Bloom Your Mind

Ep 156: Giving Positive Feedback

• Marie McDonald

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Most of us are much more practiced at pointing out what’s not working than naming what is. And even when we do give positive feedback, we often keep it vague:
“You did great.”
“That was awesome.”
“Nice job.”

In this episode, we explore why specific positive feedback is one of the most powerful tools we have—for leadership, parenting, relationships, teamwork, and personal growth—and why it’s so often underused.

I break down how generic praise feels good in the moment but doesn’t actually help people grow, while specific feedback builds confidence, clarity, and trust. It teaches people what to keep doing, not just what to avoid.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Why the brain needs specificity to learn and repeat behaviors
  • The difference between empty praise and meaningful, growth-producing feedback
  • How specific positive feedback builds psychological safety and motivation
  • Why this skill is essential for leaders, partners, parents, and collaborators
  • 10 Simple prompts to help you look for and give feedback that actually lands and sticks
  • Real-life applications in parenting, partnership, and team culture

We also talk about how specific positive feedback helps counter self-doubt—both in ourselves and others. When people know exactly what they did well and why it mattered, they don’t have to guess. That clarity creates momentum.

And here’s the quiet power of this practice: when you learn to give specific positive feedback outwardly, you also start doing it internally. You become better at recognizing your own progress, effort, and growth—rather than only tracking what still needs fixing.

Whether it’s a colleague, a partner, a child—or yourself—this small shift can radically improve connection, confidence, and results.

Mentioned in this episode:

  • Look How Far You’ve Come: EP 
  • Leadership and communication tools from The Bloom Room

How to connect with Marie:

