Free will, chance, divine intervention, choice, happenstance, coincidence, karma, or serendipity – how do you look at the lessons that have made you who you are today? Are you degreed, certified, trial & errored? Adventurous, cautious, or somewhere in between?   No matter your answers, lessons have come.  You’ve grown, you’ve stumbled, you’ve gotten back up again.   Fear can keep us frozen, that is true, at least until the pain of not moving forward outweighs the discomfort of moving forward. Forward is through, forward is past.  Forward says there is another side to get to for renewing. Consider the path, the journey you have been on.  Consider how far you have come!

Wikipedia tells us that “Lessons learned are experiences distilled from past activities that should be actively taken into account in future actions and behaviors”.   I love the phrase “should be actively taken into account”, emphasizing the “should” but not the “must”, as it is still our own choice whether we learn and/or apply our new knowledge after the lesson, or after a succession of similar lessons. Graduating to our next step of growth with our new knowledge, the true value of a lessons learned can be found.   However, it is not that uncommon to have our hardest lessons come in a series – until we can remove our obstacles, often charged with emotion, and get clarity.   It is in the period of hard lessons that we may begin questioning ourselves, believing intrinsically that our difficulties are a direct result of some mistake(s) we have made, that somehow the pain we are in we caused and should have known better. Take heed, Maya Angelou gives encouragement in this verse, and I encourage you to read it as many times over and over as needed until you internalize its meaning:

      “Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.”

We only know by learning. I wish there were another way, a less painful way, but in our humanness, seeking answers, knowledge, and growth, our lessons at times will be painful.  You’ve heard the phrase “hind sight is 20/20”, or “if I only knew then what I knew now”, right?  Do you understand with the knowledge you had at the time of the choices you made in the past, you could not know what you didn’t know? Try as we might, we cannot, with 100% certainty, predict the future, as there are variables we have absolutely no control over.  Even if we convince ourselves that we should have known, question that! How can you know what you don’t know? If, even in the hard lessons, you learn, It is time to forgive yourself and continue to move forward. 

The following definition for a “lesson learned” comes from NASA, and although scientific in nature, really calls out the necessity and value of lessons:

“A lesson learned is knowledge or understanding gained by experience. The experience may be positive, as in a successful test or mission, or negative, as in a mishap or failure… lesson must be significant in that it has a real or assumed impact on operations; valid in that is factually and technically correct; and applicable in that it identifies a specific design, process, or decision that reduces or eliminates the potential for failures and mishaps or reinforces a positive result”.

I encourage you when you are in the next season of lessons in your life to consider:

• Knowledge and understanding is gained by experience in the form of lessons.
• You can’t know what you don’t know before the lesson.
• Lessons learned serve to reduce or eliminate the potential for failures and mishaps or reinforces a positive result.
• Forward is through, forward is past.  Forward says there is another side to get to for renewing.

You’ve made it this far, keep going! 

If you need encouragement along the way, check out our Guides & Guru’s at WomenBeyondBreaking.com.