Meditation411 Blog

March 2009: Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

A few of you may have heard this metaphor recently in one of my mindfulness or meditation group classes.  I find it quite insightful and wanted to pass it along to everyone else.

I was recently attending a leadership workshop that my company held for the managers in my department.  The speaker was discussing different leadership styles and related a story about a leadership style in another culture to help make a point he was trying to drive home.  Of course, when I hear things like this, I find myself extrapolating on the concept presented to areas of self awareness and meditation (as is my habit).  What’s perhaps most unfortunate is that I cannot recall at all what point the speaker himself was trying to make.

I’ll present the story as best as I can remember it.  The story revolved around certain etiquette in business situations in Japanese culture.  He described that when a manager in a company had exercised poor judgment and created a significant problem for the company or team, a meeting would be held after the issue had been resolved.  All of the company leaders would attend the meeting and the manager who had caused the problem would get up and speak.  The manager would speak about the issue, express their sorrow for having exercised the poor judgment then would share with everyone what they had learned from the experience and how to prevent the issue from happening again.  Once the manager had finished, tea would be served and everyone would drink.  From that moment forward, it was considered extremely poor etiquette for anyone to ever raise the issue ever again.

Now, of course, it would be wonderful if we could show such etiquette towards our colleagues in our own society.  But where I found this story most powerful was not in how we should forgive others, but more how we fail to forgive ourselves for our own previous mistakes.

So often we will reflect back on difficult times in our lives and rehash all the guilt and remorse around the situation that occurred afterwards.  What we are so seldom to do is forgive ourselves for our past mistakes.  What we often fail to grasp is that at that point in time we thought our actions were correct or appropriate, as I’m sure the manager in the story above may have felt.  And what we may neglect to do is to look at what we learned from the experience, hold a formal lessons-learned session, as it’s often called in the corporate world, with ourselves.  Express remorse with ourselves, take in what we learned and move ourselves forward, never to raise the issue ever again.

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