Saving people is an ego trip!

Good teaching is through good questions

is true caring! 

Parents, coaches and teachers know it is important to care about their kids. 

However, it is even more important to not care so much that you feel you have to save them from every tricky situation and prevent them from making mistakes. 

Give them tools to handle adversity and learn from their mistakes. It is folly to consider yourself as somebody who is there to help prevent others from making the same mistakes as you. 

Tell the story about your mistake in a way that lets them draw their own conclusions!

People learn resilience through making mistakes and having to bounce back. 

There is a tendency to short circuit or miss all potential hazards. This is doing young people, heck anyone a disservice. 

Owning and taking responsibility for mistakes is an important part of the maturing process. When you can own a mistake and learn from it that is powerful. 

As teachers, parents, or coaches, our job is to ask good questions of young people, to stimulate them to come to their own conclusion that possibly a decision needs to be different, either this time or the next time. 

If they work it out for themselves, it is really powerful. 

So, learn how to ask the right questions and not allow people off the hook with soft questions. Whenever a person has to pause and think it is a good question -> stay silent and give them time to answer. Silence at this point is truly golden!

Saving people is an ego trip because it creates need and when people need you, that massages the ego. By default, it puts you in a superior position and that is not what we want. 

What we want is for young people to be opened up to, and confident to challenge ideas and opinions, and equally be open to being challenged! 

Minds open to all possibilities find amazing solutions and are respectful of the ideas and opinions of others. Disagreement through different conclusions after open discussion is healthy and desirable. 

Be open to letting someone’s imaginative idea that is so ‘out there’ becoming a piece of magic. 

Who are we to judge the genius from the fool when so often the fool is the genius? If it doesn’t work out, then surely, they will learn from it. 

Mindset College is a course that asks good questions for inquiring minds. It is life skills on steroids, life skills with a competitive edge.

We are helping you compete healthily by decluttering your mind! www.mindsetcollege.co.uk

Written by David Sammel 

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

mistakes, people, ego trip, potential hazards, care, questions, disservice, coaches, learn, young, important, position, comma, resilience, making, parents, teachers, tendency, powerful, prevent