How many times in your personal or professional worlds are you faced with the challenge of giving or receiving feedback? And how many times have you been left disheartened, downbeat or even devastated by some well-intentioned yet poorly phrased or framed comments aimed at helping you to improve?

Feedback is absolutely an important part of the learning and growth process, as it does give us a sense of how far we are progressing and what else we need to keep developing. However, the manner in which feedback is offered, given or enforced often determines how we receive, what we do with it and how we allow it to shape, or not, or future behaviour.

The English Oxford Living Dictionary offers three definitions of the word 'feedback':

1. Information about reactions to a product, a person's performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for improvement.

2. The modification or…