Harvest the Learning

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.    Rita Mae Brown

I know when I learn really valuable lessons, I have a tendency to forget what I’ve learned and what is most important to me. Recently, I’ve put trust in a person I had learned earlier is not trustworthy. This experience drained my energy, and caused familiar feelings of disappointment in the person and myself. While I know better in my head, I get “pulled into the familiar” and I forget some of the previous hard-won learning. Have you ever been in a situation which feels bad, yet familiar, then you smack your forehead and say, “of course, why am I doing this again?

A client I work with has been especially exhausted this holiday season, so she began to pay keen attention to what she enjoyed and what drained her.   We all have short memories and are easily distracted, but she found a very creative way to elongate her memory. She wanted to make sure NEXT year’s holidays are packed full of what enriches her, what is MOST important.   What she observed, is that what she truly wants is relaxed, unscheduled time.   So, she wrote a letter to her future self listing in great detail all the “dos and don’ts” in planning the holidays and stapled it to her June 2015 calendar so she has a reminder at midyear of what she needs to avoid in the coming months. Mostly, her December calendar will have lots of white space on it.

One way to remember wisdom is to record it. It creates a lens to recall the spiritual and emotional lesson. Writing a letter to ourselves after any difficult experience helps us leapfrog over the grumbling and complaining and sets us up to operate from a position of strength, groundedness, courage and consciousness as we move forward. May your New Year be filled with all of the things you call in.