I hear a recurring advice in personal development circles, leadership and non-technical training at large: teach what you most need to learn. Or alternatively: If you want to grow from here, you need to start teaching.
Teach what you want to learn: at the root of the misunderstanding
Look at Roger Federer, possibly the greatest tennis player of all times. Do you think he has developed his sublime forehand by teaching it to newbies in a tennis academy, or rather by practicing for hours and hours every day?
When it comes to sports, or business, or playing an instrument, it’s easy to see how such advice makes no sense. So why would any other domain of life be any different? Why wouldn’t the same laws apply to personal growth, to improving your character, to leadership or spirituality at large? Why would any soft-skill covered in the personal development arena be a special-case scenario?
And in fact, they’re not different. If anything, changing your character and behavioral patterns is an even more grinding type of work, a path riddled with frustrations and failures, as you witness your old ways and old programming take over again and again, each time you think you’ve finally gotten your head above the water and seen a little change in yourself.
Teach what you want to learn: why most have a vested interest in believing it
However, there is a reason why all the egos in business out there would like this to be a special case. Because it provides a perfect opportunity for the ego to get the gratification that comes from teaching others, speaking on stages, panels, getting attention, while deluding itself that it’s also serving its highest purpose of learning. All the while, avoiding the grinding and painful work of self-development and true embodiment.
As a matter of fact, the original quote attributed to Bach was: we teach others what we most need to learn.
The quote is meant to highlight the inconsistency we tend to have within ourselves. We like to project onto others all the time. Hence the meaning is: what we’re drawn to teach may reveal what we need to learn. Quite the opposite. It doesn’t suggest that we should start teaching stuff that we need to improve upon!
I plead guilty of having done that too and I’ll concede that the process of teaching may occasionally also lead to self-improvement.
While coaching numerous professionals, throughout my career, I’ve had a few instances when I ended up taking my own advice. I pushed my coachees to take certain actions or commitments, which I later realized could apply to my case too, although in slightly different ways.
But this mechanism of teaching something I needed, didn’t produce any results until I started executing on those things: something I should have done long before, without needing to preach it to somebody else first.
Probably, suggesting an action to someone else just created enough cognitive dissonance within myself, so that eventually I was compelled to take action.
However, it would be silly to turn these isolated incidents into a viable methodology: teaching others so to create cognitive dissonance and then acting from there?!
Rather than a viable methodology, this sounds a lot more like a perfect recipe for self-delusion, which perfectly accounts for all the fake self-help and leadership gurus that have flooded the market by this date.
Teach what you want to learn: what science has to say
So, let’s say that you pick an area where you feel you still need to grow. Does it make sense to start teaching it? What a foolish idea!
Although research partly backed up this notion (insert link below), the results only suggest that if you teach something you’ve actually learned, then teaching it consolidates the learning.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X13000209
There’s no ground for the idea that teaching can become a substitute for learning, or that you should start teaching stuff you haven’t embodied, expecting that by preaching it to others, automatically you will!
Besides, the experiment was conducted among college students on theoretical learning, so it does make a lot of sense that by repeating these concepts to other students, they were reaffirming them in their minds and exploring them at a deeper level.
However, when you teach others about behavioral skills for example, there’s absolutely zero reasons to believe that teaching will lead to any improvement.
It’s like suggesting that giving a talk about fitness can spur muscle growth! Yes, you might grow by teaching, but only to the extent to which you practice alongside your trainees.
If you give 1000 TED talks about becoming a more compassionate and kind human being, there isn’t much support to the idea that you’ll become kinder yourself! If that consistently worked, then all politicians should be morally outstanding individuals and corruption would be long gone in this world!
Teach what you want to learn: what Gandhi has to say
There is this story of a mother who was upset that her son was obsessed with eating sugar. No matter how much she SCOLDED HIM, he continued to eat sugary stuff.
Not knowing what to do, she decided to take her son to see Mahatma Gandhi.
Making their way to the Mahatma was not easy: they walked for miles under the scorching sun, until they finally got to Ahmedabad.
The mother explained to Gandhi: “Bapu, my son eats too much sugar. It is not good for his health. Would you please advise him to stop eating it?”
Gandhi listened to the woman carefully, thought for a moment, but refused to advise her son. He told her instead: “go home and come back in two weeks.”
The mother wondered why he had not asked the boy to stop eating sugar, but she patiently walked all the way back home.
Two weeks later, again she took the long road to see Gandhi bringing her the boy along.
This time Gandhi looked directly at the boy and convincingly said: “stop eating sugar. It is not good for your health!”.
The boy nodded and finally promised he would stop this bad habit.
The boy’s mother was pleasantly surprised. As she walked out the door though, she couldn’t get one thought off her head, so she turned to Gandhi and asked, “Bapu…why didn’t you tell him the same thing two weeks ago when I walked for so long and brought him here to see you?”
Gandhi smiled and replied: “mother, two weeks ago, I too was eating sugar”.
Embodiment is everything
Gandhi’s story shows us the only thing that matters in this work: embodiment.
It’s not by walking up to a stage and impress the crowd with a talk that you’re going to grow much further (aside from overcoming the fear of public speaking if you have any). It’s by putting in the work every day, little by little. Then you can share what you’ve got and it’s going to be as powerful as the extent to which you truly embody it.
In truth, your real challenge is not to teach more so you can grow, but to become so authentic that you ultimately teach only and exclusively what you have embodied. And to embody so much, that you have so much to teach.
The words of a good presenter, trainer, speaker, teacher, may excite you and entertain you. Those of a truly embodied teacher may change you.
