The Lessons Never Stop

One of the things that is true in this world, whether you’re a leader or not, is this:  by virtue of the fact that you are human, your are bound to engage in continual learning.  Life lessons and teachable moments abound.  Everyday, there is some new piece of knowledge that will present itself to you, some new experience that you will face.  It’s inevitable.  The lessons never stop.

Sometimes, these lessons come fairly well spaced out — there’s time for you to stop, catch your breath, assimilate the learning before moving on.  At other times, the lessons seem to come at you at a fast-and-furious rate, rather like being bombarded with snowballs from every angle possible, leaving you with no time to breathe, let alone think or assimilate.  This is the sort of week I find myself caught in at the moment.  Actually, to be honest, it feels like it’s been a couple of weeks’ worth of this sort of pace.  and in my conversations with others — again, whether leaders or not — this sort of experience seems fairly common.

What I’m noticing is that there are a couple of ways  to be with this sort of bombardment.  One, given that everything is essentially pelting me at once, is to lay down and try and escape from it all.  The bombardment still occurs, but there’s a way that I can bury my head somewhat and avoid the inevitable bruising.  Sort of an escapist strategy.  Keeps the pain at bay, but doesn’t actually result in me gaining anything or learning anything.  Which means that the life lessons will present themselves again at a future date, because that’s the way life works in my experience; if you don’t learn the lesson the first time, it’ll resurface later.  So I get to ask myself, do I want to learn this now or postpone this for later?  Always a difficult choice.

Another option is to allow the lessons to come at me, and try and learn from them all.  The challenge with this one is that my brain can only focus so much.  After that, nothing makes sense, so inevitably, I will miss stuff — and probably not the stuff I want to miss.

A third option is for me to keep myself in the game, keep myself really grounded and aware, so that I’m consciously choosing which lessons to pay attention to, and which to let go for now.  This is essentially the route I’m choosing at the moment.  The challenge with this strategy, especially as I hold myself in my leadership game, is that as I hold myself in a space of awareness, I can move very quickly into a corresponding space of judgment — judging myself for not absorbing all of the lessons, for having to learn the lessons at all, for being in this space, etc; etc;.  Which, let’s be honest, doesn’t serve at all.  Judgment tends to undermine any learning which might be happening.

So, what to do?  How do effective leaders be with the experience of life lessons in away that minimizes the need to relearn the lesson later, but doesn’t move one into overwhelm or judgment?  I”m not sure I’ve come across the definitive answer on this one yet.  My sense, however, is that it absolutely requires letting go of judgment,  opening myself to the learning and allowing relearning a lesson be an okay option.  Yes, I think that’s it.  And, as a leader, learning to let go of the judgment and stand in awareness as I learn and grow may in fact be the biggest life lesson of all.