Episode Transcript
The Using Feedback Loop card states, “The feedback process is complete not when you’ve made a positive change once or twice, but when that change has become your new norm.” And the card invites you to set the checkpoint, a reminder for 30 days out. When it arrives, ask yourself, “Is this behavior my new reflex, or am I still forcing it?”
So perhaps nothing brings more joy and suffering to our lives than change. Despite it being a fundamental law of the universe, we often cause ourselves immense pain either by wanting everything to change instantly or by fighting tooth and nail to ensure nothing changes at all. Other cards across this deck have talked about disrupting existing habits and defaults when they’re no longer serving us. This card is about the other side, actually forming the new one.
And for that, I want to bring in Kurt Lewin, widely considered the pioneer of social and organizational psychology. Lewin understood that we aren’t just isolated individuals, we’re systems held in a state of equilibrium. And in the 1940s, he proposed a simple but profound three-stage model of change: unfreeze, change, refreeze. Think of an ice block. If you want to change its shape, you can’t just force it. You have to unfreeze it, mold it into the new shape, and then refreeze it to lock in the new state.
I’ve used this concept at work and in deeply personal areas, like reframing my relationship with my social anxiety. For years, as an introvert, standing in front of a classroom of smart, hungry master’s degree students terrified me. The dread was heavy, even though my heart felt fuller after every class. And for years, I tried to fix this anxiety with a sledgehammer. I tried to force the change all at once, demanding that I simply stop being anxious. Of course, that never worked.
So I looked to Lewin. I stopped trying to break the ice block and started trying to thaw pieces of it one at a time. I identified the specific frozen pieces of my fear. There was the piece that feared my background wasn’t specialized enough. I applied heat to that by seeing my non-linear background as a strength. There was the piece that felt anxious about how I was dressed or how yellow my teeth were, whatever. I worked to thaw those slowly, dressing and grooming to a reasonable standard, then focusing on the value I provided rather than the aesthetics. Seemed obvious, even absurd, but it’s such a human thing, especially in the, you know, filtered and advertised world we live in, to get caught in anxiety swirls where we spend more time stressing over the shade of our teeth than on what matters most.
By unfreezing those specific blocks little by little, the change happened naturally. I didn’t have to force confidence. I just had to melt the specific insecurities that were freezing me in place. And then comes the stage this card lives in, refreezing, forming the new behavior into habit until it becomes your new frozen norm.
This is why the checkpoint matters. Doing the new thing once or twice is kind of like water that hasn’t refrozen yet, and water flows back to old shapes easily. Thirty days out, ask the honest question: Is this my new reflex, or am I still forcing it? If it’s a reflex, the loop has closed. If you’re still forcing it, it just means the refreeze needs more time, more reps.
That’s card 04 of the Using Feedback suit. Where in your life do you feel frozen, and has that part been frozen a long time? Instead of the sledgehammer, ask, “What’s one small practical way I can apply heat today to begin thawing one small piece of it?”
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