The Need
For a while now I have noticed a pattern: I offer development suggestions — to younger family members, to colleagues — with genuine care and, I believe, genuine relevance. And often, nothing happens. Not resistance, not disagreement. Just silence. My first instinct was to treat this as their shortcoming — a lack of receptivity. On reflection, I decided to treat it as mine: an area of my own development, worth understanding properly rather than working around.
I needed to develop the competency. A younger one drew my attention to a tool to help myself developing the competency which turned out to be a digital development companion — an AI-enabled tool built specifically to support a person's own growth journey, conversationally and at their own pace.
The Tool
It doesn't hand out generic advice; it works through a structured process: helping you name a specific competency worth developing, walking through an honest self-assessment of where you actually stand on it, curating resources — free and paid — to build the underlying knowledge, and helping translate that into a concrete, personalised plan tied to real people and real dates.
Two things about it stood out enough to shape how I engaged with it. First, it was consistently honest rather than agreeable — when I rated myself harshly, it asked for evidence rather than accepting or flattering the self-judgment. Second, it kept the choices mine throughout: what to focus on, which resources to read, whether to save a plan, adjust it, or set it aside.
I used it to work through a real, long-standing question of my own, and the reflection below is what came out of that process.
That tool sent me to two pieces of research I had long known of by reputation but not read closely with this specific problem in mind.
Two ideas that reframed the problem
Reading one — Carol Dweck, on how belief in one's ability to improve actually shifts
Dweck's growth-mindset research makes a point that is easy to state and much harder to act on: telling someone they have a fixed mindset rarely changes it. What actually shifts someone's orientation toward their own growth is a felt experience of improving — not an instruction, not even a well-argued case. People come to believe they can grow by experiencing what growth feels like, not by being told it's possible.
Reading two — Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan), on what actually motivates people to act
SDT names three needs that have to be met before a person genuinely invests in their own development: autonomy (the sense that the choice is theirs), competence (the sense that they are capable of it), and relatedness (the sense that someone is with them in it, not above them). Suggestions offered without attention to these three tend to be received as pressure — and pressure is something people quietly resist, even when they don't say so.
Read together, the two pieces point at the same gap from different directions. Dweck explains why telling doesn't work — the idea has to be felt, not delivered. SDT explains why: unless a suggestion respects someone's autonomy and sense of competence, it doesn't matter how sound it is, it won't be taken up as theirs.
What this clarified about my own problem
Unprompted input, however well-intentioned, cannot help someone if it arrives without first understanding their mindset and what actually motivates them.
That is the honest reframe. I have, for years, been generous with what I know — sharing it in writing, in notes, in links to material I thought would help. What I had not been doing consistently was finding out, before offering it, where the other person actually stood: whether they saw themselves as capable of the change, whether the suggestion felt like theirs or like mine, whether I understood what genuinely moved them.
This is not a failure of intention or of years of experience — both were always sound. It is a gap in method: offering the “what” without first doing the work of understanding the “who.”
What changes from here
● Ask before I offer. Before suggesting a development step, understand what the person already believes about their own capacity to change, and what actually drives them — not what I assume drives them.
● Create the experience, not just the argument. Where possible, let the person discover the value of an idea through a conversation or a small experiment, rather than receiving it fully formed from me.
● Protect their ownership of it. Frame suggestions in terms of the other person's own goals, and let the idea become theirs to act on — not mine to have delivered.
● Test this with real conversations, not just reflection. Understanding this is a start; the real evidence will be in whether the next few development conversations actually land differently.
Two short readings, one honest look at a long-standing habit, and a clearer sense of what to try differently next.
No comments:
Post a Comment