What can Passover teach us about how to be more effective coaches, teachers, trainers, parents, managers, and course creators?
It turns out that the Passover Haggadah imparts a powerful lesson in this regard. The primary commandment of Passover is to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The Torah — the Old Testament — speaks of this commandment in four different places. In each place, it speaks about what to say to a child asks about this event — or what to say even if a child doesn’t ask.
The authors of the Passover Haggadah used the construct of the Four Sons — or Four Children — as a narrative hook. Each passage from the Torah is ascribed to one of these Four Children:
The Wise child asks about the particularities and distinctions between various types of laws.
The Wicked child asks “what does this service mean to you?”
The Simple child asks “what is this?”
And the One Who Doesn’t Know How to Ask doesn’t ask anything at all.
The Lesson on How to Be a More Effective Teacher
The instructions for how to respond to the children — what to say, and how to tell them the story of the Exodus — differ based on which child is being addressed.
This lesson has relevance to anyone who seeks to teach anything to another person:
Always meet your student (or client) where they are.
Or as my coaching mentor, Joanna Lindenbaum, teaches in her Sacred Depths Practitioner Training:
Coach the what based on the who.
It’s simple, yet profound, advice.
Different people learn differently. We can be more effective as coaches, trainers, teachers, managers, and leaders when we identify where someone is in terms of their existing knowledge, their capacity to understand and apply concepts, their processing speed, and their nervous system capacity to absorb more details.
When we consider how the person in front of us best learns and integrates information, we can tailor our approach to best meet their needs.
To be most effective at training, teaching, and coaching, we want to meet the student or client where they are.
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