Too eager to teach, advice and talk

Too often I notice sincere, well intention people, wanting to contribute, to do good.

This is especially so among the older people. People with a lot of life experience and wisdom. People who are retiring or retiree.

Another category of such people are the parents, who have taken more salt in their life than their children.

Naturally, with wealth of experience, they can easily see the pitfalls, inadequacy, inefficiency, ignorance, or misunderstanding of things, of people who are trying to realize a goal, do a project, or organize an event or exhibit certain behaviors.

With eagerness and passion, they "charge" in to try to rescue the situation from turning bad. They give advice, lecture. They try to teach the ignorant. They tell and share their stories, usually long stories of their earlier mistakes, or successes.

Unfortunately, things still do not work out well. The NGO organization still suffer diminishing membership problem, the projects launched do not get the expected response from the public. The commercial organizations, with these eager and enthusiastic advisors, still have product quality problems, safety issues, customer complaints.

The children behaviors do not change for the better, with all the good lectures and advice and telling from the parents.

The well intention people are simply too eager to teach, advice and talk.

They do not realize that effective communication and learning to produce intended outcome is not just by one way communication in the form or teaching, advice and talking or telling.

A greater chance for things to happen the way it should be maybe for these sincere people to learn new knowledge and skills to listen (by suspending their own values and judgment) to facilitate (to make things easy for people to learn collectively) and to coach (helping people to seek their own solutions).

People with enormous experience and wisdom can become more effective facilitators and coaches when they learn how to reframe their mind from less teaching, advice and talking, to designing conducive learning environment and deeper inquiry questions for the learners, and listening to the response they elict.

End.