Using Feedback: Track

Episode Transcript

The Using Feedback Track card states, “If you don’t monitor the impact of your changes, you won’t know if they’re working. Strive to wring insights from every attempt at change.” And the card invites you to keep the log, which you can do for one week. Each time you use the feedback, rate how it went on a scale of one to five, and add some brief notes about why.

Some years ago, I spoke at a major industry marketing event, and for various reasons, I gave the worst presentation of my life. I felt terrible about it. And here’s the strange part, there was literally a line of people waiting to thank me afterward, but I knew. I could feel it in my bones. And the feedback results came in from the event organizers, and the audience scores confirmed what my bones already knew. It was not a great presentation.

For months later, I kept telling myself I would address what happened. I’d sit down, figure out what went wrong, extract the lessons, and each time I brought it to mind, the pain and embarrassment were too hard for me to sit with, and just as importantly, too easy to distract myself from. There was always a snack, a scroll, a task, something more important, or something I could rationalize as being more important for me to do. The Emotion card from the processing suit covers this exact avoidance loop, and I was living in it. It wasn’t until I put a journaling plan in place, a structured, simple written practice, that I could actually make progress on it, and I literally only did this for a few days in a Word doc.

That experience taught me something about a phrase we all use, hard-earned insights. We usually assume the hard refers to the failing, that insights are hard-earned because something went badly. But I don’t think that’s quite it. The failing is just an event. What makes an insight hard-earned, I think, is two things: having the courage to go for it in the first place, and then having the capacity to reflect on how it went, honestly and in detail, close enough to the discomfort to learn from it, then course-correct or double down and go again. Plenty of people fail and learn nothing from it, precisely because the reflection step is the one that hurts.

This is where writing comes in, and why the log asks you to write rather than just think. Writing is a disciplined form of thinking, and it can externalize, literally get on paper, what’s floating around in your mind. Making it real this way, a thing you can see as separate from yourself, can itself feel like a massive step forward. A vague mental “That went okay” can float away and take its lessons with it. But a written three out of five, maybe notes like, “The new opening worked, lost the thread when questions came early, need a plan for interruptions,” that’s thinking with a spine. The rating forces an honest assessment. The why captures the insight while it’s fresh. And even a few days of entries like that can become something a memory never can, a visible record of whether the change is actually working and exactly where it’s breaking down.

And notice the card says, “Wring insights from every attempt.” The two out of five days aren’t failures of the log. They’re often its most valuable entries.

That’s card 09 of the Using Feedback suit. Pick the change you’re currently working on and run the log for one honest week. You may find, like I did, that the structure is what finally lets you sit with what you’ve been avoiding, and that the insights, as they usually are, are right beside the discomfort.