The red Ferrari zoomed past the crowd standing at the red light and stopped just past the crosswalk.
The passenger door swung open.
Out came a long, long, long leg capped off by a black stiletto with a red sole.
Following the arrival of the first leg, the second joined and carried with it a statuesque young woman wearing a very short, no, way shorter than that, twirling style skirt. (You might refer to it as a band-aide.)
After shifting the skirt into the correct position, she turned back to the car and bent down…
…to reveal absolutely everything…since there was nothing on underneath the skirt…
She rose, turned around, now grasping her clutch, and with the jaunt of a run-way model, strut into L’Avenue restaurant.
The woman I was standing next to made eye contact with me.
We both smiled, contemplating the sight we had just witnessed.
The light changed and we proceeded with our afternoon, forever to hold the imprint of the young woman in our mind.
What lessons can be learned here?
I know I’ve shared that story with you before. But I’ve been thinking about the potential lessons one can learn from an incident like that.
Possible lessons
- Underpants are optional (unlike what my mother told me)
- Underpants are mandatory (do the laundry)
- Crouching is a better method to get something on the floor of a low car
- Grab your purse before stepping out of a car to avoid those magical moments
- Teach your children well
- Ferrari Red is the perfect color red.
In the end, I decided that Ferrari Red is the perfect red.
Which brings me to the point of this story, and that is the importance of reflection and learning lessons to take forward in your life.
Failure or Lesson
You have probably heard people say there are no failures, only lessons.
Big news: This only counts if you actually learn the lessons.
If you make a note, whether mental or otherwise, that enables you to avoid the situation the next time it arises… you can learn a lesson and transfer it to other areas of your life where it can be applied.
Let’s take the cake baking example. If you bake a cake and it doesn’t work, and you decide to follow the same recipe again… did you learn anything after it didn’t work the first time?
Maybe the second time you try to follow the recipe better or you check your ingredients to make sure the baking powder hasn’t expired or you double-check the oven temperature. Maybe your cake didn’t work because you were at altitude.
Something has to be different.
Otherwise, the end result will be the same as the first.
This quality of the reflection is critical for development.
The Stone Age man had to notice that when he ate certain mushrooms, he got sick.
Or those around him had to notice and reflect upon it so as not to make the same mistake.
It’s a learn by doing or learn by not doing. Learning what works for you.
Twyla Tharp learned what worked for her to maintain her schedule.
She knew that if she wanted to work out, she had to get to the dance studio.
If she wanted to get to the dance studio on time, she had to leave her apartment and be a taxicab by a certain hour.
That is what made her day.
She may not have wanted to go through the motions, but as long as she made it into the taxicab, she was practically finished in her mind.
The hard part was getting into the taxi.
When she reflected on her success, she attributed it to getting into the taxicab because then she was out and rolling.
And you know an object in motion stays in motion.
What it takes to succeed
For me, with working out, the pivotal point is to get into the water. I have my swimsuit on, I walk to the pool, and get it.
Once I’m in, I go through my routine.
I’m not going to NOT swim since I’m already in and wet.
Then it’s the NIKE methodology: Just do it. Lap after lap.
The one thing for me is: I don’t want to disappoint my daughter, who is waiting for me to join her.
For her the trick is, she doesn’t want to disappoint me.
Together we can do it. Alone, it’s much more difficult. No one is holding your accountable.
When it’s just me, I have all sorts of excuses…
I went to bed late, I’m tired, my lower back hurts, it’s good to take a break, I can always do it later (Later NEVER happens…)…
I’ve been through all of those excuses already.
What I’ve learned is that I have ONE opportunity to swim and it’s at 7:15 am.
If it doesn’t happen then, it doesn’t happen.
And what happens when it doesn’t happen?
- I let myself down
- I let my daughter down
- I feel crappy about myself
- I feel fat
- I feel like I have no self-discipline
- I lack motivation for the rest of the day
- I lose my joie-de-vivre
- Cooper doesn’t get his exercise in (I throw the ball between laps for him)
All in all… not a good scene.
I learned this through the personal experience of NOT doing what I said I wanted to do.
And with some reflection, you can avoid the negative situation again.
That goes to show you that good things can come out of negative situations.
Benefit of Reflection
Adding reflection is a great practice.
At the end of each month, I look back on the month and see what I did that worked, what didn’t work, and what needs to change going forward.
The problem is our lives are going full speed ahead all of the time and we never take the time to think about what happened in a way to learn from it.
We tend to go from one project to the next without taking the lessons learned with us and this is a travesty because it leads to failing again and not knowing why and that it’s preventable.
This is one of the great benefits of working with a coach.
The coach can help you to reflect on why something happened and what you can do to keep that same mistake from happening again and what you can learn from that moving forward.
You don’t need to limit your reflections to negative situations.
You can learn from what does work and build on that to make it even better. You can learn to improve the process further going forward.
About the woman in the micro-mini who climbed out of the Ferrari… I learned a big lesson which I passed on to my girls, and that is point # 3 from above: it’s better to crouch down when getting something out of a low car.
I have a review sheet that I go through at the end of each month. It helps me to sort through my ideas.
If you would like a copy, email me back and I will email it to you. It’s pretty simple, but kind of cute all the same!
Have a great week!
And when in doubt, go with Ferrari red lipstick. It sure makes a statement!
Hugs,
Alicia