Growth through Guidance
Growth through Guidance
Expanding tool kits and avoiding dependency
If someone hands you the whole thing on a silver platter, they gift you the result, but rob you of the accomplishment.
James Clear
No matter how impressive we are, we will always need help.
However, there are different types of help. To simplify, there's doing something for someone and there’s showing someone how to do something.
One approach is challenging but empowering, while the other is easy but limiting.
When we ask for or offer help, it's tempting to request the result or provide a complete solution.
While this approach is quicker, easier, and achieves the desired outcome, it eliminates the opportunity for growth.
Eagerness to help
We’re overbearing when helping because we're eager for solutions.
When faced with a problem or challenge, we want it resolved. When we see someone we care about struggling, we want nothing more than to make their problems disappear.
The quickest way to eliminate these struggles is to have an expert solve them directly.
It's easier to have a full-time employee build a report than to teach an intern how to build it. It's easier to email the coach requesting your child's inclusion on the team than to help them process their failure. It's easier to give your spouse a plan to deal with their overbearing boss than to listen and empathize with their situation.
Our eagerness to avoid hardship and protect those we care about creates a solution-centric approach to helping, focused solely on the end result.
While rooted in good intentions, this approach often does more harm than good.
Instead of focusing on outcomes, we should emphasize guidance for reaching them independently.
Solutions create dependency
Focusing on guidance develops skills and strategies to solve similar challenges independently in the future or even avoid them altogether.
Guidance fosters resilience, while one-time fixes create dependency.
Who we are is an accumulation of the lessons we've learned and the skills we've developed. The more we learn and grow, the better—and the way to learn and grow is not by letting others solve our problems.
When we're stuck, we should seek guidance and mentorship, not solutions. We should focus intently on the principles and strategies for solving problems, not just on the solutions themselves.
Developing the skills to solve a problem, even without solving the immediate issue, is more valuable than solving the problem without learning the skills.
In the journey of becoming a bit better each day, an ever-expanding toolkit is far more important than a collection of finished projects built by others.
Consequently, guidance should always take priority over ready-made solutions, both when we’re facing our own challenges and when we’re helping others overcome theirs.
Prompts
When others ask you for help, do you provide guidance or solutions?
When you ask for help, do you ask for guidance or solutions?
Where is it most important for your to focus on guidance rather than solutions?
Deep Dive
The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
A bestseller arguing that talent is often the result of nurture, not nature.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin