I have a feeling that my grandson, Hayden is going to teach me a lot. He’s now seven months old and full of beans.

‘Shouldn’t that be the other way around?’ you ask.

Well actually, here’s the thing…

Something I’ve rediscovered in my quest for continual improvement as a coach is that the best way to learn things is to teach them.

Profound eh?

Think about it though – when someone asks you a question or they have a problem on which they are stuck, you help them discover the solution by asking questions around the issue.

Jeff Slayter and Kane Minkus, who are my amazing coaching gurus, describe the process as ‘Discovering a whole heap of rabbit holes and diving down them until you figure out which rabbit hole is the most important one to the client so you can keep digging’.

As you ask the questions and observe the reactions and responses, it challenges your own thinking too.

In fact, the strangest thing is that I keep finding that the very things my clients are asking me about and having problems with, seem to be a direct reflection of my own questions. Sometimes they are current issues or sometimes they are issues that I have just finished sorting out myself.

In helping my clients, I also  crystallize my own thoughts and consolidate my own strategies or direction.

You could actually conclude that we see life as a reflection of ourselves, because all of our beliefs and habits are shaped by our experiences and our familial structure, so we filter everything we experience through our own unique view of the way the world works – what we students of Neuro Linguistic Patterning call ‘Our Map of the World’.

George Faddoul, another of my great NLP mentors said that ‘We should never be astonished at anything that happens in life’.

Now that’s a deep topic for another day, but the point is that the lessons are there, just waiting for us to notice them.

What started my train of thought was seeing the sparkle of joy in Hayden’s eyes as I waved a bottle of water in front of him.

We’d just finished our Tuesday evening volleyball game and the family were all stood in the car park chatting under the floodlights.

The light was catching the water in the bottle and causing interesting reflections.

Hayden was fascinated and his little face was beaming with delight as he reached out to touch the bottle.

It was the same fascination he had when we put a mirror on the floor for him the other night.

So there you have it. Seek out enlightenment and reach out and grab it, no matter your age.

Children aren’t cluttered with all of the stuff that we worry about. They just see the joy in the simplest of things. Now if we adults could reinvent ourselves to be that way again…

Until next time, remember to look and to notice those special moments.