Using Feedback: Momentum

Episode Transcript

The Using Feedback Momentum card states, “Waiting until you feel ready to try a new behavior based on difficult feedback may lead to avoiding it. Taking action could bring the readiness you want.” And the card invites you to take the next rep, because the perfect moment may not exist. Identify an opportunity on your calendar to try the new behavior, even a small one.

Let’s get honest about waiting. So here’s a story we often tell ourselves when facing a difficult change: I’ll do it when I’m ready. It sounds responsible, prudent even, and sometimes it can even work. But if you are anything like me, you may have experienced how ready never really quite happens. Or if it does, you don’t know what it feels like. In this way, whether we meant for it to happen or not, waiting sort of becomes the plan, and weeks later, the only thing we’ve practiced is postponing.

Because there’s a sort of mechanism underneath this. Often with difficult feedback, the discomfort we feel doesn’t come before the action we take to change. It comes before the thought of the action we are going to take to change. A lot happens emotionally and otherwise in the thoughts that come before our actions. So waiting to feel comfortable may never happen. Readiness, more often than not, is a result of reps, just putting them in, just trying something.

Now, how do you actually generate that first rep? Back on the Routine card in the seeking suit, we talked about calendarizing your feedback seeking. The same move works here, and for the same deeply practical reason. For many of us, our days happen based on what’s in the calendar. Parent-teacher conference, the dog’s vet appointment, work calls, project due dates, people’s birthdays. Meanwhile, the things that live only as intentions, someday when things calm down, when I get ready, those get bumped by whatever’s actually scheduled. You likely care a great deal about developing and improving in some way, but all of that may be competing against the calendar stuff.

So put it in there and make it specific. Not “work on delegation” floating in on a Tuesday, but details on exactly what you’ll try and when. Thursday’s project kickoff, hand the timeline section fully to Maya, including the client questions, and don’t take it back when it gets uncomfortable. That specificity matters twice. It removes the how do I start friction in the moment, and the calendar entry itself elevates the importance of your development, especially during the exact stretches when it’s easiest to deprioritize your growth. Busy weeks on the calendar can chew into unscheduled intentions.

This card says even a small opportunity counts. The point of the first rep is to build momentum. One small completed attempt does what six weeks of preparing to feel ready never did, right? It gives you evidence you can do this, and evidence is what readiness is actually made of.

That’s card 08 of the Using Feedback suit. Open your calendar, find one real moment this week, and schedule the smallest honest version of the new behavior.