What Lesson are You Still Learning?

Note: I’m taking a break from updates for the American Workplace Relevance Road Trip while we work out some scheduling logistics. Who knew that scheduling 100 interviews and 200 career coaching sessions would be so much fun? Sponsors are coming on board, and I’ll be pushing out more on this exciting adventure very soon!

Over the years we’ve heard a lot about “flow.” To borrow a mindfulness phrase, flow means being fully present in what is going on right now. This presence makes it much easier to sense and purposefully use the currents revealed in events and relationships. But accurately sensing these currents also requires a deep understanding that I call Educated Intuition.

Educated Intuition comes from experience, practice, and feedback. That feedback often shows up as failure. And, contrary to popular logic, we usually need to fail the same way multiple times to change our consistent choices based on our deepest conditioning. To paraphrase Yoda, life’s ultimate guru, we must unlearn what we have learned.

Repeated failure can serve to create enough emotional mass to carry us beyond the logjam of our personal fictions and repeated blunders. Even then, the pattern may continue until we provide our hindbrains with a risk-acceptable way forward. So, Educated Intuition often presents itself as experience, practice, feedback/failure/learning (repeated as many times as necessary), and strategy.

For me, dedication to this humbling process of making the same mistake over and over is fueled by my craving to discover and remedy where I am ignorant, mistaken, misinformed, or just flat wrong. I have a driving desire to be right, and I would rather not have my blind spots pointed out by others. So, I actively seek productive and even painful feedback.

The point of this is not to give up when you hear yourself say, “I always do that!” Just because you always have, doesn’t mean you always will. But I would suggest substituting the more positive and accurate statement, “I’m still learning that lesson.”

My greatest lesson right now is learning to ask for what I need. What lesson are you still learning?