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Hi, my friends, and welcome to episode number 156 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. That number just keeps getting higher. It's so fun. I'm gonna share next week's episode topic just because it might be really helpful for you to be prepared for that one because the time of year that this is being recorded is a few weeks before the new year changes over. And one of my most highly recommended practices for reflection is to absolutely take the time and space to pause and reflect on your year. So I'm going to record next week's podcast early because it's a holiday week for me. And I'm gonna record it around a guided reflection that my clients just love in terms of looking back at the year that we've just been through. And I just can't tell you how much people say, This is so great. I love doing this. And so I really highly recommend that you make some time and space, just half an hour more if you want it for yourself before the end of the year. And you will have that episode next Friday. For this week, we are actually talking about how to give positive feedback. So let me just start with a little story. I used to be in charge of an innovation company up in the Bay Area, and there were all kinds of things that I did in that job. I wrote a lot of content, I managed and led lots and lots of people. I also did instructional observations. So I went into classroom environments and watched teachers, and I went in to different communities and watched leaders, and I gave them feedback on their teaching or their leading. I did that with all kinds of people who were leading groups of adults or kids to give them feedback on what they were doing well, the ways they were unique and amazing, and the things that I saw that were opportunities for their growth. There was once when I went into one of those sites, and I love giving people feedback, love to do it, and I love getting feedback. And I went into one of those sites and I always tried to give positive feedback directly and immediately. And I gave some feedback to somebody that was leading a group of kids and teaching a group of kids, and I recognized her natural leadership abilities. I recognized the specific things she did to empower the children that were in her care and the specific things she did to create safety for them and create belonging in the group that they were a part of. And just kind of how I saw her unique strengths coming across. About five years later, when I had grown the company, maybe it was even 10 years later, it was probably about 10 years later, actually, now that I think about it, that person who I had given feedback to when she was leading one group of kids had moved her way up the organization from teaching one group of kids to teaching many groups of kids to all of a sudden taking over leadership of an entire site to then taking leadership over many sites and being in the role that I was in when I gave her that feedback originally. So she was a director of many different sites and, you know, um had kind of moved her way up organiz the organization. So now I was leading a retreat for all the company leaders. And I was sharing some kind of, um, I was leading some kind of session around reflection, and she stood up and she said, I remember when Marie came up to me when I was in my very early 20s, maybe like 19 or 20. She was very young, maybe 21 at the time. And Marie told me that she saw natural leadership capabilities in me. And she told me the specific things she saw. Up until that moment, I did not think of myself as having any leadership skills. But that sentence, natural leadership capabilities, and then describing the effort that I was putting in. Maybe she used the word natural, but I actually think she was describing effort that I was putting in to all this leadership of the kids, made me think of myself differently and changed the trajectory of my life. Because all of a sudden I thought of myself as someone who is capable of leadership. And if I keep putting effort into developing my leadership skills, I can become a leader of many people. And then she said, and here I am. And it just shocked me because I love giving positive feedback, but I had never before that moment truly experienced how you can say a sentence to someone and it can change their life. Now, I've also seen this often with children. So parents will talk to their kids, or educators will talk to kids, or leaders or coaches will talk to kids. And when those adults are very intentional about what and how they say to kids, it changes how kids perceive themselves entirely. When we remind kids of their innate goodness, their kindness, when we really reinforce their efforts, their ability to build skill in any area, and we reinforce their efforts, not their innate qualities. Because they don't really have control over their innate qualities, right? An example that I'll give later on is natural beauty when we say, You're so pretty, versus I like your fashion choices. I like the choices you made today in the ensemble that you put together, right? That's such a different compliment to give. It's actually complimenting something that a person has control over instead of something that a person is like born with or not born with, and something that's subjective and whatever. So when we praise kids for their effort for sticking with something for being determined and sticking with something for putting effort into something that didn't come easily to them, that will impact their lives in such a positive way. I also think about how we do this with our partners. When we get used to people that are our friends or our primary, you know, love interest or romantic partners, we begin to see more of less of the shiny, spectacular, new, wonderful things that attracted us to someone in the first place. And we see more of the things that are like bugging us. Am I right? We'll like start to comment on the things that are frustrating us during the day. And and I'll talk again a little bit more about this later, but I just want to say that like we create reality with our words. So if we're saying frequently the things that are bothering us, we're putting a lot of negative feedback into the mind of our primary partner. We are the one that sees them all the time. So if we are not focusing in on their strengths, their efforts, their potential, oftentimes nobody is. So we can be really careful to make sure we're balancing out that positive and that negative. So think for a moment about yourself, about your own life, about a time when someone said something to you that changed your world, first for the better. When someone said something to you, something that they saw in you, something unique about you, a gift, a strength, a talent, and how that impacted you. And you can pause the episode if you'd like to give yourself a little space to think about that. And then when you're ready, secondly, think about that sometime when someone said something to you that impacted you for the worse. They criticized you instead of sharing something positive. Like they offered a criticism or um a cut down or negative feedback, or maybe they just talked about something that impacted them in a negative way, but assigned you blame and motive instead of sharing how an action impacted them and owning their own experience and feelings and making a specific request about what they wanted you to do differently. I imagine it's probably a lot easier to think of those examples because we have a negativity bias to our brain and we remember those painful things more easily. So you can see it's really important to balance them out. The brain's gonna hold on to them, the brain's gonna look for them, and we are creating reality for other people with our words. So let's use all of this to motivate us to create a positive reality for other people, to balance out our brain's negativity bias, our brain's threat scanning, to balance out the way that the brain, our brain, and the people around us, their brains, hold on to negativity by giving more specific positive