If, for instance, we search for the meaning of ‘feedback’ in Google, we will obtain more than three million results. Therefore, with this article I am briefly addressing to your reflection on this wonderful tool and, if possible, to get deeper into it, if I manage to catch your attention after reading these lines.
The feedback, in few words, is the information – needless to say, extremely valuable -, about an action or behavior, which has the distinctive feature of being a key part in the development and fulfilling of both personal and organizational excellence, in multitude of disciplines.
Focusing on the issue of communication, and specifically when doing public speaking, I shall distinguish between two situations: The first one, and perhaps the most obvious and simple one, occurs at the time of assessing the performance of a speaker at the end of a speech. We will put aside this first situation, and will focus on the second one, which tends to be the least kept in mind, and is concerned with the information obtained from the audience while delivering a speech.
The faces, the expressions, the way of looking and body gestures, amongst other factors, expose clearly the interest awaken or missing, as well as the attention being paid and the assimilation of the message itself.
We can even notice if we are going too fast or not, which is particularly important in international events including different nationalities.
Of course that there are limitations as it happens with everything in life, but yet a great audience is continually providing you with feedback with their short laughs, expressions and applauds.
In such a good custom of looking at everybody, caring for the tone and inflections of our voice to connect with the audience, we also find the antenna to receive this feedback, and it is part of what I affectionately claim in my conferences: “To pamper the audience” or “Mimar a la audiencia” as we would say in Spanish.
Such valuable feedback ends up being extremely useful to find out if you are really achieving the goal of your presentation, which in the end, is just to transmit your message.
Finally, the exercise which I always recommend is simply to move from your place to the other’s, to see what their view is like. It does work!!, and it’s both easy and magical.