Experience Isn't the Teacher.

Read Time: ~3 Minutes

At the virtual launch of my book Lead. Manage. WIN!, someone asked a question I wasn't expecting.

Not because it was hard. Because it was honest.

He asked: "What did YOU learn most from writing this book?"

I paused. Because the real answer wasn't a framework or a chapter title. It was something more personal than that.

I told him: Writing this book made me relive years of lessons. Some I had built my career on. And some I had forgotten.

That last part gave me internal pause.

How does a person forget what they learned the hard way?

The Problem with Experience Alone

Here's something I heard years ago and have said for many years myself, and writing this book proved it all over again:

Experience isn't a good teacher. Evaluated experience is the good teacher.

Most people have no shortage of experience. They've managed people, handled conflict, made hard calls, and survived enough chaos to fill a book. Literally.

But experience without reflection is just time passing. You collect years, not wisdom. You accumulate scar tissue, not insight.

The people I've worked with who struggle the most aren't lacking experience. They're lacking the habit of evaluating it.

The Lesson I Had Forgotten

When I went back through my own story to write this book, one lesson hit me harder than I expected.

Early in my career, I was task-driven. Get it done. Hit the numbers. Fix the problem. I was good at it. And that competence quietly became a liability.

Because I wasn’t seeking to understand the people around me. I assumed I already knew their intent. I assumed I had the answer. I assumed that if something wasn't working, I could see why without asking.

That assumption cost me. In relationships. In results. In trust I didn't even know I was losing.

Along the way, a mentor taught a new mindset. To ask before I concluded. To listen before I diagnosed. To seek understanding rather than confirmation of what I already thought I knew.

That mentality served me really well for MANY years.

But then I did what we all do, I got busy. I remembered some of the tools that surrounded this concept, and used them often, but I forgot the importance of the deeper part of that lesson.

Writing this book made me remember that seeking to understand isn't just about asking good questions. Seeking to understand is a mentality that permeates into every part of my demeanor. The mentality makes the questions even more effective.

The Question Worth Asking Yourself

If you've been a supervisor for any length of time, you've learned things. Hard things. Things that changed how you showed up for your team.

My question for you is this: Are you still practicing those lessons? Or have you gotten so busy running your business, leading your own team, that the wisdom you earned the hard way is buried somewhere under the next deadline?

Seeking to understand isn't a soft skill. It's a discipline. It's the choice to ask a question before you make an assumption. To treat people like they have context you might not have just yet. Because statistically speaking, they do.

The supervisors who struggle the most in the operations environments I work in aren't bad people. They're just running on autopilot. Reacting. Assuming. Moving fast.

Sound familiar?

What Evaluated Experience Actually Looks Like

Writing Lead. Manage. WIN! was, for me, an act of evaluated experience. It forced me to stop and ask: What did I actually learn? What do I believe now that I didn't believe before? What do I wish someone had handed me when I first became a supervisor?

That process surfaced the deeper lesson about seeking to understand more powerfully than any single moment in my life could have.

You don't have to write a book to do this work. But you do have to stop.

Stop and ask yourself: When was the last time I sought to understand rather than assumed I already did?

The answer might surprise you. It surprised me.

And that's exactly why I wrote the book.