feedback. I also want to just mention that I like to think about this in terms of deposits and withdrawals in a bank account. We don't want to even keep it balanced, right? We don't want, if we're thinking of positive feedback as the deposits we're putting into a relationship and constructive or negative feedback as withdrawals that we're taking out of the relationship. You can really, if you're really honest with yourself, there's probably some relationships in your life that are in the red, right? I am super, super careful about this, but some of my relationships get into the red sometimes. Maybe I'm just grumpy for a day or two and I'm complaining or I'm whatever. I'm I'm not seeing the best or something, and I'll say the trash needs to get taken out or whatever. Whatever constructive feedback I'm giving is probably more than the positive feedback, right? It doesn't have to be perfectly balanced all the time. But the important thing is that there's room for those withdrawals. There's room for the constructive feedback when there's enough positive feedback already in there. So I like to think I want like a lot in my bank account so I don't ever have to be afraid of taking out a withdrawal. If I'm going to offer some constructive feedback in a careful and intentional way, I want there to be enough positive, loving, wonderful feedback in there to make it not a big deal. This applies to work relationships. This applies to friendships, to relationships with kids, to our primary partners, to people we date, to people we collaborate with, and to ourselves. I know that can be hard. We tend to be the hardest on ourselves, but maybe you can just think about the importance of working on that, working on how you talk to yourself and the importance of surrounding ourselves with really great people that give us positive feedback. Because remember, our brains will focus on the negative, our brains will scan for threats, our brains will look for things that hurt us or that are about to hurt us, or it's possible will hurt us. And then our brains will focus in on those hurtful things and find more and more and more evidence of those hurtful things. So we got to balance that out. We got to be intentional about balancing that out by looking for positive things and sharing them. We create reality with our words. I started this episode with examples of that. We create reality with our words for ourselves. The things we say out loud, we anchor in our mind. The things we think over and over again become the reality of how we're perceiving situations. And we create reality with our words for other people, for our friends, for our kids, for our partners, for our community members. If we allow our brains to overfocus on the negative, which they will do, and then we become complacent with that, and we say out loud and share in meetings and share in communities and share in the parking lot of wherever we're at, or share on the phone the negative things. That is the impact we're having on the world. Our impact of what we say is really powerful. We all have that power. So let's use that power for good, shall we? Here's some ways to give positive feedback because it doesn't come naturally to our brains. Let's learn the skill. First of all, just simply look for what you like. That is it. I learned that tool when I was like 21, 22, and I was like, dang, this is helpful. When I'm driving, when I'm waking up in the morning, when I'm talking to someone, when I'm listening to a lecture, when I'm working out, anytime, all the time. Look for what you like. That is it. It balances things out so much. So when you're with someone else, look for what you like. What do you like about them? What do you like about what they're saying, what they're doing, choices they're making, effort that they're putting in. Okay, number two, look for actions that create a positive impact. What is someone doing that is creating a positive impact? Tell them. It could be an impact on you. It could be an impact on the people around them. It could have nothing to do with you. It could be you just noticing the impact they're having on the world, through the work that they do, the things they say, their presence, their smile, their energy. Look for actions that create a positive impact. Number three, be specific and timely. Be really specific. When we say, that was so great, it doesn't really land with the person. When we say the way you articulated the specific experience that you had was so clear, non-blaming, and helpful to all of us to focus on solutions. Thanks for having that impact in that meeting. That's specific. And when you tell someone right away, they remember what you're talking about. When you tell them two weeks later, they're like, oh man, I don't even remember what I said. So be specific and timely. Number four, lower the bar for yourself. Don't try to be perfect. Don't look for the right time to give your feedback. It's almost always a good time for positive feedback. And if you do it right now, it will happen. If you wait, it likely won't. Because feedback is never the most urgent thing. Or very rarely the most urgent thing. Let's say very rarely. Okay, number five, look for good intentions. Look for the way that even if somebody messed up, they were trying, right? They had they really had an idea for something and they were trying to do it. And you see just saying, I see you, I see you. That didn't go the way you wanted, but I see you. Number six, I think. Look for effort. Look for the effort that someone put into something over traits and qualities that a person doesn't have control over. For example, I gave this earlier, I'm gonna say it again. Hey, I love the fashion choices you made today. The way you put that outfit together is unique. I wouldn't have thought of doing that. Rather than you look so pretty. Another example. Look for what someone does to support others with their money instead of making compliments on what their money can buy. Right? Look for what the choices they're making, something they can actually impact rather than what they just have. Right? There are many, many other examples of this. Number seven, gratitude. What can you thank someone for? Here's one thing I want to say. Thanking someone else for something never cancels out what you have also done. I say this because I coach a lot of couples and I notice that a lot of couples don't say thank you to their partner because they are also doing so much. And they think if I say thank you, all my stuff will be invisible. It is the opposite. Ironically, when you start saying thank you to other people, 95% of the time they will thank you also. You open up a door, you're the example of the change you want to see. You start, you go first. Number eight, what positive impact is someone having on your life? Share it with them. Look for it. What positive impact do they have on your life? Maybe they don't take out the trash, but having a partner that you can depend on in all of the other ways that you can depend on them really impacts your life in a positive way. Number nine, look for what's unique about them. I could go on and on about this all day, but when you just ask your brain to look for what is unique about the person in front of you, it will go to work giving you all kinds of answers, and every single person is 100% unique. What can you compliment someone on that is unique about them? Different that makes them special in the world. You say it, all of a sudden they'll be able to see it. And lastly, compliment them on how far they've come. Think about where they started in relation to anything and compliment them on the distance between where they started and where they are now. This relates to anything and everything. Listen to the episode, look how far you've come if you want to hear examples of that. That is what I've got for you today. Go out into the world and give positive feedback. You will start a ripple that will create beautiful things, and it'll ripple back to you, my friends. That's what I've got for you this week, and I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.