Why I Don’t Tell People What To Do

I don’t like being told what to do. I never have. I would always rebel against it, according to my mother, long before I could remember. While my defiant nature has mellowed over the years, mainly because I got into too much trouble, and I disliked the implications of being in trouble more than I disliked being told what to do. Still, I don’t like it.

When I first went full-time into the people development world back in 1999, I already knew that getting people’s buy-in was a far better strategy to get people to do something than telling them. I then learnt other clever techniques, such as asking questions to get them to think it was their idea all along to do what I wanted. I mean, I was trained in these techniques, and I must confess, I trained others to do the same. While I was doing this, there was something uneasy within me. I felt, well… a bit dirty. I’m glad I felt it. It was a clue that I was on the wrong track. I didn’t know better back then, so I carried on, in spite of the feeling telling me something was off with the whole idea.

Coercion. Manipulation. Mind games. Trickery. Yup, guilty to all as charged!

Let’s face it, it’s all designed to get someone to do what I wanted them to do, or what the company wanted them to do. Now, what I wanted them to do was never evil. In fact, to me it always seemed to be in their best interest. That’s why I could sleep at night and carry on. It wasn’t ‘they lose, I win’. It was good for both of us, or all of us if it were with a team in a company.

What I didn’t understand back then was that I was disregarding some fundamental truths about human beings. Every single one of us has common sense. A wisdom that we are born with. A sense of knowing that is always guiding us, when we are not listening to personal, egoic thinking, that is either fearful/insecure or reactive/compelling. Knowing how to discern that difference is life-changing. How do I know? I’ve seen it for myself, countless times. And countless times I’ve heard people share their own experiences of listening to their quiet, still voice within, instead of the other ‘heady’ voice. And it always works out. I can count on it.

I’ll go further: every time I’ve got myself into trouble, it’s because I listened to that personal, contaminated, reactive thinking. I couldn’t join the dots then to what was really at play. I thought it was a character flaw: a ‘shooting myself in the foot’ trait that looked to be an inherent part of me. I’ve heard it been called the ‘upper limit problem’, the ‘limiting belief’ problem, the ‘this and that’ problem. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s listening to a voice that is noise and not the voice that is signal. Contaminated, not pure. Reactive, not reflective.

Now, I’m the one who has just got heady. Because it can’t be explained. Words are ill-equipped. The difference can only be felt.

Let me come back to the point. If it’s true that we do have this quiet inner voice, a real-time intelligence that takes care of all our ‘doings’ – from within – then anyone outside of us telling us what to do makes a lot less sense.

Here’s what comes to mind to illustrate this:

If I tell someone what to do, straight up, they may do it. Maybe once. Maybe more than once. But over time, they find their own way, often back to how they did the thing before we spoke.

If I lay out the facts to someone with a hidden agenda, my personal vested interest with the aim of influencing them, then the way they receive my message has a high chance of being different. They can sense me. ‘Spidey-senses’ are activated. And even if they are not conscious of their suspicions and do exactly what I’m ‘subtly’ hinting at, the long-term trust they have in me is under threat.

If I can lay out the facts to someone, clean without my own agenda or bias, then they can decide for themselves what to do. The other person is open, they tend to listen better, and they experience me as clean. They have nothing to resist in what I’m sharing. They can then consider the situation for themselves, in a reflective state. A state where insights are more likely. And insights last. They have inherent ‘stickability’.

(A classic example is the warning signs in cigarette packets, and the medical advice that’s been around for decades, with the aim of persuading people to quit smoking. While the number of smokers has decreased significantly, the change in someone didn’t come from the information. It came from somewhere deeper. Within the person, not from the outside: via insight. Not from information. The same is true for every change in habit or the quitting of an addiction.)

As well as the change in their ‘doing’, the relationship I have with everyone in my life matters to me. And relationships are founded on feelings.

In David Maister’s book ‘The Trusted Advisor’, he and his co-authors identified the factors that make ‘person a’ trust ‘person b’. Through their extensive research, the factors were credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation. While I’ve written more about this in other articles and videos, the key point is that one of these four factors far outweighs the other 3. It’s self-orientation. This is the degree to which we are focused on ourselves: the lower the self-orientation, the more likely the other person is to trust us. This cannot be a technique. If it is a technique, it is more self-orientation, not less, because it’s ‘me’ wanting something. I think of a dodgy salesperson saying “Trust me,” and my ‘Spidey senses’ - they’ll kick in. My eyes will narrow, I sense they are up to something. Bye-bye trust! And if that trust ever comes back, it takes a long time.

And if the relationship weren’t enough, here’s the other main reason that I don’t tell people what to do. It is effectively me saying that my ideas are better than theirs. Sometimes this might be true. Even if it is, it has 3 major downsides: 1) it discounts their own wisdom and their ability to listen and discern wisdom from noise for themselves; 2) it bypasses their own learning curve, and 3) ‘understanding’ is light years ahead of ‘doing’ in fostering lasting change in people’s behaviour.

Now, before I go on, I do need to put a caveat around this. Sometimes I DO tell people what to do. If I’m crossing a road with a child (as I’ve done quite a few times with my brother’s grandchildren), I will share why “Stop, look and listen” matters. I also know that demonstrating this does a lot more than only telling them. The reason this is an exception is clear to me: I don’t want anyone to go through learning the importance of road safety by making mistakes. The same can be said about hot things that burn, playing with fire, playing with electricity, heights and a bunch of other things that can be dangerous and harmful.

In my work, situations are never dangerous. Danger is a real-time thing, not a ‘later today’ thing or a ‘tomorrow’ thing. Let’s face it, speaking to me is not the wisest move if someone is in present-time danger! When it comes to legal advice or medical advice and such, I’m no expert, so I cannot advise. And it’s good that I know that – and that I stick to not playing the role of expert when I am not. My ego needed to learn that, and to be put back in its place. Because my very human ego thought I could or even should be the expert on everything.

So now, every time I read a post on social media, an article, or a blog post that is telling the reader what to do, I shake my head. Not in judgement, in my realising that they don’t know that they are not qualified to know what’s ‘right’ for the reader in the moment the words are being read. And if I slip into telling someone what to do, I’m not qualified either. How could I be?

The greatest leverage I can have is to tap people into their own inner expertise, and help them understand that’s a part of their divine nature. It’s their own inherent common sense. Their real-time intelligence. The voice that’s not the reactive one. Not the compulsive one. Not the intrusive one. Not the heady one. Not the intellectual one. The deeper one. The one that feels so different.