Categories: On Experience

When Experience Works Against You with Mark Molony

When Mark Molony walked into his first day as a social worker, he thought his training had prepared him for anything. Then a grieving widow said six words and every assumption he had fell apart.

In this extract from our On Experience conversation, Mark, now a Mindfulness Teacher, exposes the insight that the most dangerous moment for any experienced professional is when you think you’ve seen it all – because that’s exactly when your expertise stops helping and starts blinding you. If you’re a self-employed professional who sometimes leans on experience as a shortcut, this is the wake-up call.

The On Experience Transcript

“It was my first day in social work. And, I remember it was to do with a grief reaction of a lady whose husband had died. And, the emergency director of the hospital I was working with came in, and he said, “I’m gonna tell this lady that her husband’s died suddenly, and then it’s over to you. You do your grief stuff. We’ll organize that her husband’s viewable in the emergency department and move along.”

And, you know, new graduate, no real experience, but I had all this training that I’d had as a student. In emergencies, I knew what to do, and I was sitting there thinking, “Oh, yeah, I know what to do here.”

I was thinking about crisis and sudden shock and all these other theories that were coming in, empathising, and all these wonderful things that occurred to me as part of this experience that I’d had as a young social worker.

Anyway, the medical director came in, and he was good to his word. He said to her, “Mrs Bloggs, I’m terribly sorry, your husband’s died suddenly. There was not much we could do.” He explained the medical part of it, then basically walked out of my office and left her with me.

And, I was watching her, and I thought, “Right.” So I did my best empathy, “This must be so shocking and terrible for you. I can’t even imagine what would be going on for you.”

And, she looked at me, and she looked out the window, and then she looked at me again and she said, “I’m glad the old bastard’s gone.”

And so that was my experience, day one of social work in a major hospital.

It’s a compelling story, but the issue became how to manage the staff who were so annoyed that this lady didn’t really care about her husband. And there was a reason why, and a very reasonable reason why she didn’t care about him.

But, that in a way always changed me from day one about this idea about experience, how you view experience.

And, I started coining the phrase, “Always expect the unexpected.”

Right? And some 30 years later, or whatever it worked out to be when I started doing mindfulness practice, these things started to mesh together rather nicely. Um, the reality of life is that the unexpected shows up. So experience can be helpful, but sometimes it can be decidedly unhelpful. And so it’s knowing, having an awareness to know when to apply experience and how to apply it and not being wedded to your experience…”