10 Tips for Taking Feedback Like a Pro
How to make your clients feel heard while maintaining your creative integrity
Feedback.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the word we use to describe receiving notes from a client about a piece of creative work can also be used to describe the ear-shattering sound of a howling guitar.
If you operate in a professional creative context outside the arts then you know that making work is only half the story. Certainly as demanding, if not more so, is trying to amend that work to please the people who commissioned it while still preserving its intrinsic creative value.
Your skill at receiving feedback will determine how long, how successful, and how fulfilling your creative career is — however much we’d like to pretend that this isn’t so.
So here are 10 tips for how to take feedback in a way that will make you the first person your clients want to work with, while also ensuring that you don’t spend the rest of your career feeling like a worthless skivvy at the mercy of an utterly unpredictable and wrathful client god.
1. Be an active listener
You know that hoary, old piece of folk wisdom: We have two ears and one mouth, so why do we make so much use of the latter…
