Sharing your wisdom
Isn’t it wonderful to graciously share our pearls of wisdom whenever someone seems like they struggle? It is truly a fantastic feeling — dispelling the darkness of ignorance, shining the light of knowledge where someone may be wrong, extending a helpful hand.
Except more often than not, whenever we engage the advice giving mode (and frequently it happens almost automatically), we’re either bringing nothing to the table, or worse, making fools out of ourselves. A while ago I wrote about receiving advice and how annoying it can get. Today I wanted to look at it from the other side.
You hear your friend is tired because she caught a cold. “You should have some ginger tea. Here, I’ll make you some!” She may promptly refuse, saying she already had her tea, but you won’t give up so easily: “Have some vitamin C!”. You notice her blank stare. What an ungrateful person.
Another day, you hear two of your developers arguing on the best way to schedule that Lambda function that needs to run on an interval. They are clearly unhappy with what they came up so far, so you decide to join the brainstorming: “Can’t you just create a row in DynamoDB with a TTL, and simply listen for when that row gets deleted?” You’re so proud of yourself, coming up with such clever thing! But your developers clearly don’t appreciate it and just look away, half-smirking, half-annoyed.
The core of the issue here is that any advice needs to fit one’s circumstances in order to be useful.
First, the person needs to understand the message itself, and then understand how it applies to them or their particular situation. And once they understand, they need to be able to actually follow it. The more perfectly a given piece of advice fits, the better. It actually doesn’t matter if the advice itself is objectively good or appropriate. You may be saying the smartest thing ever said in the history of humanity, but if person on the receiving end can’t apply it, your words are truly worthless.
Now the challenge is, we actually don’t know if or when a given piece of advice fits.
Even when we know the person very well, even if it’s our spouse of 20 years, or our own kid, we simply can’t tell with absolute accuracy, what kind of advice will be what they need. We can get pretty close, but we’ll never get all the way there. To do that, it would require us to have all the little experiences that the other person accumulated over their lives, to know exactly what they know and not more, it would require us to *be* that person. Ridiculous, isn’t it?
But hey, there is someone who actually meets all these requirements, and by extension, is able to come up with advice that will be the best match. What’s more, we can employ them to do the advice-giving instead of us. So not only they will do the job for us, they will also do it much better! How clever is that?
I really hope you know where I’m going with this (if you do, you can skip this paragraph, seriously). In case you don’t, or you didn’t bother reading all of the text so far and yet you somehow landed on this paragraph, let me spell it out. Instead of giving in to the urge of being the enlightened voice, the wise and helpful, the ultimate sage, instead of opening your mouth and stating your opinion, suggestion, profound thought, try shutting up and listening for a while longer. And then perhaps ask a question. And then another one. Yes, I’m talking about coaching instead of preaching. Or rather, I’m preaching about coaching (oh, the irony!).
It’s all easier said than done. I’m not going to lecture you on how to do it though — there are many books out there that do it so much better (you could start with The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier; while it’s somewhat watered down and mostly directed at somewhat extroverted managery folks, it’s still a very good guide to the subject). However, I’m going to share what I personally found most important to remember about this whole coaching thing. That is to avoid the urge to be the know-it-all. It may seem simple, but it’s not (you can clearly see how bad I’m failing at it on this blog). The trick I like to use is to assume that you can always learn something new, from everyone, then start each conversation with that thought in mind. It goes a long way.
What are your stories of successful, or even better, failed coaching?
Originally published at bytesandsenses.wordpress.com
