Most people today are seriously involved in some effort to develop new skills or some other initiative for personal improvement, like acquiring better habits. However, when we invest our time and energy in such goals, it may be difficult to measure our progress. This difficulty to assess our results may be very frustrating.

In my opinion, the best way to measure our progress when learning new skills or developing better habits is to implement feedback mechanisms. These feedback mechanisms are the tools we can employ to actually guarantee that we are moving in the right direction, and have concrete metrics about how fast we are moving in this direction.

How to receive feedback?

Feedback mechanisms are very important in any activity you undertake to gain experience. For each type of activity you should plan the most efficient type of feedback. Planning the feedback mechanisms is an integral part of the plan for each personal or professional development initiative. Without this kind of feedback, your plan won’t be complete and you won’t be able to learn what you need to learn.

A basic feedback tool is questionnaires. At the end of each activity, both face-to-face and online, you can send a questionnaire to the participants. The answers will be very useful for you to identify your strengths as well as your weaknesses.

Furthermore, if you repeat a type of activity frequently, the feedback will allow you to identify trends: Do you have clear indications that you are improving? Are you becoming more experienced? Are you receiving less criticism? Are the people who are participating in these activities becoming more satisfied than before?

For example, if you’re leading a team, you might want to ask the people you’re leading to provide you with some form of feedback on your performance. In general, in any professional environment you should ask for the feedback of all your co-workers, and not only the opinion of your superiors or people who are managing you.

Outside the professional context, it is also possible to do a general feedback exercise, in which you can ask your friends to describe your main qualities. The responses you’ll receive can be quite surprising.

For example, I recently asked 20 friends to describe 3 of my qualities. Several people wrote that I am honest, trustworthy, with integrity. This surprised me. Obviously I believe that I really have these qualities, and they are very important to me, but that’s not what surprised me.

What surprised me was to see that for my friends my honesty was a quality that stood out and deserved to be mentioned as one of my main qualities. Then I understood that these friends of mine probably considered me much more honest than the average person, and that’s why they trusted me a lot. Of course it was important for me to be an honest person, but I discovered that for my friends my honesty was even more important.

Now think about your case. What are your main qualities? Perhaps you also have some attributes that are considered outstanding and much above average? I recommend that you also do this exercise with your friends.

Immediate feedback from Social Networks

Social networks certainly have many flaws, and they are heavily criticized for that. But one of my favorite aspects of social media is the ability to get immediate feedback from a wide range of people.

When you make a post on a social network like Facebook, that post will be immediately judged by your audience, who will react with likes and comments. So we can say that a post was successful if it generated a lot of likes and got a lot of positive comments.

Obviously, these likes and comments are very good for our ego, and can even create a certain dependence. There are people who are addicted to likes, and even get depressed if they make a post that receives few likes.

But if you’re really committed to developing your content generation skills, this feedback is essential. The likes indicate that your post is well written, that it is relevant, and that people agree with your way of thinking.

Thus, these skills that you develop on social media can become useful in a completely different context, like for example at work, when you need to send an email or write a comment or a post in a Slack channel.

In the case of LinkedIn, when you generate content you are exposing yourself to other professionals like you. This can have a direct impact on your reputation. If people like your content they will remember you, and this can generate opportunities for new projects and partnerships.

Please notice that it’s not about you aiming to become a digital influencer, or a “top voice”. You don’t have to strive to create content on a daily basis to impress others with your wisdom. Personally, I only write when I feel inspired and when I think I have something really interesting to contribute to my contacts.

The goal here should really be to create value for your network. So when you write a post, you must think that you are using a part of your time creating content that can be useful for other people. When you get likes and positive comments, it means these people recognize that the content you’ve created really has value to them.

In Summary

Whenever you plan some personal or professional development activity, such as learning new skills or acquiring better habits, make sure also to integrate the appropriate feedback mechanisms that will enable you to measure your progress. For example, you can send questionnaires to your friends and co-workers, and you should also use the immediate feedback you can get from social networks.

Good luck!