On Experience

Geoff McDonald

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Entrepreneurship

On Experience is a series of recorded conversations exploring how experience shapes the way we see and respond to situations. Through reflective dialogue with thoughtful practitioners, the series examines where experience helps us, where it limits us, and what wisdom looks like in a rapidly changing world.

1d ago

Why Helping Begins with Seeing with Linda Gidlund

For most of us, helping means giving advice, solving problems or having the right answers. But what if helping begins somewhere else? In this conversation, educator, facilitator and coach Linda Gidlund reflects on a lifetime of learning, community and service. Together we explore how experience changes the way we see other people, and why the best helpers often notice things the rest of us miss. If you've ever wondered why some people have a remarkable ability to put others at ease, ask the right question or see potential where others don't, I think you'll enjoy this conversation. What good helpers notice may change the way you think about helping.
Jul 8

The Doctor Who Stopped Trying to Heal with Dr Patterson Stark

What if the most important lesson a doctor learns is that they can't heal people? After fifty years in healthcare, Dr Patterson Stark reached a conclusion that completely changed the way he practised medicine. It wasn't a new treatment or a breakthrough discovery. It was a shift in how he understood his own role. In this conversation, we explore how a life-threatening cancer diagnosis transformed Patterson from someone trying to fix people into someone helping people heal themselves. Along the way, we discuss why knowledge isn't enough, the gap between knowing and doing, and how experience quietly reshapes not just what we know, but who we become. This isn't a conversation about medical advice. It's a conversation about how experience changes the practitioner.
Jun 24

The Things We Learn to See with Philippe Guichard

Industrial designer Philippe Guichard has spent more than thirty years designing products, businesses and experiences. But this conversation isn't really about design, it’s about perception. And, how over time, experience changes what we notice. In this conversation, Philippe reflects on the shift from ego to service, how culture shapes design, why observation comes before intervention, and how experience gradually teaches us to see things that others often miss. The longer I explore experience, the more I wonder whether expertise is less about accumulating knowledge and more about learning what to pay attention to. This conversation explores that possibility.
Jun 10

Your Experience Has a Use-By Date with Mark Molony

A few days after our first conversation, Mark Molony got back in touch with a simple message: “I’ve had some more thoughts.” So we reconvened to continue exploring a deceptively simple question: What is experience? What followed opened up a deeper conversation about wisdom, memory, beginner’s mind, and why some of the most experienced people are also the most willing to say: “I don’t know.” We explore why experience may have a use-by date, how painful experiences shape us, and why the most useful response in uncertain situations may be: “I don’t know. Let’s experiment.” If you’ve built a career on your experience, this conversation offers a thoughtful question: Which parts of your experience are still serving you… and which may no longer apply?
May 27

Experience and the Space Before Reaction with Mark Molony

In this conversation, mindfulness teacher Mark Molony and I explore a deceptively simple question: How does experience shape the way we see situations? What began as a discussion about mindfulness quickly became something deeper: Why experienced practitioners often slow down rather than speed upHow expertise can quietly harden into an assumptionThe difference between reaction and awarenessAnd why experience can both help us… and mislead usAlong the way, we discuss: practice wisdom, ego, AI, intuition, judgment, relationships, and the subtle space between noticing something and reacting to it. One idea stayed with me long after the conversation ended: Perhaps mature experience isn’t about becoming more certain… but becoming more aware of how quickly certainty appears.
May 27

Why Experience Can Stop You Seeing Clearly with Michael Henderson

This is a recorded conversation with Michael Henderson (https://www.culturesatwork.com/), a corporate anthropologist who has spent over 30 years observing organisational culture, human behaviour, and the patterns that shape how people work together. Rather than focusing on frameworks or solutions, this conversation explores something more fundamental: how experience shapes what we notice… how it influences the way we interpret situations… and what happens when that interpretation no longer quite fits. Along the way, we touch on: • The difference between observing and assuming • How experience can both sharpen and distort judgment • Moments where we realise we may have been seeing something incorrectly • How identity is tied to what we believe we know • And the role of questions in returning us to what is actually happening There is no fixed structure to the conversation. It unfolds as an exploration, moving between ideas, examples, and reflections as they emerge. You are listening in on that process.
May 27

Why These Conversations Exist - On Experience

Recently, I realised a flaw in the way I work. I spend too much time alone thinking about things and not enough in conversation with other people. This is a problem because a lot of my good ideas come from interacting with others. They either say something interesting or I surprise myself by what I say. That’s part of what led to On Experience. After years of making videos about expertise, authority, meaningful work and experience, I started realising the most important ideas were often emerging between the polished answers rather than inside them. This is a series of open conversations. It’s not an interview or a performance. It’s more about exploration - two people thinking out loud. Season One begins with a question that I’m thinking about a lot right now: How does authority actually form? And I’m not talking about online authority or algorithms, but about people. Why do we listen to some people and not others? And how can I build authority for myself? This short introduction opens the door into that inquiry, why I created it and what is already showing up in the first two conversations with guests, including anthropologist Michael Henderson and mindfulness teacher Mark Molony.

7 Episodes

On Experience is a series of recorded conversations exploring how experience shapes the way we see and respond to situations. Through reflective dialogue with thoughtful practitioners, the series examines where experience helps us, where it limits us, and what wisdom looks like in a rapidly changing world.

Creator

Geoff McDonald
Years Active

2026
Episodes

7
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Geoff McDonald 2026
Show Website

On Experience