Yesterday, I stumbled upon a very timely phrase for what I´m going through at the moment, and I realized that, as it happens, it´s not fully translatable from English to Spanish:

If you want to grow, get feedback

Feedback. That amazing word. Technically, it does have a translation, but not for this particular context, I believe.

Surprisingly, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language includes the word feedback as-is in its dictionary, with two meanings that reflect two different contexts: "retroalimentación" in biology (literal translations of back and feed joined in a single word), and "retorno, eco" (as in echo) related to sound (like when you place a speaker opposite a microphone and it starts screeching). Google translator offers alternative words like "realimentación" (same idea "retroalimentación") and "comentario" (as in comment), which I guess can be applied to the context or social networks, but even in that case, it sounds like a bit forced to me.

Realistically, what happened is that in the workplace, professional and creative contexts, Spanish speakers got used to the word feedback feedback as it is, without translation, for this word has a third definition in English that doesn´t exist in Spanish. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it´s "information about reactions to a product, a person's performance of a task, etc., which is used as a basis for improvement."

And what do these three definitions have in common? Well, as indicated by the word itself (feed-back, feed backwards), the result of a process is used as information to regulate the process itself. In biology (my favourite! I still remember when, as a teenager, I learned about this in school), the product of chemical reactions at a molecular or cellular level controls the reaction itself, very often to get back to a certain balance. In technology and engineering, the output from one system can be connected as an input to the same system, forming a loop that allows it to self-regulate. And in the workplace, we find out how well or how badly we´re doing things (or how much our work is liked or disliked) based on the comments we get on it.

An interesting definition I found on Wikipedia is the one proposed by Ramaprasad in the 1980´s. According to him, feedback is "information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level of a system parameter, used to alter the gap in some way". The key is in the second part of the definition: information by itself is not feedback unless it has an impact on the system, giving way to an action.

Going back to the workplace, that´s also the purpose of feedback: helping us to enhance "the system" (in this case, our abilities and performance in a specific area) using the information provided by our own results. Sounds easy, right?

But of course, it´s not easy. Why? Because we´re people, not automated mechanisms. We human beings are a lot more complex. On the one hand, no matter how much we tell ourselves we´re objective, we´re not, and that´s a fact, so we receive distorted information. From the inside, it´s difficult to truly see the results we´re producing, so we need someone to show them to us from the outside. On the other hand, "the system" here is not something separate from us; it´s actually us, so we tend to take feedback personally. Very often, we receive it as a judgement of what we do, and ultimately of who we are, instead of simply as information about the effect our specific actions produce. That´s when emotions come up, as well as thoughts, defence mechanisms, etc.

What if we could go back to the origin of this word and remember that feedback is nothing but reference information we can use to continue to improve? We need to know when we´re going too far and when we´re falling short, and the only way to find that out is to give it a try, and then analyze what happens.

Which brings me back to the phrase from the beginning: If you want to grow, get feedback. And I would add: even if it hurts a little.

All this is fresh in my mind because I´m currently waiting to receive feedback, and it´s so interesting to see everything it´s stirring up...

What about you? What are your thoughts on this?