“Stop letting people ‘should’ all over you.”
Spending a lot of time alone throughout my childhood made me a pretty keen observer of life. It made me really curious. I didn’t have much first-person knowledge of people and the way most people did life. I developed an almost empirical curiosity about people and how life worked for them.
In addition to that, my self-preservation skills made for a very strong and forceful personality. The combination of those two things means that I can be aggressive and intentional about the way I engage others. People tell me that it can be a little uncomfortable to have someone lean so curiously into their life, but many also say it can result in one of the most meaningful conversations of their life. I found that insatiable curiosity can reveal essential things buried and unearthed previously.
I get the privilege of frequently hearing things like:
“I’ve never told anyone that before.”
“I didn’t really understand that until this conversation.”
“I can’t believe I am telling you this.”
“I’ve never connected those two things together until now.”
I somehow naturally found that questions led to discovery, which led to ownership and the possibility of real change. But being trained in appreciative inquiry helped me to go pro at that…to institutionalize that in my life. It kept me from relying on past experience or the need to be seen as the answer; a real temptation for most of us.
But with business leaders or people I encountered with real problems, I would sometimes ask just enough to understand the problem and then “should” all over them. Pull from over three decades of business experience, hundreds of business books, thousands of podcasts, etc., to tell them what they should do. And while the advice was often right, I was going about it way was wrong.
If we can sit in the integrity of someone else’s interest and thoughtfulness...
If we are willing to be seen and are interested in helping to make things right and not just be right…
If we can trust a person’s motive in helping us get to the right answer instead of just wanting them to “should' all over us…
Real change is just around the corner.
The life of Jesus, summarized in the new testament of the Bible, shows us how to engage others. He was asked 183 questions but answered only 3 while asking 307 of his own. He was seeking to understand and help others with honest discovery so that real change was a probability. And he already knew what I am just starting to realize: given enough time and the right questions, we already know the answer to our problems. Our job is just to give them the courage of their newfound convictions.
Maybe we need to focus less on teaching everything we know and become more a student of everyone we lead.
Consider
Do you have people in your life that constantly “should” on you?
Are you guilty of doing that as well?
Could learning to ask good questions change your life and how you lead others?