I had a meeting I wasn’t looking forward to today. It wasn’t a tough topic or a tough personality that made me apprehensive, I was apprehensive because the meeting was called because the person’s boss made an off-hand remark about a technology to incorporate and I was the checkmarks to her list.

So in order to get myself psyched to do a good job I also started thinking about how else I could benefit from this invitation to back my technology dump truck up to her loading dock. Real mature? Real experience.

Today I showed this person around the requested product. I adjusted the pace as my learner showed some uncertainty of the steps. I asked open ended questions to informally check her understanding. I asked to reproduce the entire process and demonstrated pretty good wait time (for me).

And once we were done with the tool, we checked to make sure what she now knew met her needs to demonstrate compliance to her boss. I asked some questions which generated many future possibilities for a more integrated approach (which honestly was about meeting my needs). I did my most reflective listening, this was close to dead-on reciprocal teaching. As a way to summarize, I reviewed dates, my action items, what she would do on her part.

And then, after some of my best teaching so far this week…..

Her parting words to me, “I want you to know I really do like technology. I just don’t have time to learn it.”

Arrow through the heart.
I just taught you, you just learned.
And we weren’t talking about technology anyway. We we’re talking about teaching, effective teaching techniques and amplifying those techniques.

This happens more often than I like. I take comfort in the fact that I unloaded my dump truck at least.