Processing
Feedback

The Processing Feedback tab card states, “Receiving feedback leads to processing feedback, a skill that involves slowing down and reflecting before acting.” And the suit’s guide is the sloth. They are intentional, so they’re confident when they move. Processing feedback calls for that same deliberate pace.

So let me tell you why this suit is personal for me. Years ago, uh, I was a high performer at a Fortune 100 company. I received feedback I couldn’t make sense of. And when I went looking for resources on what to do next, how to evaluate it, how to decide whether it fit in my career, how to work with everything it stirred up in me, almost nothing existed.

The guidance out there jumped straight from say thank you to build a plan, as if the spaces between receiving feedback and using it were empty. That space is where this entire suit lives. It may be the most neglected phase in all of feedback literacy, and I’d argue it’s the one where the most important work happens.

The sloth is the perfect guide here, and maybe not for the reason you’d guess. Sloths aren’t slow because they’re lazy. They’re intentional. And that intention is exactly why they’re confident when they move. That’s the trade the suit offers. Deliberate pace now, confident action later.

The arc of these ten cards moves from what I see as evaluation to decision. The early cards help you assess what you’ve received, checking the credibility of the source, because feedback can be a mirror, and mirrors can be grimy. Sorting everything into bins, adopt, adapt, ignore, because you are the curator of your own growth, and some data doesn’t belong in your museum. And searching for patterns, since a single comment is a snapshot, while several may be, may more accurately reveal what’s actually there, including, as I learned the hard way, patterns of positive feedback we’ve been refusing to let in.

The middle cards go inward and outward at once. Inward, toward the emotions feedback stirs up, treating defensiveness as a map pointing to something you want to protect, and turning toward the discomfort rather than reaching for the snack, the scroll, the channel change. Outward toward calibration, bringing feedback to people who know you, because processing feedback alone, while possible, can kind of shrink the picture a bit despite whatever the bootstrap myth taught us.

And the final cards insist on an ending, permission to discard what you’ve genuinely analyzed and found wrong. Selecting the one element with the biggest impact rather than trying to attempt everything, and then finally, the verdict, because processing that never ends in a decision can become rumination that is not helpful. Believe me, I’ve been there more times than I can count.

That’s the Processing Feedback suit. Ten cards for slowing down so that when you move, you move like the sloth.

The Processing Feedback immerse card states, “Difficult feedback may cause your palms to sweat, your chest to tighten, or your stomach to drop. Those reactions hold information you can learn from.” And the card invites you to practice what’s called the dive, which you can do by bringing the feedback to mind, noticing whether a feeling arises in your body, and if so, going beyond the surface by asking, “Why am I feeling this?”

Now, let’s go a bit deeper into some of the data behind this card. In 1924, a philosopher named Robert Givler published a book called The Ethics of Hercules. In it, he wrote something that was radical then and honestly is still not common enough now. Quote, “Ethics and physiology can no longer be studied apart.” End quote. He wasn’t just talking about ethics in some abstract sense. He was talking about our ability to make decisions, to grow, to become better human beings. And his core argument was that the body is not separate from that process. It is central to it.

A century later, I think we’re still catching up to that idea. We live in an intellectually focused culture that tends to treat the mind as the problem solver and the body as something that just kind of carries the mind around. But when it comes to processing feedback, especially difficult feedback, the body often speaks first. We got the sweating palms, the tight chest, the stomach that drops. These aren’t inconvenient interruptions to your thinking. They’re data.

That’s what the dive is designed to help you access by intentionally moving between body and mind. Noticing what you feel, then asking why, you can begin to develop what researchers call emotional intelligence. And a piece in the Yale School of Medicine highlights, quote, emotionally intelligent workers are, quote, “experiencing less burnout. They also perform better.” End quote.

Many people chase both of those things. Less burnout, better performance. Through longer hours, harder effort, more discipline. But the research points somewhere quieter. It’s pointing inward. It points to the body and to our understanding of emotions, which again, the corporate world, many situations we’re in, many environments we’re in, often tries to get us to ignore or stuff down.

