My mother never said “student”

My mother never said “student”

I was at primary school. My mother was still with us then, and when she spoke about me and my friends she always said “talebe”. Today everyone in Turkey says “öğrenci”, the ordinary word for student; I can hardly remember hearing it from her. With a child’s mind I put it down to her love of old words, a habit of speech. It suited her work, too. She was a lawyer, and she lived in the older vocabulary.

Years later I understood why. A student is the person we assume is ready to learn. They sit at their desk and wait to be taught.

A talebe is the one who asks. The one who wants it, and goes after it.

Until a student becomes a talebe, learning never quite runs at full power. A few chips are missing from the board: desire, eagerness, passion, curiosity…

“What do you think I should do?”

I have been watching the same distinction at the table for years. Only yesterday, a sales director I have been working with for two years came into a session with a serious matter at senior level and spent the best part of an hour pouring it out. As they spoke, they also heard their own thoughts and feelings out loud. Then they stopped, narrowed their eyes slightly and asked, point blank: “Müjde, what do you think I should do?”

You know what? The moment that question is asked, something at the table changes. Now there is a request where a moment ago there was none… provided the person across from you is ready to hear what you are about to say 😊 (how ready they are matters enormously to the outcome; I will write about that another time)

In my Blended Guidance piece I explained why I define myself, above all, as a consultant. This is exactly the reason. A coach asks, a mentor tells you what they went through, a consultant names the recommendation, and I do all three, usually inside the same conversation. And I name my recommendation only when it has been asked for.

I have programmed myself not to give advice unless someone really presses me for it. Let me be clear, this is not a rule of politeness. It is so that the advice actually works.

Advice stays in the hands of the giver

Advice comes out of the story of the person giving it. More often than not it is a solution that worked in another life, under other conditions, for another temperament. It rarely transfers intact to someone else’s life. And the one who feels good the moment it is given is usually the giver. When it comes unasked, it quietly says something else: I know your life better than you do.

The research backs up that instinct. In a 2018 study by Schaerer and colleagues, giving advice was found to increase the adviser’s sense of power and influence. What is more, people with a stronger drive for power give advice more often. So advice sometimes comes not from the other person’s need but from the adviser’s. Strange, isn’t it 😊

And is asking for advice a weakness? The eight-experiment study by Brooks, Gino and Schweitzer (2015) says precisely the opposite. People avoid asking because they fear looking incompetent, when in fact the person who asks is seen as more competent. And the harder the task, the stronger the effect!

An investment there, something to hide here

The more I talk to colleagues abroad, the clearer the difference becomes. There, when a crisis hits, the first reflex of many companies is this: I need help now, I need someone who sees better than I do. Here, the first budget lines to be cut in a crisis are usually training and consultancy.

Let me be fair, though. Training budgets being the first to go is not peculiar to us. In the 2008 crisis, training spend per employee in the United States fell by 11% in a single year (Bersin & Associates, 2008), and in the United Kingdom more than half of organisations cut their training budgets (CIPD, 2009). So the real difference is not in the budget reflex. It is in how taking counsel is seen.

There, taking counsel counts as respecting your work and investing in it. Here, a question does the rounds: “Don’t you know your own job, that you need a consultant?”

There, taking counsel is treated as an investment; here it is mostly hidden. Culture, culture, culture.

There is one more difference, and it is the one I find most interesting. People here rarely recommend their consultant to anyone else. Partly from a worry — will they hear my secrets? — and partly so that nobody else gets the counsel they paid for. And even so that nobody knows they take counsel at all.

My own records confirm it. At the close of every year I look at how that year’s new clients found me. Almost all of my corporate clients arrive through a referral from an existing corporate client. Among individual clients, those who come by referral never exceed 20%.

So organisations share their consultant, and individuals keep theirs to themselves.

Yet what those eight experiments found was the opposite. The person who asks appears more competent, not less. Which means “don’t you know your own job, that you have to ask?” says the exact reverse of what the research found. Being a talebe is not a shortcoming. And I agree!

Even when nobody says it out loud, unasked advice earns us the label of a know-it-all. Are we content with that?

What I do when the request is real

I do not stay silent. If someone truly wants it, saying “I am a coach, I cannot advise” does not meet the need. But I leave the advice on the table as my own lived experience and as one option, never as a prescription. The decision always belongs to its owner.

This is exactly where the consultant’s hat comes in. In my Blended Guidance piece I wrote that the moment a consultant names a recommendation, they take on a share of the responsibility. That is why I do not put that hat on at random. I put it on when it is asked for, because only then do we carry the responsibility together.

When I would rather not advise, I ask

What I put in place of advice is not silence. It is the right question. Hearing one’s own answer out loud usually does more work than any sentence I could offer. In my previous piece I wrote that the visible emotion is the position and that underneath it sits an unmet need. A question is what gives that need its name.

There is a similar fine point in feedback. John Gottman’s work with couples, spanning decades, separates a complaint from criticism. A complaint names a behaviour; criticism touches the person’s character and usually arrives with words like “always” and “never”. What Gottman suggests is plain: do not describe the person across from you, describe what that behaviour made you feel and what you need.

In one study of couples, the first three minutes of an argument were enough to predict the outcome six years later (Carrère and Gottman, 1999). Among couples heading for separation, the conversation usually opened not with a complaint about a behaviour but with criticism aimed at character. The opening sentence carries the whole conversation.

A last word

With a single word my mother left me two things. To be the one who asks, and to give to the one who asks. What is given unasked usually hangs in the air; what is asked for and then received tends to heal.

Now ask yourself these questions: