There is no expiration date

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One of my clients had to pull out of our coaching engagement. We’d done some assessments, which is where I always start so we can get a jumpstart on getting to know each other.  We’d been through the assessments and she had learned some things about herself that she hadn’t thought about before. She had also learned some new ways to describe herself and then she had to pull out of coaching. She was concerned about stopping and picking up later.

She said that she’d hate to think that she had wasted all that time on coaching because she was ready to make a change and now she couldn’t. My first thought was, “Hey, there’s no expiration date on what you’ve learned!” There is no expiration date on what you learn explicitly, like through a career coach. There’s no expiration date on what you’ve learned in a job or in life.

Think about it, those things you’ve learned about yourself never go away. You will just find yourself using them later in your life. It will also inform what you do next, because once you’ve learned something new about yourself, you don’t forget it. You might not use it yet, but you do not forget it.

One of my favorite clients is an amazing young man. He likes to work, is a good worker - totally self-effacing. He is in his twenties, and has been a hockey referee since he was 16 years old! 16!! Now, I’m from the South and we have hockey down here, but not much. But I’ve been to games and I know what a hockey game looks like – all those guys, skating on the ice, really fast – and they fight!! And who breaks up the fights? The referees! So, here’s this young man, skating around on the ice himself, following the game, calling the game, breaking up fights – and he is in charge of the situation – he can keep track of everything that’s going on on the ice! It blows my mind every time I think of it!!

When I told him that I could not imagine keeping up with all that while moving around on the ice, he goes “Oh, I never thought about it that way! Wow!” So he found a job that he loves, and he’ll never forget what he learned about himself. He won’t forget how to describe his crazy amazing skills!

This keeps happening in everyone’s life. Let’s go back to my client who had to drop coaching. Months later she emailed me asking if I’d look at her LinkedIn profile. Of course, I did. And she had used everything we had gone over in her assessments to create a fabulous LinkedIn profile, including her headline and summary. I couldn’t resist telling her “I told you that there’s no expiration date on the work we did! You never know when you will use it. The learning process is never wasted.”

What have you learned lately that has no expiration date? Please post your answer in the comments below!

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Becky

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