And that’s okay, because I have new data now

I am wrong all the time.

I actually enjoy being wrong.

Nobody learns from being right. People don’t grow from success. Show me one athlete who transformed from winning every game.

What about you? What kind of intention do you hold around reflection?

If we want to ramp up our experiential learning, it’s helpful to have a framework to guide our efforts. Mine has three parts.

Insightful exploration, critical thinking and emotional awareness.

These three categories will make it easier to focus on specific areas of cognitive growth. Note, they’re not mutually exclusive. Some practices may overlap. Feel free to adjust and adapt them according to your own needs and preferences.

Starting with with insightful exploration.

Wondering why you behave the way that you do. Analyzing your own behavior as if you were a scientist. Noticing how your thoughts arise. Reverse engineering recent experiences to try and figure yourself out.

I do this every morning while writing. Often my creative inspiration comes from something that I either felt or thought yesterday. Somebody did something that offended my sense of order. Somebody said something that I badly wanted to call bullshit on. Somebody asked me a question that nobody had ever asked before.

My goal as a writer is to explore that experience until some kind of insight drops out of the bottom. And it almost always happens if I stick with it long enough. The return on experience cashes in.

Part two of the experiential learning framework is emotional awareness.

Examining your feelings. Concerning yourself about your style of doing things. Identifying the emotions that influence your behavior. And making sense of the way you experience things.

A helpful place to start is to identify your favorite placeholder words. The catchall terms you default to when you’re experiencing difficult or complicated emotions. Words like weird, awkward, lame or annoyed.

These are not feelings, they’re adjectives. They might be descriptions, interpretations and observations, but they offer no emotional clarity.

The problem with such placeholder language is, it allows you to be correct, with zero opposition, and without fully exploring your true feelings. If you comment you don’t like a book because it’s weird, nobody is going to challenge that.

Now, understandably, articulating your specific feelings accurately and in real time is difficult. I don’t think I learned how to do that until my thirties. Developing emotional intelligence is not something most of us were taught to view as a skill, myself included. Some cultures demonize emotional awareness as a weakness.

All the more reason to call out the catchall words. For ourselves and others.

I’ve personally put an embargo on saying the word weird. This rule forces me to be more specific with my feelings.

In fact, I get bullish about it with others too. When other people describe things as being weird, I like to dig in. What do you mean by weird? What feeling is behind that? Insecure? Scared? Threatened? Confused?

I’m sure my little linguistic quirk annoys the shit out of people, but good. That’s the goal. I am not trying to micromanage people’s language, I just think we should hold each other accountable to be more precise with our feelings.

Starting with ourselves. Otherwise we will never learn from our experiences. If you want to learn from history, focus on your true biological feelings, rather than subjective interpretations to describe your emotional state.

And you can start small, too. Think back to incidents from your past, and see if you can reveal the true feelings that were never full experienced or were hidden beneath the surface reaction. It’s good practice.

The final part of this experiential learning framework is critical thinking.

It’s questioning your assumptions and beliefs. Looking at your own habits of thought. Testing your judgments against those of others. These practices are critical if we want to learn from history.

Just imagine if people were will to call bullshit on their younger selves and say, wait a minute, my habits of thought were immature and uninformed. And that’s okay. Because I have new data now.

In summary, if you want to ramp up experiential learning, use this framework to guide your efforts. Use the three practices of insightful exploration, critical thinking and emotional awareness.

That way, when history repeats itself over and over, you’ll be equipped. When the rhythms of time start beating a familiar drum, you can get up and dance.

Who knows?

Maybe during the next pandemic, you’ll realize that you don’t need to wear two face masks after all.

Are you capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound