Experience is a complicated psychological issue that cannot be taken lightly if anyone wants to get the best out of people.
Human beings are by their nature experience beings. They are what they are because of what they have been through.
I know that this might be difficult for you dear reader to stomach because most of us believe strongly that we have made conscious choices and we are where we are because of our choices and our intelligence.
We, therefore, take full responsibility for our actions because we chose what we chose. When we say we are what we are because of our experience some people hear us to be saying they are not in control of their choices.
Stephen Covey, the writer of one of the most read books of our time, The Seven habits of Highly Effective People says, “We are in control of choices, but certainly not in control of the consequences of our choices.”
I am not sure I agree with him anymore after my reading about experiences and lived experiences in particular. May his dear soul rest in peace.
I am of the understanding that we are not in control of our choices, but experience is, because we are products of experience. That is why it was easy for Jesus to pray for his killers and say, “Forgive them Lord, because they do not know what they are doing.”
He was referring to a group of men who killed him because of their lived experience. How else does one explain their “choice” of Barrabas and not Jesus? A man who had healed the sick and raised the dead.
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If you read Jagadish Vasudev, now known as Sadguru’s book, Karma; A Yogi’s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny, one thing that immediately hits you is that if one has to craft their destiny, it means that if they do not do so, someone else will and I put it to you that, that someone is, experience.
A child is born a clean slate and free from societal influences and most children are free to do and say things adults would find anathema.
I have personally experienced situations where a child makes every adult want to hide or disappear when they say things adults fear to say because of experience.
Kids are born naked and run around for years with no shame like Adam and Eve in the Bible. They were naked and not afraid before experience happened and experience happened, they hid like little kids covering their faces when they are ashamed.
All of us are shaped by experience and imagine living in a family with a strict mother who cracks the whip with reckless abandon because she comes from that kind of background where their own primary carers did that to get discipline out of their kids.
So, just to give you an idea of what experience can do, this mother comes back home to find a broken water glass lying on the floor.
She is worked up by the time she gets to her kids and wants to know who did it.
She learns that it was her older daughter and lands on her with a couple of lashes while the younger daughter watches with fear as her sister weeps and asks for mercy.
She shouts at her and tells her never to do it again. What do you think happens to the younger sister the following day when a glass slips out of her hands and falls on the floor broken?
Yes, she is scared to death and starts scheming around not getting caught.
What is that called by the way when a person decides to hide the truth? Lying, dishonesty, no integrity and so on and son.
Do you see how experience shapes a person as they grow up?
How things like integrity are lost as we grow up in some instances, of course, because there are some environments that inculcate a different value system based on the way they make their children experience life and specific events.
This child, first time in her life has to throw honesty to the wind and think about her own survival and she will not feel guilty at all about this but maybe might even have a sense of achievement having outwitted a woman, her mother, whose temper, and sense of discipline is dangerous to her.
Must she be whipped to death by her mother for a glass of water? Really?
She does not think so and does not even feel so. All she feels is fear and the fear of death. She feels her mother is up to no good and might kill her in the process.
Remember she witnessed that level of cruelty when her mother wanted to kill her sister. She would be foolish to expose herself to death just like that.
If she wins and no one finds out, then she has discovered a survival tactic that if she does wrong, she must escape by finding ways of not being found out.
And that particular day her mother actually brought her some sweets and she felt a sense of being loved and belonging.
In her heart, that was a big achievement because as a child her need for being loved by her mother is up there.
So, she lost nothing that day but gained more.
Experience then shaped this child who later has to seek employment and join a workforce and a company with a tight and strict code of conduct.
You see, there she is face to face with her mother. By now, mama rests in peace in her grave, but left behind an experienced child who knows how to avoid trouble, punishment and above all, death.
The organisation even advertised the job she got and said that they wanted someone with five years of experience in a similar position.
She had all the experience they wanted, and it did not even start at her previous job but at home with mom.
She learnt that human beings are up to no good and can kill you if you do not tell the truth and if that was true about her mother, what more about strangers called supervisors and managers in the workplace?
So poor child, who is now an employee comes to work fully equipped to survive and avoid trouble and this means that she cannot give out her best because even in meetings when she thinks that her manager does not like her idea, she avoids trouble by just nodding her head in agreement and might even argue with anyone who wants to differ with her manager just to make sure that she does not lose her “sweets” from mama.
It is a whole thread starting with mama whipping her sister and going right up to a management meeting.
Experience, after all, is not the best teacher. Well, one may argue that it still is the best teacher whether it is teaching good or bad because whatever it teaches sticks.
- *Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery, and mental fitness. He works for a Zimbabwean company as human capital executive, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for several blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management. He can be contacted on [email protected]
