Feedback
Opinions & comments for improvement
Feedback tells you how you land on other people, which is something you cannot fully see from the inside.
Good feedback is rare, and most people receive far less of it than they need. The formal versions, annual reviews and structured assessments, tend to be too infrequent and too filtered by organizational politics to be genuinely useful. The more valuable feedback often comes in smaller moments: the way a conversation ends, what someone stops asking you to do, what a trusted colleague says when you ask them directly.
Getting useful feedback requires making it safe for people to be honest. That means not reacting defensively when you hear something you did not expect, and not asking for feedback in ways that subtly signal you are looking for reassurance rather than information. It also means knowing whose feedback is worth seeking: people who know your work well, who have no stake in flattering you, and who are good at articulating what they observe.
What you do with feedback matters as much as receiving it. Not all feedback is correct or relevant. Learning to weigh it, to distinguish between a genuine pattern and one person's particular perspective, is part of the skill.