Processing Feedback: Filter

Episode Transcript

The Processing Feedback Filter card states, “You are the curator of your own growth. Not every piece of data belongs in your museum. Separating what matters from what doesn’t is a skill.” And the card invites you to practice the three bins, which you can do by sorting feedback into mental bins: adopt for what’s valid and helpful, adapt for a valid point wrapped in poor delivery, and ignore for what’s inaccurate or irrelevant.

Let’s dig into this one. So following from the Source card, where we evaluated who the feedback came from, this card is about the next step. How do you sort everything you’ve received? And sometimes, especially if you’ve been on cruise control with your development for a while, this means reaching back, sometimes years back, pulling feedback you received long ago into the present moment and finally laying it all out on the table. Once it’s laid out, the work becomes assembling all those pieces into something meaningful for you. That’s where the three bins earn their keep.

Let me share what this looked like in my own life, long before I had names for any of it. So twenty years ago, as a writing student in graduate school, I was receiving feedback multiple times each week from a variety of decorated writers, and often they offered conflicting advice on the very same piece of writing I was working on. Their publication and career advice diverged even more dramatically. One professor encouraged me to routinely submit imperfect work to publications, because I needed to get into the flow of submitting, getting rejected, occasionally getting feedback from editors, maybe landing an acceptance here and there. Another professor told me the exact opposite. “Don’t submit until long after grad school,” they said, “once the work is far more polished,” because I’d likely collect only rejections. Rejection can break a writer’s morale, and they had watched too many writers stop writing entirely because their morale plummeted in exactly that way.

Two experts, two credible sources, two complete opposite pieces of feedback. So what did I do? I sought feedback on the feedback, bringing both perspectives to others I trusted. And without knowing it at the time, once I did that, I began sorting everything into categories, what to act on and why, what to tweak and why, what to ignore and why.

And here’s the part I’d encourage you not to skip. I wrote all of it down. Not just the decisions, the reasoning, because when doubt showed up later, and it did, as dozens of rejection letters came rolling in, I could look back and see exactly what my thinking had been. The written record meant my past reasoning could steady my present wobbles.

That’s the deeper function of the bins. Yes, they are a kind of organizing tool, but they’re also a kind of sorting function, a way to force you to articulate why something belongs where you put it, and that articulated why becomes an anchor you can then return to.

That’s card 04 of the Processing Feedback suit. Gather the feedback you’ve been carrying around unsorted, maybe even the old stuff. Lay it out. Run the bins. Sometimes this process of deciding what doesn’t belong in your museum makes the pieces that do belong suddenly feel much stronger.