Tag: experience

How to Share Insight

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“We teach each other things. People take this for granted, but it’s actually unbelievable.” – Nicholas Christakis

Last weekend, my five-year-old son got two moon balls. They are cratered like the moon and bounce like they are going to leave this atmosphere. That bounce combined with my son’s determination to hit as if he’s aiming for the Green Monster at Fenway Park meant we lost both balls in pretty short order.

He was bummed when we lost the first… and really sad when we lost the second. I sat next to him on the steps and asked, “Do you want to know what I know about being sad.”

“No,” he replied.

It’s all about timing, isn’t it? 🙂 It is one of the keys about sharing insight that I talk with customer experience strategist Karl Baisch about on the How to Share Podcast.

Nicholas Christakis, sociologist from Yale, has this really hopeful view of humans based on our ability to interact and cooperate with others. He says, “We teach each other things. People take this for granted, but it’s actually unbelievable.”

In this episode of ‘How to Share’, Karl and I explore the nuances of how we teach each other things and share insights effectively. We discuss the importance of asking the right questions, the challenges of navigating data, and the significance of context in delivering actionable insights. Our conversation also touches on parenting and how to instill curiosity and critical thinking in children, drawing parallels between data synthesis and everyday experiences.

Here are some takeaways from our conversation:

  • We teach each other things.
  • Real change happens when there’s enough curiosity.
  • Groups have to want an answer to hear it.
  • You gotta share your work product somewhere.
  • You want to avoid analysis paralysis.
  • How do you synthesize it into a story?
  • Insights should breathe new energy and life into anything.
  • You have to contextualize it.
  • You have to ask the right questions.

This is a great episode about the practice of creating insight. Join us as we dig into the who, what, when, where, how and of creating and sharing a-ha moments!

Here’s a short clip from our episode to give you a taste of the great conversation with the bright and engaging Karl Baisch:

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The Power of Looking At Your Life Through a New Lens – The Life of Try: Personal growth, one try at a time.

How do the stories we inherit from our families shape who we become—and how can we rewrite those stories with more compassion, courage, and purpose?In this episode of The Life of Try, Wynne Leon talks with Jennifer Griffith, author of Both Sides of Then and host of the podcast About Your Mother, about inherited family stories, hidden shame, resilience, motherhood, memoir writing, and the healing power of bringing secrets into the light.Jennifer shares how learning her mother’s story changed the way she understood her own identity, why family history can influence the way we parent and see ourselves, and how her LENS framework helps people revisit old narratives, look at them from a new perspective, and use those stories for good.This thoughtful conversation explores family secrets, legacy, forgiveness, generational stories, personal growth, writing a memoir, and what it means to keep trying when a story is still unfolding.Key Takeaways:- We all inherit stories—and they shape how we see ourselves.Jennifer reminds us that family history, secrets, wounds, and even everyday phrases from our parents can quietly influence our identity, choices, and relationships.- Seeing our parents as people can create compassion and clarity.When we understand the experiences, pain, and resilience that shaped our parents, we can better understand ourselves—and begin to loosen the grip of old assumptions.- Shame loses power when it is brought into the light.Family secrets can create distance, but honest storytelling—shared with care and appropriate boundaries—can create healing, connection, and freedom.- A new lens can help us rewrite old narratives.Jennifer’s LENS framework encourages us to listen to the stories we repeat, engage with them, narrate them from multiple perspectives, and step out of them so we can use them for good.- Trying again often means slowing down and letting the work become ready.- Jennifer’s story about being told “you’re not ready” became a powerful lesson in patience, humility, and the creative courage required to keep going.📘 Order Both Sides of Then: Finding Love After Abandonment: 🌐 Show notes and more inspiration: https://wynneleon.com🔔 Subscribe to The Life of Try for more conversations on:personal growth, creativity, reinvention, resilience, writing, and mindset.📌 Subscribe to The Life of Try on YouTube & Stay Updated: → https://www.youtube.com/@thelifeoftry?sub_confirmation=1ABOUT MEHi, I’m Wynne Leon — host of The Life of Try, a personal growth and self-improvement podcast exploring resilience, reinvention, uncertainty, and the courage to keep trying.Through thoughtful interviews, reflective conversations, and real-life stories, I share insights to help you navigate change, get unstuck, and move forward with more intention.🌍 Website: https://wynneleon.com━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🎥 Watch NextHow to Tell Relatable StoriesThe Quiet Mindset Shifts that Changes Everything | Mindfulness & Personal Growth with Joseph SchmidtHow to Embrace What Makes You Different | Finding Your Purpose with Kym Gordon Moore
  1. The Power of Looking At Your Life Through a New Lens
  2. How To Tell Relatable Stories About Life
  3. Why Second Place Might Be Preparation, Not Failure
  4. When Your Plan Falls Apart | How to Stay Resilient and Keep Trying
  5. Barbara Nickless on A Voice In The Dark, Online Gaming and The Power of Story

Links for this episode:

Karl Baisch on LinkedIn

Learning From Experience

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“Turn your wounds into wisdom.” – Oprah Winfrey

Ten years ago (I know because I found the picture), I was walking my dog on a busy neighborhood street and he found a stuffed animal. A cute little tiger with a soft white belly and my dog proudly picked it up and carried it all the way home until he could stow it away on one of his dog blankets.