That’s card 01 of the Processing Feedback suit. The next time difficult feedback lands and you feel it somewhere in your body, don’t rush past that feeling. That’s the invitation. Go beyond the surface. Ask why. Take some time to move that data between your body and your mind. What you may find in that process may be more useful than anything your mind comes up with on its own.

The Processing Feedback sleep card states, “Whether pressure to respond comes from yourself or others, it can make feedback harder to process. A night of sleep may give you new ways to think about it.” And the card invites you to practice the 24-hour rule, which you can do by making a rule for yourself. Something like, “I will not commit to any next steps for 24 hours. Let your brain work on the problem while you rest.”

Okay, so let’s unpack this a bit. So, if someone gives you feedback about fixing a comma, you don’t need much time to process it. You fix the comma and move on. But challenging feedback is different. Maybe it was unexpected. Maybe it highlighted a weakness you already knew you had and were a bit sensitive about. Uh, or maybe, and this can be the hardest one, it revealed something that you saw as a strength was actually working against you. Maybe you even received feedback that was asking you to do something that goes against your values.

Feedback like that can stir up complex, deep emotional states. And trying to respond from inside those intense states can mean we don’t bring our best selves to the situation. Researchers have a term for the exact moment feedback is delivered, the feedback intervention. And this card is about getting some space from that moment.

A literal night of sleep may help. Your brain genuinely does continue working on problems while you rest. But the card is pointing at something broader than sleep alone. It’s about space. Uh, which could be a walk, uh, a workout, a bath, even playing video games. Anything that allows you to separate a bit from the feedback, because that separation matters. When you bring the feedback to mind later, you will likely be able to see it from different angles. Uh, approach it from a more grounded emotional state.

My own passion for this part of the feedback process comes from personal experience. Years ago, uh, I was a high performer at a Fortune 100 company. I had recently won a department award and then boom, I was hit with feedback from my manager that I could not make sense of. It was the kind of feedback that went against my values and actually went against, uh, the qualities that I think made me a great team leader capable of winning that award in the first place.

So I went looking for resources or research on how to process it and basically nothing existed. Almost all of the feedback guidance out there spoke to the feedback intervention, that moment of receiving it. And the guidance was say thank you, ensure you understand what the giver is asking, build a plan, act on it. None of it addressed what I actually needed, which was how to determine whether the feedback made sense for my career, even my sense of self. What I wanted to know was how to decide if I should use it at all, and then how to approach the person who gave it to me about what they said, etc. The sleep card is one step toward getting the space that kind of processing requires.

So, that’s card 02 of the Processing Feedback suit. The next time non-urgent but challenging feedback comes your way, try the 24-hour rule. No commitments, no next steps, just space.

The Processing Feedback source card states, “Feedback can be a mirror and mirrors can be distorted. Clarity depends on the giver’s expertise and on how critically you evaluate what you’ve received.” And the card invites you to run the credibility check, which you can do by asking three questions. Does the person have relevant expertise? My best interest in mind? Direct experience with me?

Let’s slow down on this one, starting with a single word. So notice the nuance in the card’s first sentence. Feedback can be a mirror. Not feedback is a mirror. That difference might seem small, but it’s doing a lot of work. We live in an age of certainty flavored content. Hot takes, absolute statements, catchy phrases written to be shared rather than to be true. Feedback is a gift. Feedback is a mirror. These sayings are catchy precisely because they’ve sanded off the nuance. But in my experience, the actual truth, the insight your growth genuinely depends on, usually lives in that nuance, in the, the small details those catchy phrases leave behind.

So yes, feedback can be a mirror. And like all mirrors, sometimes they’re clean and clear, sometimes they’re dirty and grimy. Sometimes they reflect real truths or parts of truths, genuine areas for you to expand your perspective on your performance. And sometimes the distortion in the glass says more about the giver than about you. The work then, often the hardest work, is proactively cleaning that mirror before you trust what you see in it.

That matters now maybe more than ever. Because in an age where everyone seems to have a formed opinion on just about everything, including areas far outside their expertise, you may receive feedback from just about anywhere and everywhere. A colleague, a comment section, a relative at dinner. The volume can be a problem if you don’t have a strong ability to sift through it all. That’s what the credibility check is for.

