Give It Time

“How was school today?”

“Good.”

That’s the standard answer from my freshman son. One word, no eye contact, moving on with his night. And honestly, most days I let it slide. I’ve learned not to press—it usually doesn’t go anywhere.

But something shifts when we just... sit. Like tonight at dinner. No agenda. No interrogation. Just the three of us sharing a meal, and giving the moment a little more space. That’s when it started to come out. A funny interaction in class involving super minty gum. A new project he’s excited about. A teacher who's challenging him. None of it came from the initial “How was school?” It came from time—letting the silence hang long enough for something real to emerge.

And it got me thinking.

How often do we do the same thing in our work with learning. We build these big, powerful events—training sessions, leadership retreats, kickoffs—and then we rush off to the next thing. We don’t leave room for things to sink in. For people to reflect, talk it through, or connect dots that don’t reveal themselves right away.

But what if we did? What if we treated the time after the learning as just as important as the learning itself? What if we stopped trying to cram more content into tighter windows and instead built in space—for dialogue, reflection, real-life application?

When we give it time, more comes out. More gets absorbed. More sticks.

Maybe the real transformation doesn’t happen during the event at all. Maybe it happens at dinner, days later, when something finally surfaces—because we made space for it to.