This essay has two parts. This part is about explaining why it's so important HOW we give feedback. The next part is about how we can actually give better feedback.

Feedback can make or break a person.

We all know, that giving and receiving feedback is significant in life. Feedback can help us to grow, improve ourselves, get to know other perspectives and broaden our horizons.

But giving feedback is more than just telling your opinion or facts.

The success of your feedback often depends much more on the How than on the What. How we deliver the feedback often makes the real impact.

If we do it wrong, the feedback maybe will never reach the receiver. It might even break the person. But if we chose the right way of giving feedback, it can help the person to flourish and grow.

A story about learning how to drive and giving feedback

When I was 19 years old, I started to take driving lessons.

My driving instructor was a very direct and harsh kind of person. He would become loud very fast, and giving positive feedback was not his strength either.

I'm an introvert and a pretty sensitive person, so you can imagine that these lessons were pure torture for me.

I don't want to say that his feedback was not justified (the What), but I couldn't work with the way how he gave me this feedback (the How). And at that age, I was not mature enough to stand out against him. The way he delivered his feedback would not let me grow. It raised self-doubt in me. I started to hate driving lessons and finally hated driving cars.

For one week, he was on holiday, so there was another instructor for this time.

He was very calm and settled. In his driving lessons, I received my very first positive feedback. I still made mistakes, but he didn't shout at me. He calmly explained to me what happened, how I can do it better and what was positive about this situation. These 5 driving lessons were the best ones I had, and I felt like I learned a thousand times more than in the ones from my original instructor.

Unfortunately, it was too late. I already felt broken.

In the end, I passed my theoretical and practical exams on the first try. The examiner told me that I was driving very good.

But I couldn't feel proud. I felt like I didn't grow. I didn't have developed any confidence and felt like I didn't deserve this. I didn't enjoy driving at all. The way how my instructor gave me feedback was always present as a dark cloud.

For almost 10 years, I hated driving cars and I only did it a couple of times.

Fortunately, today I'm able to enjoy driving cars and I even have a car. But this is another story.

I hope this example illustrates that it's important that we care about how we give feedback. We never know what this will do with the person.

In the next part, I will illustrate a manifesto to give better feedback.