Not By Chance Podcast

Give Feedforward - Not Feedback

May 07, 2020 Dr. Tim Thayne Season 1 Episode 23
Not By Chance Podcast
Give Feedforward - Not Feedback
Show Notes Transcript

Dr. Tim Thayne talks about the difference between feedforward and feedback. Feedback is saying the obvious of a previous event, while feedforward is giving good counsel before the event happens. When feedforward is delivered correctly it will make the road to success less painful, less time consuming and more enjoyable. 

Speaker 1:

Welcome to not by chance, the podcast, I'm Talmudge thing. Tim thin son and podcast manager today, dr Thien is talking about feed forward

Speaker 2:

now that's different from feedback and when given properly it can save the teen a bunch of time without any detours, a lot of pain and make the journey to as bad success, much more enjoyable.

Speaker 1:

We're doing a lot of construction at our house right now. And yesterday we had a cement truck coming into the home, uh, to pour sidewalks around and, and if you know anything about cement, there's a certain window of time that you've got to get it all in because it's going to dry and harden. And we were busy, me and my boys in the backyard trying to dig some holes in order to, uh, put some cement pylons in so that we can build a deck on top of it. And we were rushed and it was, it was pretty crazy. And, and the, my dad came out in me and I started kind of barking orders at the boys and especially our youngest trying to get him to run defect Fetchit tool because we had to get this done before the seaman truck passed us. Well, in the middle of that, I got some interesting information from my oldest son that I acted on that helped me potentially avoid a neck injury. I'm going to come back to this in a second. Um, let's call it feed forward and I'm going to tell you a little bit about what that concept really means. All of us know what feedback is. We've received it from the time we're little and probably on a daily basis. We're getting some kind of feedback. If we're open to it, we're receiving information from other people, from the world around us on how our behaviors or our actions are, are coming across how it's influencing the world around us. Is it successful? Are the things we're doing, are they working? So we know what feedback is. And, and frankly, I think a lot of us try to avoid feedback because it can be painful to hear how what we're doing is not necessarily working. Um, but there's another concept and it's the opposite of feedback and it's called feed forward. And it is something that I think we need to delve into. We need to, to recognize it and, and try and receive it. In fact, I think as parents for example, we're all too willing to give feedback and maybe too prone to do that when, if we would flip that around and, and provide a forecast or feed forward in the right way, we could help our children and our family members maybe avoid some of the pain that they are going through. Let me share with you a quick metaphor. I want you to imagine a blind man who's making his way towards, uh, a staircase that he's unaware of and he gets to it and falls down the flight of steps. If then we would say, Hey, by the way, mr, that was a flight of steps, you just fell down. That's feedback. He kind of already knows that happened. And, and he's experiencing the pain of that. Something better would have been if we would say, Hey mr, about 10 feet in front of you is a flight of steps and I feel, take a couple steps to the left. You can catch the on the rail and there's about 10 steps down and you'll hit another landing. That's a completely different experience, right? From a feedback experience where it was after the fact. Those are the really the opposites. The reality is we all understand feedback and if you Googled feedback, you'd find out there billions of hits on feedback. We know what that is and there's far fewer when it comes to feed forward. I believe that this really is something that we should, we should use a lot more. We should gear ourselves to default towards developing relationships, trust, attunement with the direction someone is going in their life. And being able to just kind of see what path they're on and what they're trying to get to so that we could guide them, uh, to help them get there quicker, get there more easily, avoid some of the pitfalls that maybe we fell into in our, in our own lives. And that does take though aligning ourselves in a way with them relationally and in the way we communicate with them so that they can receive the feed forward. So what are the things that get in the way of us giving or receiving this feed forward? The poor delivery of feed forward? Maybe it, it could sound judgmental. It could maybe be delivered in a way that's not preparing them to receive it because it's not connected to where they're going or what they really want to achieve in their life. So we're out of attunement with them. And so when we give advice, it's not that helpful or we give them this vision of the future, it's not that helpful to them. The last barrier I want to talk about is probably the most common and it's strong negative emotions that we might be feeling, which would keep us from being able to absorb this, this good