Episode Transcript
The Using Feedback tab card states, “Processing feedback prepares you to use it, a skill built on turning insight into action through steady, adaptive practice.” And the suit’s guide is the otter. They are resourceful and willing to adapt to solve a problem. Using feedback relies on that same strategic persistence.
So here’s a gap almost nobody warns you about. I’ve worked with many people over the years who did everything right with feedback, up to a point. They sought feedback. They received it well. They processed it carefully and genuinely decided the change was best for them. And then, in some ways precisely because the change was hard, they never actually attempted it.
The decision was real. The doing never began, though. That gap between deciding and doing is where this entire suit operates, and crossing it takes more than willpower. It takes strategy, which is why the otter guides this suit. Otters are famously resourceful, cracking shells with rocks, adapting their approach until the problem gives.
Using feedback well asks for that same inventive, persistent spirit. The arc of these 10 cards moves from starting to sustaining and then verifying. The early cards kind of get you moving, breaking the big rock of feedback into pebbles small enough to actually work on, because vague and enormous can feel unstartable.
While, “This month I’m working on my pacing,” for example, can feel like a real thing. Treating each attempt as practice rather than performance, since the behavior you’re changing may have years of wiring behind it. And understanding change itself through Kurt Lewin’s model, unfreeze, change, refreeze, because the feedback process is complete when the new behavior has become your new norm, and honestly, not before that.
The middle cards keep you, I’d say, honest and adaptive along the way, expecting to over-correct or under-correct on early attempts and going back to the giver occasionally, if possible, to calibrate your aim. Tailoring feedback to its right context. A hammer is useful for nails, not windows. Signing contracts with yourself.
Planting flags so others can watch for your change. Putting reps on the calendar because readiness is usually a result of action rather than a prerequisite for it And the final cards face the part most feedback guidance skips: tracking how it’s going, wringing insights from every attempt through the discipline of writing, and accepting that genuinely good feedback from a genuinely qualified source may make you worse before it makes you better.
Steph Curry’s worst summer built the greatest shot in basketball history. There’s a card where I share that story. Many of us retreat at the first dip in our performance. The people who grow are the ones who can tell a dip that’s part of the path from a path that’s actually wrong. That takes an immense array of skills, and those are skills that we’re trying to build in this suit.
That’s the Using Feedback Suit, 10 cards for turning your hardest decisions into your most visible growth, one resourceful, adaptive rep at a time.
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