Using your Experience – Competence lessons for Woman’s Month from my Book of the Month – “Educated” by Tara Westover
Living through various situations is interesting, being exposed to new things can be exciting, but learning from those situations and being able to apply that new knowledge is extremely powerful! This is what we call experience. And experience is now a passive experience, it is an active engagement where you enter the environment in one form and leave as a better version of yourself.
We all know that experiences can be good and bad, yet there is the impression that it is often the good experiences that we enjoy and therefore gain more from, and the negatives one we endure, and move on from, happy that we survived.
Take a moment to look at the people you admire. Most of them would have emerged from difficult circumstances to make them who they are today. They did not simply come through their struggles; they used the emotions, thoughts and actions that they needed at that time to build themselves into who they are now.
Westover said that she “remembered the words of Sancho Panza: An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.”
It is the process of evolving through an experience that makes us grow, even if we don’t like it at the time. Women have specific experiences in the working world that are particular to them. Talk to those women and see how often she, as an innocent employee suffered, laughed, and learnt, and emerged as the empress of her own career.
Why not sign up to my book club? Every month I review a book that has lessons for business people. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a woman in corporate or a daughter looking to take over the family business, you’ll find useful insights and coaching tips.