information that might be coming our way from people who care. Many years ago we had a trip planned to go to Mexico as a family to celebrate Christmas together there. And we looked forward to this for a long time. Uh, at the time we had a milk cow and here in Utah we usually have snow that time of year and that was the case that year. And we had this buildup of snow. We have a long driveway and, and we didn't have a snowblower. And so I had kept, you know, asking the boys to, to shovel the long driveway. Well, it didn't happen and we kept driving over the snow as it piled up. And ultimately it turned into ice. Well, two days before we're going to fly to Mexico, I had a woman in our neighborhood who was going to come and milk our cow come and I was going to show her how to do that. And as she was walking down our driveway, uh, I was afraid she was going to fall. And I started thinking what a treacherous situation I was putting her in right before we go to Mexico. And so I became frustrated because all of this snow built up, turned into ice and we had a couple of days left. I went and got a pickax and I started busting up the ice and I had a neck injury. And, and with each swing of the pickax I could feel my neck, uh, the, the vertebrae and the problems I had in my neck starting to inflame and the pain got huge. But because of the urgency, because of the anger, the frustration, I just kept going and busting through all of this ice and I ultimately cleared it and I felt like I had to for liability purposes and to be a good neighbor. Uh, we flew to Mexico, turned out to be the most awful vacation of our lives because I was, I was in bed just trying to survive the whole time. I ended up coming home early and leaving my family in Mexico. I was in so much pain, I didn't think I could really bear it. I came home, spent Christmas by myself in kind of a fog, you know, medication induced fog, trying to deal with the pain. And that's how I spent Christmas, well just yesterday, now back to the story that I started with. We are there trying to dig these holes in the backyard and, and uh, place these little cylinders in it so that we could pour cement inside it for our deck. And I'm rushing trying to get this done. And so I've got the pickaxe in hand. I'm swinging it hard. I'm not being thoughtful about my neck injury, which by the way, laid me up for months afterwards in that first episode. And my oldest son, Mitchell, he said, dad, you want me to take that pickax from you? I'm worried about your neck. He basically was giving me feed forward. My neck was still fine at that point, but he was me from a, you know, from it, a little bit of a distance. And he noticed that I was probably craning my neck swinging too hard, not being aware of what I was doing and his desire, his feed forward was this can happen. It's essentially like the blind man making his way to the flight of steps. If you're not careful, you're going to fall down that flight of steps or if you're not careful, dad, you're going to hurt your neck again and because of the way he delivered it, I knew it was out of care and love. I didn't necessarily hand him over the pick ax and let him, you know, take it from me and do the job. I continued a little bit, but I was aware now of what I was doing. I noticed that actually made a change because what he said, that's a subtle but really powerful concept. I want everybody to understand that we're all too eager to give feedback after the fact, but if we can be attuned and and in a trusting relationship with enough skill, we can give this ahead of time and really blessed the lives of our family members in the process. I hope this has been helpful to you. I think the takeaway for for me today and hopefully for you, is that let's look for feed forward in our lives. Let's be open to it as it comes to us. Let's thank people for that. Let's try what it is that they, they're sharing with us. Let's actually let it modify what we do and then after the fact we can say thank you. You know, you really helped me out with that. I could've really gone down down a bad path or I could have missed this, this opportunity that you helped me get to. So hope that helps. Hey, before I sign off, I wanted to let you know something really exciting. We have finally got the digital copy of the not by chance, your book available on the, not by chance.com website. So let me give you a little taste of what that is. It's amazing. So this is the yearbook book and it's absolutely beautiful. There are tons of amazing pictures in it, inspirational stories, real people, real kind of things happening. And this is now all available digitally online. I wish you could thumb through it and see the amazing photography, incredible, uh, principles and inspiration up here. What we wanted to do is really create something that would, would heal someone's soul, help them feel, um, the joy, um, you know, find the, the light in their life and, and people have just poured out their hearts and shared incredible stories in here and, uh, great, great things that we can all learn from. So I wanted to let you know about

Speaker 3:

that and hop up there on a by chance.com to get a copy of that and until we meet again, I hope you're well and we'll connect with you soon.