Once we take the step to share our experience, we'll find that spontaneous laughter begins before we even get into our story. Most of us have been there. In our favorite activities, we've learned from our experiences. In sharing our stories with each other, we're also doing important work; we're using our experiences to develop and encourage trusted friendships. Friendships based on a commonality of life experiences that say we are human beings.
When these experiences occur within the context of a group of people who ordinarily work together, the entire group is enriched and enlivened by an individual's experience. People in the group know the person and they know the environment. They can easily say that sounds like me; missing the opportunity of a lifetime while I'm caught up in some tangled mess. The group members take what they might construe as a negative experience and failure. They transform the meaning of that experience into one that is positive and filled with learning for the entire group. In a relaxed setting the participants begin to laugh at themselves as they realize that any of them could have wound up in similar tangles-facing forward-even after they had made a decent cast. They can take their fishing experiences and generalize from these experiences to other areas of their lives. < previous - next >