“We do not learn from experience.  We learn from reflecting on experience.”  

~ John Dewey.

Indeed.

It’s easy to think everything that happens to us is a lesson and we get the lesson in the moment.  We don’t.  

It’s only when we look back, consider, give the experience a moment to sink in and – from there – extract the lesson that we add it to our Experience Library, as it were.

Last night I hosted a room full of insurance executives in a City office to give them the opportunity to have their own Year End Review.  Here I am with my hosts for the evening before we got going and they both did it too of course!

It’s an exercise I’ve been offering my mentoring groups for many years now and there’s always such a strong response.  With 5 private mentoring groups at the moment, I’ll know the questions off by heart by mid-December!

You give yourself the gift of time, of quiet reflection, you make notes and then use those notes to guide you towards the year ahead.

One participant had been to the Event I hosted last year at the end of 2022 and said that whilst she found it difficult, and at times emotional, it had really helped her in her decisions for 2023.  She decided to come back and do it again!

Here are a few questions for you just to give you a taste and maybe you’ll take the time to ask yourself more of these kind of questions, before leaping in to 2024…

• Who has helped and supported you in 2023?
• What are 2 peak experiences – good and not so good in your personal life AND 2 more in your professional life?
• What lessons will you take from these experiences?
• What new skills have you learned this year?
• How have you surprised yourself?
• What have you started and what have you stopped in 2023?

And so these kind of questions go on and build, and there are about 30 of them.

I do this myself, every year and every time I surprise myself too about all that’s happened, some of the things I’ve forgotten or overlooked.

A final word on the matter…

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“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”  

~Soren Kierkegaard

 And in other news…

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We had a cheeky night away last weekend on the North Norfolk coast with our hounds.  It’s an area we love and have visited many times.  We wore loads of layers with the weather so cold but, as it always is, the place inspires and pulls us back for another time.  We’re already booked for April next year!