These last couple of weeks I’ve mostly been editing personal development training materials. No, wait, hear me out.
It’s turned out to be really interesting – getting to grips with every single topic is like getting paid for absorbing a full package of self-improvement. (Dear Mr Client, if you’re reading this, please do still honour my invoice. Thank you.)
It’s not the only learning I’ve been involved in of late but it seems to have been applicable to everything. For a start, it’s not been the perfect fortnight. Some things have gone wrong and we’ve had to adapt, in my case to things I’m not particularly good at, without it affecting work too much.
We’ve also been teaching the dog the difference between fetching a squeaky, toy monkey and fetching a squeaky, toy reindeer. With limited success.
Then there’s the moment when, after spending a couple of weeks in school asking a 6-year-old girl to read with more expression, whilst reading The Three Little Pigs she gets halfway through the Wolf’s pivotal opening speech, pauses, clears her throat and returns to the start to intone in a deep, scary voice, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll BLOW your house down!” Cue mini internal fistpump.
It doesn’t matter what age we are or even what type of creature we are; it seems we should always be learning. Sifting through training materials has reminded me just how much I’ve learned but since forgotten and consequently how much better I could be.
So my lightbulb of the week is this: even if you think you know something inside-out, go back and learn the basics again. Time will have passed, your life will have changed and you’ll have jettisoned many useful details out of your brain in order to helpfully memorise razor-sharp lines from The Big Lebowski.
