“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”

John Keats

You are not the same person that you were 6 months ago. Nor are you the same person that you were 3 years ago, 5 years ago or 10 years ago. The reason for this is various forms of knowledge and situations, and regardless of the source, every episode that made you think, feel, or behave differently, is an experience.

Whether you are fully aware of the impact, or if the situation passed through you without much consideration, you are the recipient of endless encounters which educate and transform you.

Life, in every capacity, is a series of experiences. It is those who are most are of these, who learn the most and change their circumstance for the better based on what they have gained. The concept of employing experience is to do exactly that: To make use of the experiences that you have been through, so that you alter whatever facet of your life.

Experience holds no value unless it is employed in one way or another. It may be that something you go through teaches you how you do not want to behave or how you do not want to live your life. This is a valuable message to direct how you would like your life to be. Other experiences show you how you would like to be, and who you may want to emulate.

Regardless of the specific message, the usage of what you have been through grows you in some form, and that in itself is valuable.

To employ is to use. Experiences that you have been through are only advantageous when you use them. Sitting in a boardroom watching an intense negotiation is worthless unless you are watching body language, following the discussion, and forming an opinion of how you would handle this situation. 

The best way to then benefit from that experience is to put into practice as much as you possibly can, as soon as you can. The reason for this is that experiences need to be embedded into our psyche so that they become ingrained in us and a part of how we think and feel. Situations and conversations that you have been part of throughout your life so not add any meaning to you unless you allow something in that interaction to adjust how you perform in a certain way. Then you have employed your experience, and improved yourself.

Jack was an intern in an architectural firm. He was confident and cocky. He had always been the clever kid in the class, and he knew it. He was able to memorise information easily, and he could understand difficult concepts that others seemed to struggle with. He was excited at this new working position, because, ambitious by nature, this would be a good steppingstone for him.

Jack knew that he had to proceed through the internship period before he could complete the requirements to register as an architect, yet to him, much of what he would be doing in this firm was passing time until his registration. He did not feel that there was much to learn, since he had whizzed through all his university exams, and received raving reviews from all the companies that he worked at through his program.

Although he did not take this current journey very seriously, his competitive nature led him to push his way to the front of every discussion so that he could both be seen, and in the unlikely event that he would learn something new, he would be in the best position to learn it.