Seeking Feedback: Calibrate

Episode Transcript

The Processing Feedback Calibrate card states, “We may miss out on vital perspectives if we process feedback alone. Seeking additional opinions tests the feedback against a larger reality.” And the card invites you to run the reality check, which you can do by asking a person you trust, “Based on your experience with me, does this feedback sound like a real gap or an outlier?”

Let’s zoom out on this one, because the barrier here is often cultural. So different cultures relate to processing life’s challenges in genuinely different ways. In more collective cultures, working through something significant, a decision, a setback, a hard piece of feedback, is often naturally a shared activity. You bring it to the family, the elders, the community. Sense-making is something people do together. In more individualistic cultures, and I’d include much of American work culture here, the current tends to run the other way. We celebrate the lone figure who works it all out themselves.

And that celebration has a name, the bootstrap myth. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s worth remembering that the phrase originally described something physically impossible. You cannot lift yourself by pulling on your own boots. Somewhere along the way, this absurd image became an ideal we measure ourselves against, and it is a myth. Everyone who has grown into mastery of anything did so with mentors, feedback, communities, prior work they built off of, and people who actually helped them see what they couldn’t see.

Layer onto this something many of us feel. We are more digitally connected than ever, and yet at times more physically alone than ever. I’ve experienced this myself. Some call it part of the loneliness epidemic. We can have hundreds or thousands of social media contacts and no one we’d actually sit down with to say, “I received some hard feedback, and I don’t know what to make of it.”

Boil all of that together, and here’s where many people land. They’ve received challenging feedback they aren’t sure what to do with, and they believe they need to figure it out alone or that their only option is going back to the original feedback giver. Both beliefs shrink the picture. One person’s feedback, however sincere, is still one vantage point. Processing it alone adds only one more, yours, right? The reality check adds a third, someone who knows you, has experience with you, and can tell you whether this feedback matches a pattern they’ve observed or if it stands as an outlier. That’s what testing feedback against a larger reality means. You’re triangulating instead of guessing.

And yes, this can feel uncomfortable. I’ve actually felt very annoyed when practicing it, because I just wanted to be done with something and move on. But expanding your horizons here, even when it’s uncomfortable, is often exactly what accurate processing requires.

That’s card 07 of the Processing Feedback suit. The next time challenging feedback has you turning it over and over alone, maybe offering the feeling of progress without actually making progress, consider that the turning it over might itself be the signal that the next step is to bring it to someone you trust. You may find their answer settles in minutes what solitude couldn’t settle in weeks.