First Quarter 2025 Learning Moments

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

 — Benjamin Franklin

We are nearing the end of the first quarter of 2025 and wow, has it gone by so fast!  Each day is always remembered as a journey and I know that each of us is both thriving and surviving at this point of the year.  I will be fully vulnerable in that my ratio of surviving over thriving lately has been inconsistent and not in a great way.  I try my hardest each day to be where my feet are always and avoid looking ahead too much, but life does happen!  Being so early in the year, I wanted to challenge you all to take a moment (it can be five minutes, 20 minutes, a half day, or whatever your preference is) to look backwards and appreciate what you’ve learned during Q1 2025.  

As you attempt to carve out time for this exercise, I wanted to offer three insights to help you dig deep and embrace your pure learning moments from the past three months.  

1. What are you learning most about yourself? - I always like to start my reflections by leaning into my own skills and abilities, including key learning moments.  Where did you find that you enjoyed life the most (either personally and professionally) this past quarter and what are 2-3 things that you’re most proud of?  As you transfer those thoughts from your mind to officially putting them on paper, also reflect on what were your goals for the past three months and how can you measure your success based on those goals?  It may be too early to measure, however, you can always self-reflect and pivot your goals as needed.  As you think over the above questions, be kind to yourself always and try as hard as you can to embrace a growth mindset.  You’ll be able to reflect more fully and genuinely by truly leaning into your most special thoughts, feelings, and experiences!

2. What are you learning most about others? - We often say that two is better than one and I'm a huge proponent of social human connection (both in-person and virtually).  When we remember back to our most challenging personal or professional moments in life, we leaned on others to help us through the journey and benefited from learning things as others helped us.  Whether you’ve taken on a new work project, joined a social/activity group outside of work, or volunteered for your favorite charity over the past three months, take another moment and recall what you learned from the people you interacted with the most and who inspired you to greatness, success, and humility.  Every task in life informs our future knowledge and builds our set of core values.  As you lean into what you most learned from others recently, make sure to pay your inspiration forward so others can in turn learn from you in the future.  We all benefit when we constantly learn and we can embrace new learning moments through every interaction each day!

3. What are you most learning about life? - Your life and the lives of others is changing day by day, and sometimes minute by minute.  The one absolute in life is that everything constantly changes.  If you stand still too long, life will bump you along in another direction and may leave you behind if you don’t keep up.  We are all going through different, similar, and potentially challenging seasons of life.  They get better, worse, and improve over time, however, they can change at any moment.  Take the full time you need as you reflect on this question to be present, enjoy the time you have with others, and embrace the opportunity to become truly connected to life and the world around you.  There are learning opportunities from complete strangers, the people you meet as you walk through a typical day in life, and everyone loves to share their experiences.  If you don’t feel like you’ve learned about life during Q1 2025, take a walk, start a conversation with a stranger, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or start up a conversation with someone at your local gym or grocery store.  It’s never a requirement to fully learn everything so far this year and again, be kind to yourself on your learning opportunities.  They always say life comes at you fast and I fully believe that you can learn through daily, weekly, and monthly life experiences!

If you’ve made it this far, I recognize I gave you a lot of questions to consider outside of the original three questions above.  I promise if you take the time needed on your end (and truly take your time, no need to wrap this up any time soon), you will find beauty in the learning moments of learning about yourself, learning about others, and learning about life!

Keep growing and know that I truly believe in you always!

• Ryan