And here’s the mechanism behind each question. Relevant expertise, because feedback on your presentation style from someone who presents masterfully carries different weight than the same words from someone who’s never held a room. Your best interest in mind, because feedback shaped by someone else’s agenda, even subtly, reflects their needs more than your growth. And direct experience with you, because secondhand impressions and brief glimpses produce blurrier reflections, a dirtier window, than sustained observation ever will.

Now, a person doesn’t need to pass all three perfectly for their feedback to hold value, but knowing which questions they pass and which they don’t can help you sift and point the way toward how much weight the reflection deserves.

That’s card 03 of the Processing Feedback suit. The next time feedback lands and something feels off about it, or honestly even when it feels right, run the three questions. You may find the mirror is clean and the reflection deserves your full attention. Or you may find some grime on the glass and now you know to adjust for it.

The Processing Feedback filter card states, “You are the curator of your own growth. Not every piece of data belongs in your museum. Separating what matters from what doesn’t is a skill.” And the card invites you to practice the three bins, which you can do by sorting feedback into mental bins. Adopt for what’s valid and helpful, adapt for a valid point wrapped in poor delivery, and ignore for what’s inaccurate or irrelevant.

Let’s dig into this one. So following from the source card, where we evaluated who the feedback came from, this card is about the next step. How do you sort everything you’ve received? And sometimes, especially if you’ve been on cruise control with your development for a while, this means reaching back, sometimes years back, pulling feedback you received long ago into the present moment and finally laying it all out on the table. Once it’s laid out, the work becomes assembling all those pieces into something meaningful for you. That’s where the three bins earn their keep.

Let me share what this looked like in my own life, long before I had names for any of it. So, 20 years ago, as a writing student in graduate school, I was receiving feedback multiple times each week from a variety of decorated writers, and often they offered conflicting advice on the very same piece of writing I was working on. Their publication and career advice diverged even more dramatically.

One professor encouraged me to routinely submit imperfect work to publications because I needed to get into the flow of submitting, getting rejected, occasionally getting feedback from editors, maybe landing an acceptance here and there. Another professor told me the exact opposite. Don’t submit until long after grad school, they said, once the work is far more polished, because I’d likely collect only rejections. Rejection can break a writer’s morale. They had watched too many writers stop writing entirely because their morale plummeted in exactly that way.

Two experts, two credible sources, two complete opposite pieces of feedback. So what did I do? I sought feedback on the feedback, bringing both perspectives to others I trusted. And without knowing it at the time, once I did that, I began sorting everything into categories. What to act on and why, what to tweak and why, what to ignore and why.

And here’s the part I’d encourage you not to skip. I wrote all of it down. Uh, not just the decisions, the reasoning, because when doubt showed up later, and it did as dozens of rejection letters came rolling in, I could look back and see exactly what my thinking had been. The written record meant my past reasoning could steady my present wobbles.

That’s the deeper function of the bins. Yes, they are a kind of organizing tool, but they’re also a kind of sorting function. Um, a way to force you to articulate why something belongs where you put it. And that articulated why becomes an anchor you can then return to.

That’s card 04 of the Processing Feedback suit. Gather the feedback you’ve been carrying around unsorted. Maybe even the old stuff. Lay it out. Run the bins. Sometimes this process of deciding what doesn’t belong in your museum makes the pieces that do belong suddenly feel much stronger.

The Processing Feedback patterns card states, “A single data point is a snapshot. Several can point to an important pattern. Search for a recurring theme before changing your behavior.” And the card invites you to apply the scientific method, which you could do by placing feedback in context. Does it fit a pattern or is it a new discovery? If new, treat it as a hypothesis to test rather than a fact.

So, let me tell you a story about how a single data point revealed a pattern I had been hiding from myself. Something in it may resonate, or if not, it can help show you how deep the content of this card can be. So during my time as an investigative journalist covering human rights issues, I was loaded with self-doubt. I didn’t have formal training in that specific niche. I just knew I could research, I could write, and I cared deeply about my topic.

