Mindset Equals Success
My second job as a pastry chef was a mass production job where we were run by a corporate company. The company had this saying, “our culture is feedback culture.” And this type of culture was different from anything I had experienced before.
When I worked in retail, management didn’t have time to sit down with employees to talk about performance. The only time I saw them interact with us was when we weren’t selling enough “memberships”, but even that was mostly superficial talk. And when I worked as a chef in South Carolina, we had the stereotypical kitchen environment where everyone tells you what you did wrong. This type of culture fostered an environment where employees feared to have others talk to them because it was usually negative.
When I started at my corporate job, upper and middle management was very upfront about how important feedback was. And there is a skill in delivering and receiving feedback. Part of the skill comes from the mindset you put yourself in when someone offers you feedback. Coming from more negative environments, it is easy to thing that everyone is criticizing you but over time, I realized that feedback culture is about helping everyone improve.
It is easy to find excuses when someone is criticizing you. That when someone is telling you that you need to fix something, it is easy to lean on the excuse that “they didn’t teach me that” or “If only…”. There can be a hundred and one reasons why it isn’t your fault. But when you are surrounded by a culture that is feedback forward, you mind starts to shift to something more positive. Instead of everything being good or bad, it becomes good and ways to improve. This shift in mindset fosters an attitude of growth and self-reflection on how to improve yourself as a person and in your profession. The feedback mindset also changes the way you view others when they speak to you in a professional setting and allows conversations to be less personal and more professional.
Once I developed the feedback mindset, I found that I was truly able to listen to what others were trying to tell me. And in the field of nursing, mistakes can be very costly and I need to be able to take accountability when I am wrong. By being open to feedback, I can become the best nurse I can be as those around me will be willing to help be along my journey.
In a broader aspect, your mindset is what shapes you. If you can believe that you can do something, than you are more likely to achieve it because you naturally work for it. Anyways, the point of this ramble is to share how important feedback can be to personal and professional growth. It isn’t easy to give or receive feedback but the more open minded you are, the better you will be.
