Receiving Feedback: Aspire

Episode Transcript

The Receiving Feedback Aspire card states, “Receiving feedback means you now have new raw material to sculpt your growth. Adopting it may be obvious and easy, but that is not always the case.” And the card invites you to use the compass, which you can do before adopting complex feedback by asking, “Might this help me become who I aspire to be? If yes, think through why.”

Let’s go deeper with this one. So imagine you’re working the pottery wheel. You’ve got clay from a particular place. It has a particular texture, a particular color, and you’re spinning it into a gorgeous bowl. It’s taking shape. It’s becoming what you envisioned. Then all of a sudden, a new blob of clay drops right into the middle of your bowl. It’s a different color, a different texture, and as the wheel keeps spinning, you scramble to figure out how or even whether to integrate it, all while everything is moving fast, there’s pressure.

Adopting complex feedback can be a bit like that. You may have built an impressive skill set in a particular area. That’s your bowl, shaped by years of practice, and now someone has handed you feedback that doesn’t obviously fit what you’ve built. It’s new material with its own color and texture. The question in front of you is whether that new clay belongs in this bowl, and if so, why? And you need to get to that why, usually at a really deep level, because it’s going to be that why that you’ll need to fall back on when integrating this new blob into your existing wheel becomes challenging and maybe fills you with doubt.

And notice the wheel doesn’t stop, right? Work continues, life happens, deadlines arrive. The performance comes whether you’ve decided or not. That pressure is exactly why having a decision-making frame matters.

Here’s one way to make the decision. Split it into short- and long-term thinking. Short term, could this help you improve in an area you actually want to improve in? That’s a practical question about your current development. Long term, does it feel aligned with where you want to go personally or professionally? Is it aligned with your highest aspirations in the craft you’re working to master? That’s the compass question. Might this help me become who I aspire to be? When both the short- and long-term answers are yes, there’s a good chance it’s worth working that new blob into the bowl, even if the integration takes time and temporarily makes things messier.

Now, the Processing Feedback suit can help you uncover the why, and then the Using suit can help you put a plan in place for integrating it. But you might be thinking, what about when the answers are in some kind of conflict? Maybe short-term is yes, but long-term is no. That’s fine and will definitely happen, but at least you know precisely what you’re weighing rather than making the call on instinct under pressure.

That’s card 09 of the Receiving Feedback suit. The next time complex feedback lands in the middle of something you’ve carefully built, just pause before you decide. Check it against both short- and long-term aspirations. The new material may be exactly what you needed, or if not, you may set it aside with confidence, knowing the choice was made by your own internal compass rather than by pressure or discomfort and the want to avoid that discomfort.