Okay. In this video we'll go through how to use mindfulness techniques to give coaching and feedback to your team members. One important feature for effective conversations is a skill of active listening. Active listening means that you're fully paying attention to the person speaking to you. To engage in a mindful coaching conversation, you can use the practice of looping with your conversation partner. Using this technique means that you echo back to the person what you think they said and verify understanding. You can also use a practice of dipping to enhance your own understanding of your role in the conversation. This means that you check in with yourself to see if you’re really paying attention to the other person. In a coaching or feedback conversation, you might have to raise a difficult issue. This can be an emotionally charged situation for both parties. This means that checking in with yourself and your conversation partner on an emotional level is critical. For yourself, consider if you are motivated to have a conversation with a productive intention for the team, or if you are simply upset about an issue that might be helped with a different strategy. When you do have to give coaching or feedback, do you feel afraid? You're not alone. Research from Stanford shows that people tend to fear giving and receiving feedback because of the possibility of critical feedback. This fear leads to maladaptive behavior, such as, procrastination, denial, brooding, jealousy, and self sabotage. Because feedback can be such a charged issue, as a team member you should make it a habit to solicit feedback regularly rather than wait for issues to arise. There's a four step process you can use to learn to adapt a feedback, whether you are the giver or the receiver. One, recognize your fear and the maladaptive behavior that results. This step emphasizes the need to develop self awareness in order to check in with ourselves when giving and receiving feedback. Step two, reframe the feedback in a positive light. You might point out that every strength has a shadow side. For example, a creative person might be less detail oriented on a certain project, or a very detail oriented person may have difficulty with creative thinking in another situation. The key is to focus on one situation, rather than assess a person's entire performance and character when giving feedback. Step three, break up the task. Rather than giving feedback all at once, you can break it up into smaller chunks of feedback. Here you can set time frames for each aspect of a performance improvement. Step four, use incentives. Remember to congratulate yourself for giving and receiving feedback. You can keep a daily accomplishments journal or award yourself with free time, as examples. Another strategy to make these kinds of conversations routine is to use Marshall Goldsmith's technique of feedforward. Unlike feedback, feedforward is focused on future improvements rather than on past mistakes. A key difference from feedback is that the person giving feedforward offers help. You can try the follow 15 minute feedforward exercise that's been observed with more than 10,000 leaders. In the exercise, two participants have a one on one conversation, where they switch off between giving and receiving feedforward. In the exercise, participants are asked to choose one behavior they hope to change that would make a significant positive difference in their lives, then describe the behavior to random participants. For example, someone might say I want to be a better listener. Then the giver of feedforward provides two suggestions for the future that might help the person asking for feedforward to make a positive change in the behavior. It's important the receiver of feedforward listen attentively and take notes without interjecting. For the givers of feedforward, it's critical that they provide no feedback in the conversation, only feedforward. Both parties should express gratitude to one another at the end of the exchange. Through use of active listening, overcoming your fear of feedback, and incorporating feed forward into your routine, you can enhance the performance of your team. Feedforward can also allow you to reset your coaching and feedback conversations to be more future oriented. Now we'll introduce you to the company Verisk. And you'll hear from its Vice President of Talent Strategy and Culture, Dr. Renee Torchia.
