Dr. Peter J. Weiss

In the first part of this series, we talked about learn­ing from expe­ri­ence at a high level. So if you have a small expe­ri­ence, try to draw a gen­eral les­son that can be applic­a­ble at a higher level.  Then you are able to learn and grow much faster than some­body who has to learn every sin­gle lit­tle thing one-at-a-time through expe­ri­ence. And that was great.

The sim­ple exam­ple that we used was related to work. It was about learn­ing one thing about Microsoft Word and real­iz­ing, through learn­ing that one thing, that you didn’t know a lot of other things.  And then try­ing to take your work related skills to the next level. So that was a good exam­ple.

But what about things that are a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing than work. Work can be pretty chal­leng­ing but it’s nowhere near as chal­leng­ing as, per­haps, our health — or think­ing about things like these:

What don’t I know about my health?  What behav­iors do I have that might not be opti­mal for me?  How do I “wake up” and real­ize how I’m not behav­ing well and not treat­ing my body well?

What about my rela­tion­ships?  How do I know if I’m a good enough par­ent? How do I know if I’m a good enough spouse?

What about my polit­i­cal beliefs?  Am I a Demo­c­rat or Repub­li­can?  Should I learn more about what the other side thinks?

What about my reli­gious beliefs? Am I locked into a cer­tain tra­di­tion, so that I don’t even want to know any­thing else?

These things are very threat­en­ing.  They’re very threat­en­ing to our egos, which don’t like to be even a lit­tle bit unset­tled. So many peo­ple just sort of get locked in to a fixed posi­tion about all those things — reli­gious beliefs, polit­i­cal beliefs, who they “are,” their par­ent­ing style, who they are in their mar­riage, and who they are as they relate to other peo­ple.

Sure, some­times there’s cri­sis that forces us to learn from expe­ri­ence.  But do we let it stop there, with that lit­tle bit of learn­ing? Oh, some­thing hap­pened in my mar­riage or some­thing hap­pened with my health, so I changed a lit­tle.  But I didn’t learn the les­son. I didn’t get to a higher level of learn­ing from expe­ri­ence to say, “Wait a minute…I changed a lit­tle but the les­son I am learn­ing is that I might need to change a lot. And so I’m going to look into that, and I’m going to change.” That’s really scary, but you can really change your life if you’re will­ing to think about things this way.

I know because it hap­pened to me.