Today, Google Photos helped me remember where I was approximately a year ago: looking around the shop at a well-known American petrol station chain: Buc-ee´s (thanks, Tasha!)

There was a section full of posters, placards and greeting cards with really cool messages, and two in particular caught my attention. But before I show you the first one, for the Spanish-speaking folks, I have to explain an expression in English that we could include in the category of untranslatables: to have your ducks in a row, which literally translates as "tener tus patitos en fila".

Have you ever seen a mammy duck walking with her ducklings? They give you a sense of order and discipline, right? Well, that´s exactly what this phrase conveys: having everything prepared and well organised, everything under control, leaving no loose ends. At work, we use this expression quite frequently when talking about tasks or projects, or, for example, this week, as we´re getting ready to do our quarterly planning, and we want to make sure everything is in order.

OK, once that´s understood, here´s the first picture, a greeting card:

("I do not have ducks. Or a row... I have squirrels, and they´re everywhere.)

Have you ever seen, or, if you haven´t, can you imagine, a family of squirrels running and jumping in different directions? Unpredictable and chaotic; the complete opposite of a family of ducks, isn´t it? Who hasn´t experienced at least once the feeling that they´re losing control, and things are starting to get out of hand?

Which takes me to the second picture, this time it´s a lovely placard that I was very close to purchasing:

("As long as everything is exactly the way I want it, I´m totally flexible)

I think this phrase is absolutaly brilliant, and it fits me like a glove, being an Enneagram type 1 as I am. It humorously portrays the hurdle I tend to trip over much more often than I would like: having unrealistic expectations and then responding rigidly every time they´re not met (and today it happened again, sorry you got the scolding girls).

Linking this idea with the previous one, I realise that, generally, everything is fine and I can go with the flow and be content until one (or several) of the ducklings wanders off the row, and that´s when I catch a glimpse of chaos and the disaster starts... To me, this placard is a reminder that it´s easy to make progress when things are going well for us; the difficult part is not to ruin it all when things start going not so well, which, let´s be realistic, it´s going to be quite often, because life looks a lot more like the family of squirrels than the family of ducks, however hard this may be to accept.

What do you think of these two phrases? Do you identify with any of them? In which way?

Today's word is a verb in English for which the exact equivalent in Spanish is very rarely used, so I'm including it in my list of untranslatables: overexplaining, loosely translated as "dar demasiadas explicaciones", that is, explaining too much..

(This is the cover of a Phineas and Ferb comic book we have at home; if you´re wondering why I chose this picture, keep on reading.)

A literal translation in one word would be sobreexplicar, which does exist in the dictionary, but I never use it; I feel that if I do, I'm going to have to explain its meaning, and that's going to take me longer than saying it in a longer way 😀

Do you also tend to overexplain? I've been doing it my whole life; my sister used to point it out to me, though I've been able to reduce it considerably over the years, as I became more aware of it and kept working to progressively improve. I believe this happens mainly when we try to justify an action we've taken or a decision we've made, in order to obtain approval from someone else, or avoid their judgement.

But just as likely, it could have nothing to do with the other person. What could be happening is that, in reality, we're justifying ourselves, repeating the reasons why we do what we do, perhaps because deep down we're not entirely sure, and we think maybe things could have been done better, or perhaps because we feel a bit guilty for whatever reason.

And a third scenario I can think of is a general tendency to tiptoe through life, as if asking for permission, seeking validation for every single thing we do. Perhaps due to a constant fear of making mistakes, or a belief of not holding enough authority in certain areas, or even a feeling of not having the right to be where we are in life... This is something that mostly happens to women, and to other minorities, too. As you can imagine, self-confidence plays a significant role here.

So, what can we do about it? The first step, as always, is to become aware of it. To observe ourselves. And whenever we catch ourselves overexplaining, let's be curious and investigate what's hiding behind that behaviour. That way, we will be able to identify specific situations we can work on improving, and get more confident in the areas that matter most to us.

(By the way, if while observing we notice someone else who, in our opinion, is overexplaining, we can also exercise our curiosity and find out what's happening there: could it be that they're nervous, and it is in our power to help them somehow? Or perhaps we are the ones getting impatient and wanting them to finish, so that we can say our piece or move on to the next topic?)

We can also come to discover that, more than a lack of self-confidence in expressing ourselves, the origin is a much deeper problem: our acts and decisions not being fully aligned with our internal values, and that causing us discomfort (a version of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance). In those cases, we resort to repeating like parrots our programmed explanations, our own ones or the ones we inherited, in order to justify ourselves and make the discomfort disappear, at least for a while.

This week, I encourage you to observe how many explanations you give (or not) in any given day, and to reflect on what's behind each of those explanations. If you'd like to share your observations with me, I'll be delighted to read you.

Personally, I'm very proud of a recent achievement of mine: I was able to answer a question in the way Phineas and Ferb would. Phineas and Ferb are the main characters in an absolutely brilliant Disney Channel animation show, and my heroes when it comes to answering questions from adults with total self-confidence, and without overexplaining!

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:

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?