The best experiences offer great learning opportunities...but you have to learn these lessons yourself.

As a charter member of the 'I Hate Clichés Club'

I'm always happy to deny the truth of a cliché whenever I can.

So it gives me great pleasure to say that the cliché...'Experience Is The Best Teacher'...is simply not true.

Defining The Terms

By definition an experience is 'encountering or undergoing something'...perhaps encountering bad weather on vacation...or undergoing a slow market.

Similarly, by definition, teaching is 'giving instruction' and a teacher is 'an instructor or someone who gives instruction.'

Logically, and event simply cannot 'give instruction'.

Learning however is a totally different experience.

Learning is...'acquiring knowledge or skill by study, instruction, or experience.'

A Lesson Not Learned

We all know people who have experienced negative events but not learning from the event.

Many years a family I know had a serious problem arise on Halloween.

As they were distributing candy at their front door, a young trick-or-treater ran across their lawn and fell over some decorative brick work surrounding a tree.

Although she had cut her leg, after some TLC, first aid and extra candy, she was able to continue her rounds.

A month or so after the incident, the girl's parents sued the family for the injuries that their daughter had sustained.

The resulting court action and settlement was incredibly stressful for the family...definitely something the never wanted to experience again.

Several years after the court action was settled, the family moved to a new home, with a swimming pool. Not only was no one in the family a good swimmer, no one had ever taken any swimming or water safety lessons.

Their swimming pool had more hazards than safety features.

As a former swimming & water safety instructor, I felt a responsibility to warn them of the hazards.

When I pointed out the problems, their response was polite laughter....as if I had told a moderately funny story.

When I tried to relate the problems arising from the Halloween fall to the potential of a pool accident...the laughter was much louder and more intense.

They thought it was hilarious that I was trying to relate a dry land problem at another house to potential problems at a swimming pool at this house.

To them, the Halloween fall was an isolated issue...not relevant to anything else.

The Lesson

The point I was trying to make with these people is that we can and should learn from our experiences.

From my perspective, the Halloween fall was less about bricks on a lawn than it was about a safety hazard...and the consequences of some one being injured as a result of this hazard.

The lesson from the unlearned lesson: just because we encounter something...the Halloween fall...or undergo something...the resulting court action...the experience does not automatically teach us anything.

For us to learn from any experience...we must evaluate what happened and what conclusions we can draw from this evaluation.

The conclusions of course will help us repeat actions that led to positive outcomes and avoid those that led to negative results.

Don't expect your experiences to automatically teach you what you need to know...you have to initiate the learning yourself.