Hi Reader,

(Assuming you're not reading this until after the holiday, I hope you had a blessed one! I wish you all the best as we close out 2024!)

Some things are easy to teach because you can point to them. Here's two apples, see? One here, and one here. One plus one makes two.

Some things are hard to teach because they exist only inside you. Or maybe not at all.

Maybe you misinterpreted your hunger pangs as anger at that person who happens to be nearby. (Apropos, research has shown judges hand out more lenient sentences after lunch.)

Anyway, the point is that things that exist only inside us are hard to teach. My wife and I would dearly love to teach our toddler patience. But it's hard to point to. Pointing to someone being patient is like pointing to a tree. Trees are patient. But if I point one out to my toddler, all she sees is a tree.

Let's have a reminder of the graph we're looking at:

The bottom two boxes are both labeled as "awareness" of sorts. Awareness lives at close to the same address as patience: it's hard to teach.

In fact, it's even more subtle than that. I was going to say that you can't point it out, you can only invite someone to reflect on it, but I realized that's exactly the trick. Awareness is already there. Patience is already there. In all of us. It's not something we need to learn because we all already know how to do it. And if it's not something we need to learn, it's not really something we can teach.

I'm worried as I write this that I'm being squirrelly or pedantic or both. I hope that's a sign not that I'm actually a pedantic squirrel, but that what I'm calling other-awareness and self-awareness are really, actually very subtle things. Maybe you disagree, in which case lay it on me, please.

But I think that's enough context for delivering the bad news I've previously mentioned a couple times. Here it is directly: you can't really teach someone to be aware of others. And to an even greater degree you can't teach someone to be self-aware.

So what do we do, if we're interested in having tech support folks learn those skills so they can improve the quality of their support?

Well, that's the really bad news, because if we can't teach them, the only other option is to demonstrate them.

I can't teach someone to be aware of others. I CAN be aware of others (including, most importantly, the person I'm trying to teach). I can't teach someone to be aware of themself. I CAN be aware of myself.

I think the trick is recognizing that cultivating these skills in others is not a matter of teaching or training, but a matter of being and inviting. I can't teach you to be self-aware. The only thing I can do is try to be more self-aware, and invite you to do the same. That's the important word here: invitation.

One of my readers replied to an earlier newsletter and said this would be challenging to teach this to "someone who is 'just doing a job' and just wants to get on to the next transaction."

That's exactly right. Nobody can make anyone learn this.

What I can do, and what I would strive to do if training someone like that, would be to show up for them in a way that demonstrates I'm not merely doing my job, but that I care about them, that I believe them to be valuable, that I hope for the best for them and think they're capable of attaining it. Implicit in that interaction is the invitation, "this matters to me because you matter to me. You have the ability to extend this circle of caring to every customer you interact with—and perhaps more importantly, to yourself." (And of course it's also fine and good to make the invitation explicit, from time to time.)

I call that bad news, somewhat jokingly, because it's hard. It takes guts, and emotional energy, and a lot of the time precious gifts like this get slapped down and stomped into the mud. There's a huge amount of disappointment baked into what I'm talking about.

But disappointment is part of what we sign up for when we choose to love someone. Sure, I'm disappointed my toddler doesn't demonstrate more patience. But I'm not going to stop trying to teach her. And doing so forces me to grow my own patience. And that in turn teaches me that what I'm doing here isn't teaching. Not really. It's learning.

As I wrote that, it occurred to me that anytime anyone has looked to another person and thought, "they are my teacher," that they are actually seeing that person as a more transcendent learner, and that something inside them is calling out to learn more.

I notice I want to say something at this point to hide, to avoid taking responsibility. To say that I'm no expert, that I'm the biggest dunce in the world. Framing this as bad news, even as a joke, affects how I myself receive it.

But it's not bad news. It's good news. I have an opportunity here to learn, to grow, to contribute to something larger than myself. Sure, it's hard, and messy, and disappointing. Such is life. The difference is that it's in service to something. And that difference makes all the difference. When I forget, would you do me a favor and remind me?