Make your learning compelling. Make it compelling for you. You are the first listener and student of your teachings. When you listen well, the rest of the world wants to come and listen too.

A great Rabbi once said “we tell stories to our children to put them to sleep. We tell stories to adults to wake them up.” In our leadership seminars and retreats we often practice the “From you I have learned” exercise. Each participant tells a story about a person that has had a formative impression on them. When they finish telling the story they end with saying – and so from (this person) I have learned about courage/ how to say no / how to pick myself up and have another go / how to forgive and let go, and so on. People tell stories about a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a manager or a friend. It’s a powerful exercise because people learn to distill and articulate a specific learning from their experience. They learn even more from each other’s stories. As we work through this life-centering-stories exercise, people are surprised to see the value that lives inside the significant stories of their lives. They find new wisdom is available to them when they learn to reframe their experiences and bring them up to date and harvest a new meaning.

Make the learning interesting, inspiring, compelling. This is how you forward your experience into further development and growth. The radium is always buried deep in the pitchblende. Charisma joins you when you process enough pitchblende to find the radium inside you.

© Aviv Shahar