Life Coaching Tip: Experience Is Not The Best Teacher
All experience is not created equal. Contrary to what you may have heard, experience is not the best teacher; educated experience is. There is a big difference between the two.
Experience doesn’t teach you anything unless you take the time to learn from it. It is not enough to simply go through situations; you have to grow through situations. Just because someone goes through a difficult time does not necessarily mean they automatically learned from it. We all know people who have gone through a lot but have nothing to show from it. Educating yourself as to what you have acquired through your experiences will give you incredible insight into the future.
It’s not what we’ve experienced that shapes us; it’s what we’ve learned from our experiences that truly shape us. Unless we take the time to reflect, we will be destined to repeat the past, or worse, forget about it. Every experience brings with it a seed of success. Don’t allow yourself to waste experiences. Instead, take time to cultivate growth lessons from your experiences. Vernon Howard said, “Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will.”
Life is a classroom. Everything that happens to you can be used for you. If you’ll start to get more intentional about reflecting, learning, and acting on your experiences you’ll begin to live at a whole new level.
Let’s break these down:
Reflect
Make sure you take time at the end of your day to reflect on everything you experienced throughout the day. This can just be a quick scan of the highlights that stuck out to you. Whatever you do, have moments throughout the day, at the end of the day, or sometime that you reflect so you don’t forget what you are experiencing.
Learn
As you reflect learn from the experience. Write down some notes about what went well that you want to repeat or what didn’t go well that you want to change. Make sure that you learn from your experience by analyzing the good and bad that will be helpful for you to understand.
Act
Turn your learning into action. Give yourself specific challenges to repeat or change behaviors that you want to do in the future. You have to convert experiences into real change. The more you discipline yourself to learn and adjust your life the greater success you will have.
On a scale from 1-10 (10 being amazing) ask yourself how well you are doing at turning experience into insight. Challenge yourself to increase your score by practicing this series of reflecting, learning, and acting. You can do it!
