Your Scars Are Your Qualifications
Like many people, I have tertiary qualifications from University study. In my case, I have a science degree, a teaching diploma, and a psychology graduate diploma.
But it isn't where most of what I know actually comes from.
What I actually know comes from raising a family with my ex-wife and seeing the children grow in unexpected ways.
It comes from that 29-year marriage ending.
It comes from travelling to 30 countries around the world and seeing how others live and experience their lives. Including the very poor in some slums.
It comes from spending 10 years in radio and 25 years speaking, training and coaching on confidence, communication and leadership.
It comes from watching a new partner get a breast cancer diagnosis four weeks after we got together, and from finding out what "in sickness and in health" means when you've barely had time to learn each other's coffee order.
None of that was theoretical. Nobody can Google their way to knowing what it actually feels like when your old identity has gone and the new one hasn't turned up yet.
That kind of knowing only comes from having been in it.
From the scars you’ve received.
And when I’ve sat across from someone at a cafe, listening, asking questions, and offering support, interestingly the most useful ideas and advice have not come from my knowledge or corporate experience. They’ve come from my own lessons resulting from lived experiences.
That's where the true value is.
It’s what others actually want to hear. Because many of them feel alone or discouraged or disconnected. Or just anxious.
Parker J Palmer, one off my favourite authors, puts it this way:
“The best teachers don’t teach out of what they know. They teach out of who they are.”
Here's a truth about life’s scars: they're not just evidence that something hurt. They're proof you found a way through.
And the particular shape of your scars — how you lost an investment, your divorce, your redundancy, your diagnosis, your falling out with a faith or a family or a version of yourself — is exactly the terrain someone else is about to enter for the first time, frightened, with no map.
They don't need another expert reciting theory at them. They need someone who's actually been in the dark and found the door. You already are that person for someone, whether you've realised it yet or not.
Your failures taught you things your successes never could.
That's not a consolation prize.
That's the qualification.
Use it to do good in the world.
