One Small Thing Podcast

In a recent episode of One Small Thing, I shared a childhood memory about stinging nettles.

When I was growing up, my uncle had a farm with a river running through it. Along the riverbank grew patches of stinging nettles and, for reasons that still make me shake my head, he seemed to think it was great fun to let us jump off the back of the ute near them. The result was fairly predictable. Within moments we would be rubbing our legs, carrying on about the pain and wondering if it was ever going to stop.

What I remember most clearly, however, wasn’t the sting.

It was the adults.

My uncle would laugh. My aunt would laugh. Even my grandmother would stand there giggling while we complained about our terrible suffering. As a child, I thought this was deeply unfair. Looking back, I realise they weren’t laughing because they lacked compassion. They were laughing because they knew something that we didn’t.

They knew the sting would pass.

I’ve found myself thinking about that memory recently because it raises an interesting question. What was it that the adults understood that the children didn’t? Was it simply that they had experienced stinging nettles before, or was there something broader going on?

The more I reflected on it, the more I realised that the story wasn’t really about nettles at all. It was about perspective.

One of the things that changes as we age is our relationship with discomfort. When we’re young, many experiences feel overwhelming because we haven’t yet accumulated enough evidence to know that difficult situations are usually temporary. A setback at school, an argument with a friend or a painful encounter with a patch of nettles can feel enormous when you don’t have previous experience to place it into context.

As I explored some of the literature on ageing and emotional regulation, I found that this observation has been studied extensively. Researchers have consistently found that older adults often become better at managing emotional experiences, not because they experience fewer challenges, but because they have developed greater perspective about them. They are more likely to recognise that difficult emotions pass, that problems can be worked through and that today’s challenge is rarely the whole story.

This finding helped explain something I have observed repeatedly throughout my career as a rehabilitation counsellor.

Many of the people I have worked with over the years have faced circumstances they never anticipated. Workplace injuries, illness, redundancy, grief and major life transitions can create enormous uncertainty. Yet some of the most resilient individuals I have encountered have not necessarily been the youngest or the healthiest. Often, they have been people who have lived through enough of life to know that setbacks are rarely permanent.

They have accumulated perspective.

The more I thought about this, the more I began to wonder whether we overlook this same quality in our workplaces.

Much of the conversation about ageing at work focuses on limitations. Organisations worry about injury rates, workforce participation, changing physical capacity and succession planning. These are legitimate considerations. However, they can sometimes dominate the discussion to the point where we stop noticing what older workers bring to an organisation.

Like the stinging nettle, we become so focused on the obvious characteristic that we overlook the rest of the story.

One of the strongest findings in the research on ageing is that while some physical and cognitive functions change over time, other capabilities often strengthen. Experience supports judgement. Pattern recognition improves. Decision-making becomes informed by decades of accumulated knowledge. People develop a deeper understanding of how systems operate, how relationships influence outcomes and how seemingly small decisions can create unintended consequences.

In practice, this means that experienced workers often see things that others miss.

They understand why a process was introduced in the first place. They remember what happened the last time the organisation faced a similar challenge. They can often identify risks before they become obvious to others because they have seen the pattern before.

What surprised me as I explored this topic was how rarely these strengths are discussed. We frequently talk about retaining organisational knowledge, mentoring younger employees and preparing future leaders. Yet many organisations already have people sitting within their workforce who possess exactly the knowledge and perspective they are trying to preserve.

The challenge is that experience can be so familiar that we stop seeing it.

This brings me back to the stinging nettles.

As a child, all I could see was the sting. The adults could see the larger picture because they knew the discomfort was temporary. Their perspective changed how they interpreted the experience.

I wonder if something similar happens when we think about ageing.

When we focus exclusively on limitations, we risk overlooking the qualities that often emerge through experience. We see the challenges and miss the judgement. We see the slower recovery time and miss the wisdom. We see the need for flexibility and miss the capability that has been built over decades.

Perhaps the real sting in the tail is not ageing itself.

Perhaps it is how easily we allow first impressions and assumptions to prevent us from seeing the whole story.

The older I get, the more I appreciate that perspective is not something we are born with. It is something we earn through experience, mistakes, disappointments, successes and simply spending enough time in the world to recognise that most situations are more complex than they first appear.

That was certainly true of the stinging nettles on my uncle’s farm. As children, we only saw the sting. The adults saw something quite different.

Sometimes, whether we’re thinking about people, workplaces or ageing itself, it is worth asking what else might be there if we look beyond the thing that first captured our attention.