Socratic Questioning

Todd Nief's Show

Ah yes, the delightful process of asking obnoxious leading questions. What could be more fulfilling? Well, it turns out that - in order to teach the complex reasoning necessary for something like coaching, simply receiving complicated, theoretical lectures is not enough. Nor is it enough to have a ton of real-life experience. The best bounce back and forth between abstraction and reality and build complicated models of how the world works. And, in order to teach others to do this (like, say, employees at a CrossFit gym), it’s not enough to just lecture at them. Instead, you must engage in pointed questioning that comes from a genuine place of curiosity and that helps clarify reasoning and assumptions. One might call this Socratic questioning in fact...

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Show Notes

• [00:00] How to become an obnoxious person who people don’t want to be around in social situations
• [05:45] How some people build mental models of the world – and how they constantly check their models against both their real life experiences and theories from experts
• [13:52] People only work to solve problems that they know that they have. Everything else is just intellectual entertainment.
• [21:57] How to cultivate a genuine curiosity to guide questioning rather than being a pedantic blowhard