I am aware of many lessons and skills I have learned in life and their value to me. 

Certain of these include the ability to swim, ride a bicycle and prepare food.  I can’t imagine life without these skills and now that I have them, I would never want to go back to a time when I lacked these abilities. 

As I get older, it would be natural to think that I would yearn to be young again, but the beauty of getting older is that you know what it means to be young and what you might not yet know and how that could actually make life worse than it is when you are older. 

I hope that makes some sense.  We learn, we get to apply our lessons and then we get to realize how life has become easier due to applying the lessons. 

Now that I know better, I can visualise going back to how life was when I did not know better.  I can remind myself what life was like.  The mistakes I made, the pain I caused, the things I damaged or broke and the frustration I experienced. 

Go back? No thank you! 

Personal, team and organisational development initiatives might fail when they don’t create the before and after.  The before you knew and the after you implemented the lesson. 

Without the ability to reflect on how life has got better, the commitment to continue along the path, as opposed to slipping back, could be missing. 

We teach so many valuable things in our programmes, plenty of little tricks of the trade that make working life more effective and enjoyable.  Those who try and win know the value and don’t regress.  Those that do not, will never know.

When I facilitate our Wired to Influence programme, I work with people for a total of 48 hours.  Compare 48 to 8’760 hours in a year, and you’ll see that it isn’t a lot of time in the bigger scheme of things. 

But still people will think that it is too much time to commit to as they are just so busy.

48 hours is enough to learn a number of very powerful lessons.  The kind of lessons that change lives. 

Learning to ride a bicycle changed my life, learning how to create some capacity in your day, to let go, to aim higher, to stop blaming might just change yours.

I believe that any one of our references will say that they will never want to go back to the days before they started implementing Ripple and making Ripple their operating philosophy whether it be personally, in their team or for their company.

By Louis Gerke

Development Facilitator – The Ripple Effect