But after receiving a particular grant, everywhere I turned seemed to be filled with seasoned journalists who did have the formal training I lacked. They had connections I lacked, the experience I lacked, often the backing of major media companies, which I definitely lacked. I felt very much like an underdog, unsure if I could do this. And perhaps worse, I was terrified of causing harm to the people whose stories I was telling. People who often literally told me they were relying on me because nobody else would tell their stories. The pressure was immense.

Then, uh, during one meeting with a journalist I really admired, she told me how special my work was. And she didn’t stop at special. She gave really detailed positive feedback about why, uh, and she told me she believed I had the talent, the work ethic, and the courage to tell a particularly challenging story. Her feedback was, yes, a single data point, but it opened up my entire world.

So, here’s where it connects to this card. Weeks later, as I let her words marinate, I realized that throughout the years, others had offered similar feedback, like, repeatedly. And I hadn’t really let any of it in. I had ignored it mostly because I believed that if I let it in, I would lose my humility. And that truthfully was a flaw in my thinking. Letting that positive feedback in was actually vitally important. And it took this one vivid data point to crack me open enough to finally see the others, which together formed a pattern I had never allowed myself to recognize.

So, this card’s guidance runs in a few directions at once. Generally, search for the recurring theme before changing your behavior. A single comment is a snapshot. Several snapshots can reveal what’s actually there. When something arrives that’s genuinely new, treat it as a hypothesis to test rather than a fact to swallow. But also, and this is the part of my, the, the part my story taught me, sometimes the pattern already exists fully formed, and you have to determine if maybe something about your mindset has been or still is the barrier to your, your ability to see it.

That’s card 05 of the Processing Feedback suit. Spend a moment writing about the feedback themes that may have repeated across your life, including maybe especially the positive ones. Is there a pattern? If so, know that letting it in doesn’t mean you will lose your humility. And actually, not letting it in could be what’s holding you back.

The Processing Feedback emotion card states, “Defensiveness can be a map pointing to something you want to protect. Rather than suppress the feeling, try exploring it to find the roots and values underneath.” And the card invites you to practice the label, which you can do by naming the feeling and completing this sentence. I’m feeling emotion about this feedback because I’m afraid it means X about me.

Let’s spend some real time with this one. So, as an ethical leadership professor, I often teach and write about how emotion and the discomfort it can elicit is not something to avoid, but is data to be understood. And yet, many of us have built the opposite habit. A tinge of emotional discomfort arrives, fear, anxiety, agitation, sadness, you name it, and we do whatever we can to turn away from it. Having a snack, uh, scrolling on social media, turning the channel, we all have our own kind of menu of avoidance strategies. And most of us know our menu pretty well.

Now, to be fair, that approach isn’t always wrong. There are emotional states we aren’t yet ready for or don’t yet have the resources to deal with. And turning away can be, uh, what we genuinely need in that moment. But here’s the trap. Avoidance can also become an infinite pattern. Year after year, the turning away becomes our default. And the emotion we keep running from keeps arriving, because running from it precise—is precisely what keeps it unresolved. We run, it returns, we run again, and we just continue the cycle infinitely. If our avoidance strategy is something harmful to our body or mind, that harm builds up.

But life is a curriculum and these states are part of it. So often, if we can turn toward the emotion, feel it, feel what it’s like to feel it, name it, ask questions about where it comes from the way we would with a friend, we gain a better understanding of it and of who we are. And many people find, as I have and countless others have, that the intensity of the emotion actually dissipates when we stop fleeing it. That it returns less and less, and that the cycle we’ve been in gets disrupted with what is usually a far healthier pattern.

If that sounds backwards, consider the research from all sorts of domains. To name just one, there’s the pioneering work of mindfulness-based stress reduction by Jon Kabat-Zinn, which found that patients dealing with tremendous pain in many cases actually experience less pain and less mental suffering about their pain when they consciously directed attention toward the unpleasant sensation rather than scrambling to avoid it. It’s counterintuitive and it’s at the very heart of this card.

