I love giving advice. I’m very good at giving advice.
But the worms cured me of my natural tendency to tell others how they should live.
What worms, you ask? Let me tell you the strange tale of psychologist James V. McConnell.
In the 1950s and 1960s, McConnell had a bizarre idea: What if memories could be passed on by eating other creatures?
He tested this on flatworms, training them to associate light with a shock, then slicing them in half to see if their new halves “remembered.” Even weirder, he ground up trained worms and fed them to untrained ones, claiming the new worms learned faster.
Scientists were intrigued—imagine if you could eat a math genius and suddenly understand calculus! But when others tried to replicate his results, they got nothing. By the 1970s, McConnell’s ideas were dismissed as junk science.
McConnell wasn’t just an eccentric scientist—he was also a satirist who blurred the line between serious research and humor. He even became one of the Unabomber’s targets, surviving a 1985 mail bomb attack. Ever the jokester, he later said his biggest regret was not opening the package himself and making bigger headlines.
Piaget’s Take: Why Insight Can’t Be Transferred
If McConnell thought you could just “download” knowledge like a USB drive, psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) would have laughed and said, “Nice try, buddy, but that’s not how learning works.”
Piaget, who studied how children learn, showed that knowledge isn’t something you receive—it’s something you construct from within. The same holds true in transformational coaching: insight can happen in an instant, but it has to be realized, not given.
As a coach, I see this all the time. You can’t give someone an insight, just like you can’t force a child to suddenly grasp a new concept before they’re ready. Insight isn’t something that can be transplanted from one person to another.
To borrow from McConnell’s worms, trying to force insight onto someone is like grinding up your hard-won wisdom and hoping they absorb it. It doesn’t work that way. The best a coach can do is create the conditions for that insight to emerge naturally.
The Coaching Trap: When Questions Become an Interrogation
Most coaches understand that people need to find their own insights, just like Piaget explained. But here’s where we go wrong: we try to speed up the process.
I’ve been in the coaching space for almost six years now. You have no idea how annoying we coaches can be once we discover our tools. We walk around like people who got a hammer for Christmas, seeing nails everywhere.
We are dying to coach someone, anyone, anything. And when coaches get together? It’s even worse.
I once saw a coach ask for recommendations for a virtual assistant in a Facebook group, prefacing her request with: “I’m not looking for coaching on this issue, please. I only want names or agencies.” That’s how you know the coaching world has gone too far.
How do you spot unsolicited coaching? It’s the questions.
- Why did you do that?
- What do you see?
- Is that true?
Because coaches understand that insight comes from within, they think:
💡 “Aha! If I just ask a bunch of tough questions, I’ll force people to understand themselves better!”
Blame Socrates: The OG Annoying Question-Asker
Socrates, the OG Greek philosopher, took questioning to the extreme. He was relentless, poking holes in people’s logic until they realized they didn’t actually know what they were talking about. He believed wisdom started when you admitted you knew nothing.
But here’s where the Socratic method backfires: It makes people defensive. Constant questioning can feel condescending, even arrogant—like the coach holds some superior knowledge and is just waiting for the client to catch up.
The Shift: No More Gotcha Questions
That’s why I stopped giving advice and stopped asking pointed, leading questions.
Now, I just talk to people, with no agenda or stake in their choices. They are, after all, the experts on their own lives.
When I do ask a question, it’s because I genuinely don’t understand what they’re saying—not because I’m trying to “coach” them into an epiphany. My questions come from curiosity, not superiority.
What Coaching Should Feel Like
I like to describe my coaching conversations as two people walking through the forest, noticing things together. It even works for family members and friends.
“Never coach your family,” my first coaching mentor always said. “You can never get enough distance from them to help them well.”
I’ve found that you only need that “distance” if you imagine yourself above others. But something magical happens when you meet people where they are, listen without judgment, and confirm their experiences.
By validating their experiences without judgment, you empower them to uncover their wisdom rather than rely on external solutions.
The Bottom Line: Shut Up and Listen
So, no more advice-giving. No more probing questions. Just listening.
And trust me—it works.
If you’re ready to explore new possibilities, let’s take a walk together. No agenda, no pressure—just curiosity, insight, and the space to notice what’s already there. Reach out, and let’s see what we can discover.