Seeking Feedback: Introduction | The Feedback Deck

Video Transcript

The Seeking Feedback tab card states: Feedback can be your most important tool for growth. The journey begins with building the skills to seek it. And the suit’s guide is the badger. They dig to find what’s hidden beneath the surface. Seeking feedback takes that same drive to uncover insights. So let’s talk about why this deck begins here.

Most of us were never taught to seek feedback. Think back to school. Feedback flowed in one direction from teacher to student, and our job was to receive whatever arrived. That structure follows many of us into our careers, where we wait for the annual review, the quarterly check-in, whatever formal occasion someone else has scheduled.

And waiting, it turns out, is a slow way to grow. The information you most need about the gap between how you intend to show up and how you actually land is out there right now, held by the people around you. Most of them will never volunteer it, though. The badger doesn’t wait for insights to surface on their own.

It digs. The ten cards in the suit build that digging skill piece by piece, and I describe the arc in three movements. The early cards work on kind of developing the inner ground, developing the awareness to know where you want to grow, and the courage to ask despite the fear. Fear of harsh answers, fear of our ego, fear that the change being asked of us will be too hard.

Those fears are real, and in my experience, naming them is half the work. The middle cards turn more to craft because seeking is a genuine skill with genuine technique. Asking specific questions rather than vague ones, since vague questions tend to attract compliments rather than insights. Reading timing because feedback sought from a stressed person usually returns surface-level results.

Observing excellence directly, one of my favorite cards in the deck, because feedback doesn’t only arrive through conversation. And making all of it routine so your growth stops depending on rare high-stakes moments. The later cards then widen the lens a bit, seeking positive feedback to illuminate strengths you may not know you have, and eventually recognizing when your trusted circle of feedback providers, your feedback bubble as I call it, has started keeping you safe but small.

Here’s something worth holding onto as you work through these cards. Seeking is never only about you. Every time you ask for feedback with genuine openness, you make it a little easier for everyone watching to do the same. Your digging gives others permission to dig, and that can create a kind of beautiful ripple effect that positively improves the feedback culture around you.

That’s the Seeking Feedback suit. Ten cards, one skill, and the beginning of the entire loop this deck is built around. Pick a card and start digging.