So, how does this apply to feedback? When challenging feedback stirs something in you, defensiveness, a sting, a knot, anything discomforting, that feeling is a map and maybe pointing to something you want to protect, something fragile. The label helps you read the map. I’m feeling emotion about this feedback because I’m afraid it means X about me. That sentence does something powerful. It moves the emotion from a fog you’re inside of to an object you can now examine. And underneath the fear, you’ll often find some kind of value. You’re afraid the feedback means you’re careless because you deeply value craftsmanship, for example. The emotion was guarding something worth knowing about yourself.

That’s card 06 of the Processing Feedback suit. The next time feedback stirs discomfort, see if you can pause before reaching for your favorite avoidance strategy. And if possible, try to understand what that avoidance strategy even is. Turn toward it. Even briefly, name it. You may find the feeling loses some intensity in the naming, and also that it leaves behind a clearer picture of what you care about most.

The Processing Feedback calibrate card states, “We may miss out on vital perspectives if we process feedback alone. Seeking additional opinions tests the feedback against a larger reality.” And the card invites you to run the reality check, which you can do by asking a person you trust, “Based on your experience with me, does this feedback sound like a real gap or an outlier?”

Let’s zoom out on this one because the barrier here is often cultural. So different cultures relate to processing life’s challenges in genuinely different ways. In more collective cultures, working through something significant, a decision, a setback, a hard piece of feedback, is often naturally a shared activity. You bring it to the family, the elders, the community. Sensemaking is something people do together.

In more individualistic cultures, and I’d include much of American work culture here, the current tends to run the other way. We, we celebrate the lone figure who works it all out themselves. And that celebration has a name, the bootstrap myth. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s worth remembering that the phrase originally described something physically impossible. You cannot lift yourself by pulling on your boot— your own boots. Um, somewhere along the way, this absurd image became an ideal we measure ourselves against. And it is a myth. Everyone who has grown into mastery of anything did so with mentors, feedback, communities, prior work they built off of, and people who actually help them see what they couldn’t see.

Layer on to this something many of us feel. We are more digitally connected than ever, and yet at times more physically alone than ever. I’ve experienced this myself. Some call it part of the loneliness epidemic. We can have hundreds or thousands of social media contacts and no one we’d actually sit down with to say, “I received some hard feedback and I don’t know what to make of it.”

Boil all of that together and here’s where many people land. They’ve received challenging feedback they aren’t sure what to do with, and they believe they need to figure it out alone or that their only option is going back to the original feedback giver. Both beliefs shrink the picture. One person’s feedback, however sincere, is still one vantage point. Processing it alone adds only one more, yours, right? The reality check adds a third. Someone who knows you, has experience with you, and can tell you whether this feedback matches a pattern they’ve observed or if it stands as an outlier. That’s what testing feedback against a larger reality means. You’re triangulating instead of guessing.

And yes, this can feel uncomfortable. I’ve actually felt very annoyed when practicing it because I just wanted to be done with something and move on. But expanding your horizons here, even when it’s uncomfortable, is often exactly what accurate processing requires.

That’s card 07 of the Processing Feedback suit. The next time challenging feedback has you turning it over and over alone, maybe offering the feeling of progress without actually making progress, consider that the turning it over might itself be the signal that the next step is to bring it to someone you trust. You may find their answer settles in minutes what solitude couldn’t settle in weeks.

The Processing Feedback discard card states, “You have permission to reject feedback. If you have analyzed it and found it inaccurate or unhelpful, adopting it can sabotage your growth.” And the card invites you to practice the clearing, which you can do by consciously deciding, “I have understood this, considered it, and chosen not to adopt it.” Then imagine closing the mental file.

Let’s get into this one. So this card ties back to insights from the receiving suit, where we practiced not immediately agreeing or disagreeing in the moment feedback arrives. This card extends that into the phase after receiving, because often, even once the conversation’s over, the pressures to agree or reject don’t disappear. They follow us. Pressure from hierarchy, from wanting to seem coachable, from mood, energy, timing.

On that note, you may have heard of the hungry judge effect. A widely cited study found that judges granted parole more often right after meal breaks than right before them, suggesting that something as simple as hunger was shaping decisions of enormous consequence. Now, in the spirit of realism, I should tell you it’s not as simple as the headline version. Some researchers have pushed back on parts of that study. Portions of it have been maybe debunked or complicated, but I think the broader phenomenon it points to is obvious and well supported. Our decisions are impacted by a whole range of factors, including perhaps beyond the ones that seem most relevant. Fatigue, hunger, stress, the meeting we just left. None of us are exempt, and that includes how we judge feedback.

