It’s Not My First Rodeo: That Badge of Honor We Have a Hard Time Passing On (2024)

You likely have heard it before. The phrase “It’s not my first rodeo” or simply “My first rodeo” is an idiomatic expression commonly used to convey that someone is experienced or familiar with a particular situation, task, or event. The saying draws its origins from American rodeo culture and has evolved into a widely recognized metaphor.

The metaphorical use of “It’s not my first rodeo” suggests that the speaker has previous experience in dealing with a situation, and thus, they are not new or unfamiliar to the challenges that might arise. It’s a way of expressing confidence or expertise while acknowledging that they’ve encountered similar circ*mstances before.

Even though I am a parent of a brilliant and capable kid, I still find myself dipping into that “helicopter parent” mode, and not letting him fully experience the situation. It’s so hard to see him get hurt, or disapointed, or frustrated.

I recently found myself saying “this is not my first rodeo, dude.” And that is when it hit me: How is he ever going to get his ‘first rodeo’ moment if I am always hovering and protecting?

As a manager of a talented and eager team of engineers, I again found myself not letting some of the more junior ones jump into their ‘first rodeo’, so to speak. Larger fires and problems, and even some gnarlier projects would be given to more seasoned engineers that “have a few buckles” in this rodeo. How and when would that junior engineer ever get their boots dusty in the ring?

Last summer, I asked my son “When was the last time you got hurt? Sunburned? Scared? Goosebumps? Laughed until you cried?”, and on and on. He said “I don’t know” to all of them. (And, to be frank, he started to get worried with my questioning.)

I told him, “we’re going to fix that”, and that’s when he really got worried (justifiably 😅). We took a trip to stay on a small farm in Texas, hit up a water park, and took long car rides through the backcountry. In that week, he got hurt (at the waterpark, as one does), scared, sunburned, and all the rest.

That trip broke me of my helicopter parenting patterns in that seeing him experience “his first rodeo” in a number of ways, and negotiate his way through it with my support—but not taking away the experience or learnings—really helped both of us and grow.

In the beginning of the pandemic, with the whole team remote, I found myself getting a bit too micromanage-y. Like with my son, I asked some of them when the last time was that they handled a server going down, a website showing the classic “white page of death”, migrating a blog, and on and on. Few had experience in any of it, which meant the bulk of it was on me.

In the Navy, we would run drills on emergencies to build resiliency so that when it happened for real, the response times are shorter, and the stress level is much less. We had likely gone through it, and in a way, got our pseudo rodeo buckle.

I decided to have a policy that whenever a large, gnarly or challenging project would come our way, I would pair a seasoned engineer with a junior one so they could pass on the knowledge. While many projects or issues did not require two people—and it most certainly slowed the work down—the transfer of knowledge was invaluable to the individual and team. And that junior engineer ‘getting their buckle’ made our team that much more resilient to future issues, projects and work.

I get the other generational badge of honor in having grown up in a time where we basically raised ourselves—or were raised by wolves—having to figure out so much on our own. At times, it seemed like we were getting new rodeo buckles on the daily.

While that is not a great and healthy way to grow up—and even costing us buckets of money in therapy—it did make us resilient, resourceful, and reliable. What I see today tends to lean more toward heavy protections, micromanaging people, and lots of helicopter parenting. Not great either.

And it’s so hard to watch someone stumble and grind through it to learn. Even though those hard-won lessons can be some of the best, and indelible of our lives, me knowing how to avoid the hurt in so many lessons has me looking to protect others.

But, we need to let them go through it. Our kids, our coworkers, our staff, our friends, our family, everyone has to do the work. If they don’t, and merely get the knowledge secondhand, it won’t be near as good, and that still doesn’t count toward gettign your buckle for that event.