Seeking Feedback: Routine

Episode Transcript

The Seeking Feedback Routine card states, “Make feedback seeking a habit. Your growth is too important to rely on sporadic feedback or to wait for it to arrive during rare high-stakes check-ins.” And the card invites you to practice the closing ritual, which you can do by asking in your regular interactions, “What’s one thing I could start or stop doing to strengthen my approach to XYZ?”

Let’s dig into this one. So here’s something that often happens, more than most people think. Someone picks up a Seeking Feedback card, follows its guidance, has a genuinely useful conversation, and then doesn’t return to the deck or to feedback seeking at all for months. The moment passes, life gets busy, growth stalls.

Sometimes growth happens in leaps and bounds, and those can be exciting times. But often, growth, the kind that leads to true mastery in whatever we’re striving to improve, happens in the minutia, the incremental stuff, the small adjustment noticed this week, refined next week, locked in the week after. And the incremental only happens through habit, the kind of continuous improvement that requires continuously seeking feedback, whether in the direct conversational ways we’ve covered or the more observational ways.

So how do you begin? Simply, literally mark it in your calendar. A recurring reminder every other Friday, the last day of each month, whatever rhythm fits your work, that prompts you to seek feedback on something you’re developing. It may feel mechanical at first. It probably will, actually. Good habits often do. But something interesting happens over time. The calendar stops being the driver. As you feel yourself getting stagnant or sense you’re ready for the next level, you’ll notice it, and you’ll begin to seek without the reminder. And this way, we are ensuring that a formalized and kind of calendarized habit can become our instinct.

And here’s why this matters so much. Building your own feedback-seeking routine means you own the process. The alternative is the trap most professionals fall into, only encountering feedback at the formal intervals their company has established: annual reviews, quarterly check-ins, sometimes the weekly one-to-one. Those occasions are fine, but they’re usually built on someone else’s schedule, serving someone else’s purpose as often. Your growth deserves better than an appointment that arrives at an interval that may not be what you need to keep growing.

That’s card 08 of the Seeking Feedback suit. This week, put one recurring feedback prompt in your calendar. You may find that the simple act of scheduling it changes your relationship to growth itself, from something that happens to you to something you direct. Again, it’ll feel mechanical and maybe weird at first, but getting it in your calendar can help you see that your pursuit of improving is as important as anything else.