Feedback helps.

I’ve not posted recently because a few things have changed since I wrote The Monkey Mind, so I’ve been working to get my house in order. The house being this website.

FEEDBACK

While criticism hurts the ego and hammers our creative souls, constructive feedback helps make us and our work better and is only to be encouraged. Whether it’s your manuscript, website, blog or anything else you are working on, getting regular feedback acts as a check-in point, to make sure that you are on track with your vision and messaging. Even for a manuscript where feedback from family and friends can be mostly subjective, feedback will tell you whether your pages are engaging enough to keep them reading and wanting more or if you are losing them at page 2.

Of course as with any feedback, you can choose to ignore anything you don’t agree with. But it’s important to sit with that feedback for a while before making a decision because sometimes we can be so fixated on an idea or goal that any suggestion that we may not be on the right path, can be met with resistance.

Sometimes though, listening to feedback helps make the chances of hitting our goals more realistic and achievable (although always keep your bigger dreams in your back pocket.)

GREEN PESTO

When I shared my website, a few weeks ago, with a trusted friend who has built an amazing jewellery brand with a following of nearly 20k in only 5 years, I wanted her honest opinion as to whether my brand and story made sense.  Ever since I created Ammai, I had worked from the basis that alongside writing and the blog, that I would also design and produce gorgeous journals, so I wanted to make sure that my brand represented a coherent story. Would a person who doesn’t know me and lands on my website understand what I was up to and would they care?

My friend then told me this story about green pesto.  There was a company that started to make and sell this amazing green pesto sauce. It was delicious and sales went through the roof. On the back of this growth, naturally the company thought to expand to red pesto as a way to increase sales. But this didn’t happen and in fact sales for the feted green pesto started going the wrong way too.  Why? Because the company took their eye off the ball and the quality of the green pesto dropped. They wanted to do too much too quickly and the whole business suffered.

Next my friend asked me, ‘So what’s your green pesto? ‘Is it the book, blog or journal?’  This was a no brainer, the book and the blog are the things driving me forward and her response in  return was simple, ‘then that’s what you need to focus on first, the journal can come later.’   As much as I didn’t want to let the journals go, given the time and money I’d spent on it so far, I knew she was right. Now is not the time. After that, I actually felt relief because now its one less thing I have to think about, one less thing that will distract me from my main mission, making my manuscript the best it can be and writing useful and relevant content for my blog.  This feedback helped me refocus and I’m really grateful for that. So for you, I’d say figure out what your green pesto is and focus on making it as delicious as possible.

WEBSITE REDESIGN.

I also shared my website with a social media expert, who is working with another friend of mine and her feedback was that I might want to rethink my colour palette.  That there was more I could do, to make it visually engaging.  Even though I’d spent so long on my design and colour palette, I listened even if it did dent my pride a bit. So that’s what I’ve been doing these last few weeks, redesigning the website with a whole new colour scheme.  It’s been a creative and tedious process trying to rebuild the website and I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last time either.

When I asked her what she thought of the copy, interestingly she said it was fine.  Which just goes to show, no two people will have the same feedback and what you decide to take on board, is entirely up to you.

I’d love to know what you think of the redesign and the content and if you also need help working out what your own green pesto is, let’s chat I’d love to hear from you.

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