March 30, 2010PowerPhrase: Who are you doing this for?
I recommended changes for a client who simply wanted what I have always done. My client made it clear to me that it was time for me to stop promoting the new approach by saying,
- Who are you doing this for?
Things can get turned around when we do favors or give gifts and otherwise try to give people what we think they need or should want, when they want something else. It is appropriate to suggest what we think is best based on our expertise, but we also need to remember who we’re doing it for.
4 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
I can identify with this one so well. Since I teach guitar, there is a phrase that several of my online colleagues and I use when talking about beginners, “They don’t know what they don’t know.”
A simplified example of this would be a beginner who, deep down, would like to write their own songs. Perhaps she has come to believe that only “gifted” or “talented” people can write songs, so she doesn’t even ask if it can be taught as part of our lessons, because she doesn’t know that I have not told her that I can teach her how to write her own songs. She just thinks that I haven’t told her that because it can’t be done. So, in other words, she “doesn’t know” that there is something that she “doesn’t know”.
The point I started out making with this is that we often end up telling the student what they need to learn, forgetting that there are other things that they want to be getting out of the process in the short term. It’s important for us to keep that in mind because, after all, if you’re not having fun playing the guitar, why bother to put in the work it takes to learn who in the first place?
Comment by Ken Rhodes — April 9, 2010 @ 3:44 pm
Equally important is that we often don’t know what we do know. Sometimes things seem so obvious it doesn’t occur to us to explain it. I once asked my brother for help with a calculus problem. He explained the first step, the third, the seventh and then went to the solution. I thanked him and got help from someone who knew that there are things she needed to explain.
Comment by SLCCOM — April 14, 2010 @ 3:01 pm
To SLCCOM – That is the most common lesson I learn from my guitar students.
How does that old axiom go? The best way to learn a deeper understanding of something is to teach it to someone else?
Comment by Ken Rhodes — April 14, 2010 @ 3:04 pm
Hilarious, Sharon! Reminds me of when I looked at a book my Emeritus math dad had on diagonals and he said I should be able to understand it. He was right – the first two words made perfect sense to me! And to Ken, that’s why I do what I do – one reason anyway.
Comment by merylrunion — April 14, 2010 @ 4:12 pm