This is great: the institution was never designed to develop you. It was designed to deploy you.
That distinction matters more than most mid-career leaders realize. Because when the external loop goes quiet, they don’t just lose feedback. They lose the only metric they were ever trained to trust. And that’s when the identity crisis shows up disguised as a strategy problem.
The inner loop was always speaking. The institution just paid them not to listen.
What I’d add to the “See Something, Tag Something” practice: when something drains you consistently, don’t just note it. Ask whether you’ve been rewarded for being good at the very thing that costs you the most. That’s the trap the external loop never flags.
Your best leaders aren’t the ones who ignore the inner loop. They’re the ones who learned to treat it as data before a disruption forced them to.
You're right to continue the process after capturing. The meaning comes from the review, not just the capture. My focus in this post was establishing the practice so there would be data worth reviewing. In my own practice I capture in the moment and review later. The real value moves from something I noted, to what does this mean, to what does this mean for me.
That three-step move is where most leaders stop short. They treat capture as the finish line.
But moving from what you noticed, to what it means, to what it means specifically for you as a leader now that is where the real identity work happens. And that last step is the one institutions never built in, because it requires you to show up as a person before you show up as a performer. The leaders who skip it don’t just miss insights. They stay strangers to themselves longer than they should.
I actually built a one-page tool around this exact progression, it lives in my premium resource library alongside a few hundred other resources for mid-career leaders.
This is great: the institution was never designed to develop you. It was designed to deploy you.
That distinction matters more than most mid-career leaders realize. Because when the external loop goes quiet, they don’t just lose feedback. They lose the only metric they were ever trained to trust. And that’s when the identity crisis shows up disguised as a strategy problem.
The inner loop was always speaking. The institution just paid them not to listen.
What I’d add to the “See Something, Tag Something” practice: when something drains you consistently, don’t just note it. Ask whether you’ve been rewarded for being good at the very thing that costs you the most. That’s the trap the external loop never flags.
Your best leaders aren’t the ones who ignore the inner loop. They’re the ones who learned to treat it as data before a disruption forced them to.
You're right to continue the process after capturing. The meaning comes from the review, not just the capture. My focus in this post was establishing the practice so there would be data worth reviewing. In my own practice I capture in the moment and review later. The real value moves from something I noted, to what does this mean, to what does this mean for me.
That three-step move is where most leaders stop short. They treat capture as the finish line.
But moving from what you noticed, to what it means, to what it means specifically for you as a leader now that is where the real identity work happens. And that last step is the one institutions never built in, because it requires you to show up as a person before you show up as a performer. The leaders who skip it don’t just miss insights. They stay strangers to themselves longer than they should.
I actually built a one-page tool around this exact progression, it lives in my premium resource library alongside a few hundred other resources for mid-career leaders.
Well said. There's more to the personal feedback loop than meets the eye. I may write about the review layer in a future post.