This week's reframe is about building the courage and strategy to go get the feedback you need.

Episode Transcript

The Seeking Feedback Courage card states, "Our nervous system may try to protect us from difficult feedback. Noticing that and staying present with it can take self-awareness and courage." And the card invites you to practice what's called the mantra, which you can do by, before sending a specific feedback request, taking a breath, reflecting on your intention, and thinking, "I am courageously choosing growth."

Let's dive into this one. So perhaps nothing slows down our growth, keeping us stagnant in our development, quite like the fear of approaching others for feedback, and that fear arises from different places in each of us.

For some, the fear is that the feedback might be harsh. For others, the fear is that it might touch against some part of our ego, which is fragile and which we often work hard to protect without even realizing we're doing it.

For others the fear is that the feedback may ask us to change something that feels too hard to do. Here's part of why this fear runs so deep. Think back to school. For most of us, feedback flowed in one direction.

The teacher provided it on whatever the student submitted. That structure is vital for student growth, but it also means many of us went years, sometimes decades, without ever practicing the skill of seeking feedback ourselves, and it is a skill.

It takes practice. There are strategies. That is why I call this feedback literacy. We can get better at it. So this lack of practice means many of us never learn to thoroughly review our own work, compare it against great examples, uh, determine who to reach out to about it, formulate thoughtful, specific questions to ask that person.

That entire flow is a series of skills, and most of us were never given a chance to consistently develop them. I saw this vividly not long ago. I gave a feedback literacy workshop to a bright group of 13 to 18-year-old students here in Pennsylvania, and for many of them, the most profound takeaway was realizing they didn't have to remain in the role of passive feedback receiver.

They could be strategic and proactive, going to get the feedback they need from a variety of sources they choose, with a careful plan formed ahead of time. I had them practice this with each other, and it was fascinating to watch. They reflected on where they wanted to grow, took some time to write about it and even say it out loud, and they got deeply specific about it.

Then they stepped into their own empowerment as they built a plan for exactly who they would ask and exactly what they would say. You could see something dramatically shift in them. It was like they went from believing their growth was about hard work and waiting for feedback to now they could work hard, get that passive feedback when it comes, but also this...

They now had this new lever of growth. That shift that they saw is available to all of us at any age, and it begins with the courage this card names. That's card 02 of the Seeking Feedback Suit. Before your next feedback request, maybe before you hit send on that email or walk into that conversation, take a breath, reflect on your intention just for a moment, and remind yourself, "I am courageously choosing growth."

You might find naming the courage is what makes the asking possible.

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