DailyJim: I don’t teach people, I help people learn

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Wednesday, July 9th, 2025, and today I want to talk about how I don't teach people, I help people learn.

So, I've been playing with this difference in the last day or so. The difference between teaching someone and helping someone learn. Teaching, I think, implies that I have the knowledge and I am giving the knowledge to you. Teaching, educating, training. I think they often imply that I am the one with the knowledge and I am imparting that knowledge to you. But really what I want is for you to learn. I actually want you to learn whether I'm the one teaching you or not, whether I'm the one training you or not. For me, the goal is for you to learn. The goal is for me to learn. And I think when I reframe it as helping other people learn, it feels a lot better. I was talking with a friend earlier today and he said you know I didn't have anyone to teach me this or I was never taught this I said no no you never learned and you never learned you never learned from them and maybe you didn't learn from them because they never learned from someone else, so it's easy to blame the people in the past oh my parents never taught me this or you know my teachers never taught me this well maybe they didn't learn it from someone else and so it was it from someone else or from life in itself.

And so just switching it, I think it makes it more active.

I want other people to learn. I want to learn. I love learning about this stuff. And when I say this stuff, I mean emotions, communication, relationships, apologies, forgiveness.

Grace, anger, joy, all these different emotions, all these different interactions that we have. I love learning about it language i love it and i think that's what i've been hoping to impart to other people not so much that i'm going to impart the knowledge to you but impart the love of learning impart the desire to learn impart the.

Agency to learn, And so, yeah, I think framing it this way helps me so much because I am not so excited to teach you emotional combat, emotional self-defense. I don't know. I don't want to teach it. I want to learn with you. I want to learn, and I would love if you learned from me, learned from what I learned or what I'm learning because it's an ongoing process. And so just really grateful for this reframing. I reframed a little bit on my website for this as well. Not me going out and training, but me learning, trying to learn how to resolve any conflict and love every human.

And share the journey publicly. Share my learning journey publicly.

So it felt like it aligned with who i am and what i love so much or how i've learned to be rather and maybe you can say well i learned this from my my father or my dad and my mom my dad engineer, loves learning about things loves trying to figure out things my mom didn't have a lot of formal education but loved learning things she was obsessed with genealogy oh my goodness like Like she learned so much about family trees and the technology for that and just the relationships and cemeteries and history and so much.

Just that love of learning and those are just kind of some of the, not superficial, but like topical things that they learned, but there are a lot of other things I learned from them.

There's so many other people I've learned from in my life. And I like framing it that way again. Because teaching or training implies maybe an intentionality to it and also a certainty that the person knows what they're doing. I think learning from says that the person doesn't even have to try and we can still learn from them. And the person doesn't know all the answers maybe. We can learn from people's mistakes. I'm not teaching you my mistakes. I'm not teaching you how to do something. It's one of the lessons I'd talk about a lot in these workshops I'd run. It was train the trainers, but it was really like learn with the learners. I don't know. Lead the leaders. And one thing I would say to people, you know, I'd ask them at the end of the workshop if they liked the workshop or say, you know, if you like the way that we did this, or if you're frustrated by it, right? Because some of you, how many of you are frustrated by the way I ran this workshop? And some people would put their hands up. I said, you know what? You took a workshop for one hour and you learned you never want to run a workshop like that or attend one like that again. That's great. You learned that in one hour. What a great opportunity to learn. And so I think this just really aligns with the way that I try to look at the world and the way that I try to deal with education and learning, et cetera. So I'm going to keep it short for today because I'm learning that recording these at night, one is not very fun for me and two is not very fun when I have other people in my life. They're like, I thought you said you were done working an hour ago. So I'm going to end right now and talk to you all tomorrow. Take care.