Wisdom Knows No Age: Embrace Lessons from Younger and Older Minds

From big business secrets to small business success. My name is Mary. This is my best friend and business partner, Jill, and we wanted to share a few things we've picked up in corporate playbooks along the way that we implement into our small business every single day. And whether you do own your own small business or you're still rocking it in corporate America, we hope this message inspires and serves you no matter what position you're in. Today we're talking about something deeply personal to our small business.

You see, we work with teen and tween girls from the age of ten to 18, and our programs don't separate people based on grades. So, for instance, our camps are from the age of ten to 13. And that riles not only the girls up, but parents as well. They're concerned about mixing ages, which is wild to us because in corporate, in college, in your life after high school and middle school, you will mix with people who are both older than you and younger than you by far. And this taught me a great lesson when I worked at my corporate job, because my direct key leader was ten years younger than me.

Ten, which is incredible and probably frightening because we have a perception, or we look at the younger leaders and we judge them. Who are they to tell me what to do when they are x amount of years younger than me? They don't have the experience, they don't have the knowledge, and we put a cap on them. What we've seen in developing and working with our girls is the younger girls who share and are vulnerable and brave and courageous in a group setting inspires the older girls to then share and open up about her own personal experiences.

So this is really important to us because we know as adults where in our life are we capping people's potential because of their age, and capping other people's potential based on their age also caps our own potential because we're keeping ourselves from valuable knowledge that we could pick up from somebody just because we have a bias around them. It's been very cool, like Jill just shared, to see the younger girls give the older girls permission and how the two of them then can relate to one another because it's wild how quickly it changes.

From ten to 13, you could be going along just fine at ten, but at eleven, your whole worldview changes because you're trying to be more self seeking. You're trying to understand more about what you want from life, what you value. And from eleven on, we start to get hardened in our experience. I have lived x amount of years. That makes me x amount better than you. Because what do you know? You're that much younger than I am. And all it is, it's a mindset shift. It's practice. Yeah. Do we always want to be right?

Sure. I know I'm not the only one, but if you can have that growth mindset, if you can just receive and be open to allowing other people to teach you lessons and bless you in a way to make you and refine you into a better person, sign me up. Whether they're ten years younger or they're ten years older, if they can help develop me as to become a better person, I'm all about it. Amen. Amen. Amen. So our challenge to you is to look around your life right now. Are you shutting somebody down because you don't believe they're worthy of teaching you something?

And if you said yes to that question, how can you be more open with them in the next week and try that on? We do not have to show up the same way every single day. You can teach an old dog new tricks, and we're challenging you to learn some new tricks. Until the next time, y'all. Bye, everyone.