Processing Feedback: Select

Episode Transcript

The Processing Feedback Select card states, “When feedback has many parts, trying to act on all of them at once makes it harder to improve at any of them. Prioritize the piece that matters most.” And the card invites you to ask the one thing: “If I could only take one element from this feedback to make the biggest impact on my growth, what would it be?”

Let’s work through it. So as we cover in areas of the Giving Feedback suit, givers don’t always deliver the specific, clear, concise feedback that’s usually most helpful. Sometimes they throw the kitchen sink at you. You sit down for what you expected to be a focused conversation and receive everything. Genuinely helpful feedback mixed with maybe not so helpful stuff, mixed with filler fluff, often because the giver was anxious while sharing. And that’s worth remembering with some compassion. As we’ve discussed elsewhere in this deck, givers frequently carry their own anxiety into these conversations, and anxious communication tends to go either one of two ways. Either it’s too brief to be of much value, or it sprawls because the nervousness kind of pads itself with a bunch of extra words.

But the problem here is that you have to deal with the sprawl. You’re holding seven or eight pieces of feedback, maybe of wildly varying quality, and so the question becomes: what do you actually do with all of it?

Here’s what usually doesn’t work: trying to act on everything at once. Attention and practice time are finite. Spread them across eight changes and each one gets a sliver. It’s too thin for the deliberate, repeated practice that real behavior change requires. We cover this in the Using Feedback Experiment card. Old habits have years of wiring behind them. Displacing even one takes focused repetition. Eight at once? It may make it harder to improve at any of them.

So think of it like sifting for gold. The prospector doesn’t try to keep everything in the pan. They swirl, they let the water carry off the sediment, the filler, the fluff, the offhand comments that don’t hold up. What settles at the bottom is the heavy material, and among what remains, they look for the biggest rock. For you, that’s the piece with the answer to this question: which element of this feedback, if I truly worked on it, could have the biggest impact on my growth? Notice that the question isn’t which piece is easiest or which would most please the giver. It’s about impact on our growth. Sometimes the biggest rock is the piece you least wanted to hear, and that’s precisely why it’s heavy.

And to be clear, selecting one thing doesn’t mean discarding the rest forever. The other valid pieces can wait in your notes for their turn. Selection here is about sequencing rather than deleting anything.

That’s card 09 of the Processing Feedback suit. If you get feedback that arrives by the sinkful, resist the pull to fix everything at once. Sift it. Find the biggest rock or two. Improving one or two meaningful things often does more for your growth than partially attempting eight.