I was teaching a Workshops that Work workshop a while back, where I was training subject matter experts how to teach.  It’s one of my favourite workshops because you just never know what kind of subject matter experts are going to show up and I always end up learning a little about a wide variety of subject matter.

Each time I teach the workshop I encourage participants to get up and practice teaching for 5-10 minutes.  This workshop was no exception.

One guy, who I’ll call Michael, got up to teach.  He was a nurse and he taught us several things that nurses do to quickly assess the health of a patient.  It was interesting.

What was even more interesting was when he started talking about our hearts.  Specifically about how the heart pumps blood throughout our body.  Now everybody knows that our hearts are designed to pump blood, nothing new there.

But do you know what is making the sound of your heart beat?  What exactly is making that noise?  I’d never thought about it and if pressed, I likely would have said it’s the sound of the blood pumping in and around the chambers.

Not so.

The sound of your heart beat is the sound of your valves opening and closing.

Now I don’t know about you but that absolutely fascinated me.  I was gobsmacked.  The fact that I can hear the inner workings of my valves had my focus lasered in on him.  I was captivated.

Funny thing was he tossed this fact out rather off-handedly.  I’m sure he didn’t think it was a big deal.

That’s the thing about perspective.  You just never know what you can share about your perspective that will alter someone else’s.

Here’s to illuminating perspective, one heart beat at a time.