Experiences

Hey Team. All right. So here we are again, Wednesday Workshop. It’s hard to believe that the month is almost over. We are at the end of this month, getting ready for next month. I’m excited about May 5th because Cinco de Mayo, we’re going to have food. You guys have been seeing little ads and videos and different things and stuff, so I’m excited to have a taco party. It’s going to be awesome.

Wednesday Workshop is always about building our team knowledge, information, and things. How to do the job better or how to just do life better a little bit. Recently, in the last couple of weeks in leadership, I talked about experiences. How we learn, how we grow. And as parents, I’m a parent and as leaders, and just people doing life sometimes.

We go through experiences and we use our experiences to train, teach, coach, and mentor others. Sometimes we deal with things in life through our experiences. Some of you might be afraid of heights because you had a really bad experience with heights. Some of you might be afraid of water because you had a bad experience with water and stuff. And so many times in our lives we deal with things in that way and sometimes we adjust also as parents through an experience and how to do things better for our other children.

I had one of those moments. I had a time in my life when Jonathan, who’s almost nine now, was only about a year old. He’d just learned to walk. Karen and I had a pizza in the oven. Jonathan has always been about wanting to help and be a part of everything going on, even from a very young age. As a matter of fact, recently he made dinner for the entire family. It was Hamburger Helper. But I mean, the fact that he can figure out how to cook the hamburger, he can figure out how to do all the measuring stuff and do all that kind of stuff. I don’t think I had that kind of skill at eight years old.

But again, we learned through our experiences. Well, I picked him up. I moved him across the kitchen. I setting down, I turn around, went back, open the oven, and bam, there he is. Hand on the glass. Big old blister grows fast. He’s yelling, screaming, and hollering. I’m holding him. I’m crying because I feel like this horrible dad. True enough, right? Big old huge blister. The blister took up the whole palm of his hand. That was an experience for him and for me. I learned.

David hasn’t burned his hand yet because I learned to do things differently, wrapped around that particular item of dealing with a hot stove. Jonathan also has not put his hand on the hot stove because he’s smarter. Just the other day we had something in the oven and he went over to the oven and he looked at it and I could tell he reached up and he grabbed the handle and he knew that that was okay. But he didn’t put his hand on that glass. He didn’t reach down from the inside and touch the hot stove because he learned through that experience.

An experience is a brutal teacher. C.S. Lewis talks about that. And those of you who don’t know C.S. Lewis, you should maybe read a couple of his books. He’s a famous writer. But again, experience is a brutal teacher. Can you imagine learning everything that we learn through experience that you couldn’t learn from somebody else? You had to go through it yourself. Boy, that would suck, wouldn’t it?

We learn from others, and I think we have an obligation to reach down to and mentor and coach not only our children but our fellow teammates, and people that work around us. If you experience something at work, would you not want to share it with your team members around you to prevent them from falling into the same trap? I think I would and I would be grateful to those team members. So as we’re going through life, yes, we learn by experience. And yes, it is a brutal teacher, but so much better to learn from somebody else that maybe has already made that mistake.

So those lessons you learned, both good and bad. Make sure you share them. Pass them around. Don’t make people go through the experience. Because again, sometimes it’s funny, but many times it’s not. And we’ve all experienced sometimes some of the harder lessons in life. And I don’t know about you, but I would have wished and hoped that somebody else would have trained and taught me to prevent me from marching down that road and running into that problem in that way.

Happy Wednesday. Be valuable because nothing less will do. And I will see you next Wednesday. God bless folks.