Today’s early morning coffee will be around studying, learning, and sharing knowledge…
There are no silly questions. The only silly questions that I know of are the ones you don’t make because you don’t want other people to think you are silly.
Are you scared of being the least experienced in the room? Fear not! Do you know what that means? It means you are the person that can benefit the most from that scenario. Take it to the full, squeeze every second. I don’t care to be perceived as inexperienced. I know my limitations. And I learned to enjoy it when I got to learn from anyone that knew more than me on any subject.
Teaching, as any communication, is not just a one-way street.
As part of what you can call a career, I happened to be an instructor. Believe you or not. Full time. I was. And got even certified for it! And an important part of the people I got to learn with were switching from one technology to another or switching jobs or trying to get a job.
Among that experience, the most valuable lesson I got the privilege to learn was that the “expert to inexperienced” approach is b… blatantly mediocre. I never liked it, but helping people to touch base on a particular technology for the first time got me fully convinced it was. I always learned something. About their lives, points of view, motivations, jobs, companies, sectors, implementations, strategy… and even forced me to know more about the curriculum I shared.
NEVER underestimate the power of bringing questions from fresh eyes.
You’d be surprised.
I’m gonna skip how I managed to get to know the technology, how I made it to be an “instructor” and just focus on how I approached sessions back then. I always tried to know how many people would make it to the session, who they were, their positions, level of experience, company… one of the first things we did was also introducing ourselves. What’s personalization if it’s not that? You gather info, try to understand who they are, what motivates them, what their fears are and try to resonate with what you got to help them.
You create and leverage knowledge by checking the basics. No matter how long you’ve been on the job nor how much experience you might think you have. Every single person is unique, so is every single group of people. I managed to know the curriculum, chapters, and exercises by heart. I could have just started vomiting all content from slide one to the end. But it was my duty to take the group from the lowest level on day one to the best position they could be to get certified.
Breaking that useless “expert to student” stereotype I understood it was a shared effort that benefited everyone regardless of being a facilitator or enabled. We all have been students, and there’s no way you can be any good at sharing knowledge if you lose perspective and don’t put yourself in your audience’s shoes.
What makes a huge difference between an expert and a good teacher is that experts can be terrible teachers, and good teachers have mastered the art of learning with their audience. They not only share what they know but motivate people to level up and get them to believe they could do it.
You might not be an instructor or a coach, but there are some lessons learned that you can take with you.
Have you ever explained anything to a colleague? Same rules to be tested.
Oh, and here’s another one that I did once and kept with me since.
Have you ever explained anything and just got SILENCE as a response? When leading sessions, I used to share something in the line of:
“If you don’t have any questions, it means you’ve fully understood everything and you can answer all my questions”.
It usually triggers some laughs, sometimes got people back from Morpheus’ land… and then usually, someone asked something and then the conversation started and flowed with the group.
Also, another one you can take when you share or onboard someone to the fun you do on a daily basis.
Repeat after me: imitation is a very basic learning approach. I do as I see others do. I want you to do as I saw others did. It’s fine for starters when you have no clue.
When you know how to do something right and you share it with someone, you do want that person to do it right. But that doesn’t mean everything needs to be done always in the very same way. Once you share the information and that person can do what you did, you should always come by, say hi, and ask about how you could do it better. That’s something you should think about yourself. It gets even funnier when you get to hear new ideas from others. Seeing someone improving something you were doing for months… That’s happiness.