If you do creative work, it’s likely that you know the value of getting feedback on your work.
When learning a new skill, feedback is essential to help us improve.
Sometimes the feedback is best delivered on the work. For example, when someone reads a draft of something you wrote and offers suggestions for editing.
Other times, feedback is more helpful when it’s delivered while you’re in the process. I call this contemporaneous feedback.
Here are 3 skills where contemporaneous feedback and real-time corrections are most useful:
(1) Playing a Musical Instrument
An example I’ve shared earlier in this series is when you’re learning to play a musical instrument. If you’re playing the wrong notes in a piece, you want to be corrected as soon as possible — before you’ve grooved the neural pathways of playing in a certain way. Once those pathways are grooved it becomes harder to break the habit.
Learning that you’ve been playing the wrong notes for weeks or months is simply not helpful.
(2) Physical Movements
Most injuries result from a muscle imbalance or compensation pattern somewhere in the chain. We often groove these patterns over years or decades before they result in injury.
One of the roles of a personal trainer, fitness coach, yoga teacher or other movement professional is to spot incorrect movement patterns and correct them so that you don’t develop injuries.
(3) Language Skills
When children first learn to read, it’s important to encourage them to read aloud. One of the reasons for this is so you can correct them as they learn to sound out words. Without this correction, they will not learn to read fluently and will read words incorrectly, leading to comprehension issues.
This is also true of speaking. When kids mispronounce words, educating them on the correct word pronunciation is essential to training good speaking habits. Pause to help them articulate the words coherently, and continue to reinforce the correct pronunciation to avoid bad speech habits.
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