It will be good to explore the ‘asking’ space a little further, so let me share an example of when I was able to support a client with a goal she had. In this example, you will see that I had no idea how to help her in a traditional ‘telling’ sense, but by asking her Better Questions she was able to be resourceful and find the answers herself. This particular client had come to me because she wanted to make a number of changes in her life – and one of these changes was that she wanted to get fit and run a marathon. What was interesting for me to acknowledge was that I was unable to stand in the ‘telling’ space because I had never run a marathon; I had no personal experience of having to train for a marathon, and I also couldn’t draw on expertise from experiences of friends or family as they had never run a marathon either. I hope you can see that I couldn’t be teacher, trainer, educator, expert or mentor – I could only be an ‘asker’.
This was one of my first conscious experiences of being an ‘asker’ rather than a ‘teller’, and whilst I confess to feeling a little apprehensive because I wasn’t able to help in the traditional way by giving advice, I stuck to the principles I knew about asking Better Questions. I have to say that I was amazed by how resourceful my client was and how she was able to find her own answer to her problem. It wasn’t that she was incapable of finding answers to achieve her goal, it was that she had not given herself enough focused time and the right questions to enable her to find the strategy that was going to work for her. Using the skills that I am going to share with you throughout this book, she was not only able to identify her success strategy, but within a matter of a few months she was able to put it into place to successfully run her first half marathon.
I share this story so that you can see that when you can’t provide answers to problems, you can still help your clients to find answers themselves by asking Better Questions. Indeed, I will make the point that we will revisit later: when we don’t have the answer to something, it is often easier to be an ‘asker’ because then we cannot be tempted to jump in and give them advice that inhibits their resourcefulness.
It’s not often that we can make a case for not having all the answers, but in my experience being an ‘asker’ rather than a ‘teller’ frequently enables us to be better in our professional roles. When you always have an answer to something or play the role of the expert you are often tempted to be ‘tellers’, which inhibits, and it is this issue that will be your greatest challenge to becoming more of an ‘asker’ and a true Potentialiser.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
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Chapter 2
Your role as an aged care professional
In the last chapter, I focused on the general hats that we wear in our lives, and I am sure that you will recognise that the roles discussed very much relate to aged care professionals and immediately it becomes clear that many aspects of these hats typically sit more traditionally in the telling space. I say ‘more traditionally’ because in many instances your professional role is undertaken from a place of learnt behaviour from our own experiences and the way that we have been educated and trained to fulfil the role – very rarely is it undertaken from a place of conscious choice. In this chapter I invite you to reflect upon the choices you wish to make about your role going forward, given that up until now the choices you have made may well be unconsciously made rather than consciously decided upon.
The starting point for this reflection is to consider your mindset, because what you think drives your behaviours, actions and, ultimately, the results you achieve. I find that before we can look at changing anything, we have to start by looking at the way we are and the beliefs that sit behind our current behaviour. When we look closely at our beliefs, we frequently find that what we think isn’t something that we have chosen; it is something that has become programmed into our brains through:
•historic experiences or perceived experiences
•being passed on by colleagues/workplace cultures/education
•the media
•religious teachings
•cultural norms
•conforming to popular opinion or the ‘normal’ way of doing things.
Rarely do we make conscious choices about what we believe, and it can be shocking to realise how much of our thinking is based on conforming to set views rather than on independent, well-considered, rational thought. We have a natural tendency to go with the crowd and to conform, and most of the time we don’t even realise we are doing it.
In our workplaces there are many well-intended and strongly opinionated people who are ready to jump in and offer advice to new staff, and whilst often this is useful initially, it is interesting to be aware that we are starting to be inducted into a way of doing things, and the conforming starts without most of us being conscious that we aren’t making choices about how we’d like to carry out our roles. Whilst I accept that very often advice received is beneficial, I would like to suggest that it isn’t always good to make everyone fit into the same box.
As I share this with you, I am reminded about a story that I often share in workshops that powerfully represents the idea of conformance rather than rational, well-thoughtout thinking, and my belief is that this represents a lot of workplaces and their practices. Let me share the story and you can see what comes to your mind as you read it:
Start with a cage containing five apes.
In the cage hang a banana on a string. Now put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all the apes with cold water.
After a while another ape makes an attempt with the same result – again all the apes are sprayed with cold water.
Turn off the cold water.
If later another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will try to prevent him even though they are not sprayed with cold water.
Now remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror all of the other apes attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.
Next remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.
Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they are not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.
After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes which were previously sprayed with cold water have now been replaced. Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs.
Why not?
This story really invites us to take some time to stop and think about what we are doing and question ourselves in our practice. Often we are like the ape in the apes’ cage without even realising it, and we conform to the ‘way we do things around here’ rather than question