This is exactly why a deliberate processing phase exists. It’s the counterweight. Rather than letting the verdict on a piece of feedback get decided by whatever state we happen to be in when it arrived, we slow down, analyze the source, sort it, check it against patterns, calibrate with people we trust, hold it while we are experiencing a range of states rather than just one. And when the genuine analysis concludes the feedback is inaccurate or unhelpful, you have permission to reject it. Full permission. Of course, depending on the nature of the work and your relationship with the person who gave it to you. Adopting feedback you’ve honestly found to be wrong doesn’t make you coachable, and it can genuinely sabotage your growth.

After making a decision, we often keep holding the what-ifs. What if they were right? What if I should have listened? Now, a little of this can be healthy. Humility means staying revisable. But past a certain point, the open loop just drains you. The file sits on the desk getting picked up and put down, picked up and put down. That’s why this card ends with a visualization. Imagine actually closing the mental file. Decision made, reasoning recorded, file closed. The closure can free your attention for the focused state of development that the pursuit of mastery always, always, always requires.

That’s card 08 of the Processing Feedback suit. If there’s feedback you’ve already analyzed and quietly rejected, but keep reopening, try making the decision conscious and complete. Close the file. This can help you transform all that what-if energy into the energy you need to grow in new ways.

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, uh, 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, 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 off-hand comments that, that don’t hold up. What settles at the bottom is the heavy, the heavy stuff, 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, uh, 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.

The Processing Feedback decide card states, “Processing feedback should end with a clear decision, a deep understanding of why that decision was made, and a readiness to move forward.” And the card invites you to deliver the verdict, which you can do for meaningful feedback you’ve chosen to adopt by completing this. I commit to improving skill because reason.

Let’s bring this suit home. So much of this processing suit has been about hard inner work, evaluating the credibility of a source, sorting feedback into bins, searching for patterns, including the ones we’ve been avoiding, turning toward difficult emotions instead of away from them, uh, calibrating with people we trust, granting ourselves permission to discard, selecting the one thing that matters most. That’s a lot of reflection, and reflection is genuinely valuable. But here’s what this final card wants to make unmistakable. All of it has been leading to something, a decision.

Processing that never ends in a decision can become a form of unhelpful ruminating. And I say that with compassion, because staying in analysis can feel productive. There’s always another angle to consider, another opinion to gather, another night to sleep on it. I’ve been in that struggle so many times. But at some point, continuing to process becomes its own form of avoidance. The reason processing deserves ten cards of its own is precisely because arriving at a clear, often hard decision is a skill, maybe one of the most underrated skills in all of feedback literacy.

And notice what the card asks for. Not just a decision, but a deep understanding of why you made it. That’s what the verdict captures in a single sentence. I commit to improving this skill because of this reason. The because matters enormously, as we touched on with the aspire card in the receiving suit. It’s the why you’ll fall back on when the work gets challenging. And if the change is meaningful, the work will get challenging. A decision without a reason attached to it might be far easier to let go of when times get tough. A decision with its reasoning written down is something you can stand on.

There’s also that third element that the card names, a readiness to move forward. This is why using feedback is the next suit in the deck. The entire using suit assumes you’ve done this work, that you’ve made your decision and you know why. Because what comes next, especially when the feedback involves complex or hard changes, is building a genuinely strategic plan, integrating the change, practicing it over time, reflecting on how it’s going. That’s a different mode entirely. Processing is the deliberation room. Using is the training ground. This card, this making of a decision, is the doorway between them.

That’s card 10, the final card of the Processing Feedback suit. If there’s feedback you’ve been processing for a while now, maybe a long while, ask yourself honestly whether you’re still gaining clarity or just circling. If it’s circling, it may be time for the verdict. Make the decision. Write down the why. You may find that the decision itself, the, the simple hard act of making it, is what finally converts all that reflection into growth.