While I didn’t think much of it at the time, I now realize with great horror that it likely was some child’s precious stuffy that got tossed out of a car in a moment of great emotion. I’ll never actually know if the family went to look for it but by allowing my dog to carry it home, we certainly made it unfindable.

Before bed, my 6-year-old daughter and I take turns reading. She practices her reading skills and then I read a few pages of something longer we are working on. We just finished J.K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig in which a child loses his most precious friend, a stuffy that his step-sister throws out the window in a moment of rage. The child then takes a precarious Christmas Eve trip to the Land of the Lost to try to retrieve it. In J.K. Rowling’s incredibly imaginative tale, there are several places the things we lose go – Mislaid (think eyeglasses), Disposable (e.g. batteries), Bother-Its-Gone (that poem you penned on the back of a napkin), The Wastes of the Unlamented (the tchotchke you never wanted to buy in the first place), The City of the Missed (where we meet someone’s Principles) and The Island of the Beloved (where Santa lives).

In the story, she includes not only things that we lose like a diamond earring but also the intangibles – the bad habits, the tendency to bully, our pretenses, ambition, power and hope. It is so incredibly insightful that it is one of those books that was a pleasure for me to read as much as my daughter to listen to.

Which brings me back to the stuffy I let my dog take home. Often it’s only through experience that we can relate to someone else’s pain. This is the case now that I realize that stuffy was likely a well-loved object of a kid’s affection. Fortunately, my kids have not (yet) thrown a stuffy out the car window, but I have spent many fretful moments in a full sweat looking for the item that we just HAVE TO HAVE before going to sleep.

Suffering, as much as we might not like it, helps us to know each other.

The Verdict

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“Integrity is the ability to listen to a place inside oneself that doesn’t change, even though the life that carries it may change.” – Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man

Elizabeth Holmes, the tech entrepreneur and founder of Theranos whose trial has fascinated me for the last 4 months, was found guilty on 4 counts of fraud and conspiracy for lying to investors and not guilty on 4 counts. The jury was hung on 3 counts.

As I’ve written about this, I realized that it’s triggered my past experiences with money in tech and the question of how to develop character when people are throwing money at you. Listening to the jury’s decision, I don’t disagree with their findings but I’m flooded with empathy for her.

That’s probably because I can relate in a very small way to her experiences. The specific incident I’m thinking of was in 2007 when my two business partners (one of whom was my husband) and I were buying a small office building for our little company of 19 people to use as an office.

On the Friday before the closing, the bank realized that we all had one more paper to sign – a personal guarantee of the bank loan. It had to be received by Monday and my husband and the other business partner were traveling to a client’s wine tasting weekend. My husband wanted me to forge our other business partner’s signature on the document. The other business partner wanted me to forge his signature on the document. Neither of them wanted to be bothered to find a FedEx office from which to overnight the document in question.

I felt immense pressure to do it. The two of them, my husband and our other partner had made many business and personnel decisions that I didn’t agree with and I thought I could insulate myself by just focusing on my part of the business. But this was over the top. I held my ground after repeated phone calls and texts and refused to do it. There was no way I was going to forge a signature on a personal guarantee for a bank loan.

Two years later after the market crashed in 2008 and real estate prices dropped significantly so that the valuation of the building was under water, the bank put the loan into a special assets group. We had never missed a payment (and thankfully never did) but they felt the loan deserved additional scrutiny. Fortunately, my business partners had eventually figured out how to FedEx the personal guarantee document so it was on file.

By this time both the business partnership and my marriage had fallen apart so I was the one handling all the details. To say I was so relieved I didn’t forge that signature is an understatement. I shepherded the building through those tough years until we could sell it for what we bought it for and gratefully walked away.

But all this happened when I was almost 40-years-old and had almost 20 years of business experience both working for others and for myself. I doubted myself. I felt the huge pressure. I thought it would have been so much easier to not have the values I was raised with. I’m not so sure I would have been able to hold out to what these guys said was “business as usual” had I been in my 20’s like Elizabeth Holmes.

We don’t often get to see what we are able to avoid when we don’t do something risky. In this case I did and now with the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, I’m reminded of it again. If it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do, don’t do it. It doesn’t matter if someone tells you it’s how it’s done or makes it seem like how sophisticated and experienced people act. Thanks for raising me with these values, Mom and Dad!

(featured photo by Pexels)