Better Aged Care Professionals Ask Better Questions. Lindsay Jr. Tighe

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      I ask in advance for your understanding in the explanations I am about to share with you; as they may at times appear to be simplistic in their nature. I recognise that rarely is anything clear-cut in life, and usually there are many grey areas; however, if you can bear with me in my explanations, I hope to be able to clarify some important points that will enable you to glean more understanding about the key distinctions between the two approaches of ‘telling’ and ‘asking’.

      Let’s start by talking about some of the hats (roles) that you will relate to within your life, ones that belong more at the ‘telling’ end of our TELLER—ASKER line. These explanations relate to roles that we play in our lives generally, and I am certain that you will relate to them in many aspects of your life and work, even if you don’t necessarily adopt the name that I have given to them.

      The teacher/trainer/educator

      The first hat I’d like to explore is the one I refer to as teacher/trainer/educator, which is a hat that all of you will be familiar with. This hat is very much about being able to impart knowledge or a skill to enable others to learn and grow and be more knowledgeable. For you to be able to wear this hat, the prerequisite has to be that you have the knowledge and/or skills in the first place.

      This is an important hat to wear, in that it enables your clients to learn and be more aware and informed. Indeed, if I look back on my life, I absolutely acknowledge I wouldn’t be the person I am today without some great teachers, trainers and educators sharing their knowledge and skills with me. Consequently, I am not invalidating the role of the teacher/trainer/educator hat; I intend to make you more conscious of it so that you can make more informed choices going forward.

      The expert

      Let’s look at another hat that we wear, and one I am sure you all relate to within your lives: being ‘the expert’. What I mean by this is that you are a person who considers yourself to have the best knowledge and advice about certain situations or things and believes that your role is to offer this knowledge or advice to help people. There is a sense that you do know best, and this doesn’t necessarily come from an egotistical place; it is likely to be a genuine belief that, given your education, role and experience, your opinion really is right. I can recall many people telling me that they are aware that they often converse wearing the expert hat in the absolute knowledge that they are right about things, and frequently they are!

      Professionals who wear the expert hat frequently will do so out of real concern and care for their clients, often in the belief that if they don’t provide this knowledge or advice there will be adverse consequences. Indeed, there are often situations where you feel you have a duty of care for your client; in other words it is often worn from a protective space. Very often a habit develops over the years that you will be the advice-giver and the expert, and your clients will approach you with an automatic expectation that you will wear this hat in your role. I have had many people share with me that they readily recognise this role and, without realising it, have even become relied upon to be the provider of answers and advice. It is clear that whilst reliance is not a good thing, being available as an expert to your clients will be one way to enable their living healthier and safer lives through sharing your wisdom and knowledge. Therefore the expert hat is again a valid one to wear, but I should emphasise at the right time and in the right way, which will be explored further very soon!

      The mentor

      Whilst I acknowledge that there are many more hats that we wear, the final one I would like to consider here is that of the mentor. There are many ways to describe what a mentor does, but over the years I have settled on there being two clear components to the mentoring roles. The first is that the mentor is there to support another person in their development, and to do this there is an expectation that they will share their wisdom and knowledge from their journey so far. The other feature that defines a mentor is that they have ‘been there and done that’; their role is to guide another person so as to enable them to successfully deal with the challenges that they are confronted with on their journey.

      The mentor is a role model and generally someone to whom you aspire. Certainly, when I have utilised mentors in the past I have had a huge amount of respect for them. It has been my desire that, one day and in some way, I would be like them, and my expectations were that they would show me how to reach my goal. Currently, I have a mentor who is a Professor of Philosophy, and whilst I don’t aspire to reach that position, one day I would like to become a wiser person and trust that through the mentoring I receive I am on the road to achieving that aim.

      To reiterate, the role of a mentor is a very valuable one that can have a profound impact on people, particularly in their learning, growth and development. We frequently act as informal mentors to others, often without even realising it, and we may also take on more formal recognised mentoring roles with staff or people in more structured settings. Again, it should be emphasised that there is a prerequisite to wearing the mentoring hat in that you will be expected to bring your expertise, knowledge, wisdom and ideas to the table.

      We have explored, then, a number of roles that sit traditionally at the ‘teller’ end of our line, and I trust that you can see that in some form or another the role of a professional takes on all of these aspects. Whilst I absolutely accept that aged care professionals who fulfil their roles well won’t operate entirely from the ‘teller’ space, I ask you to bear with me as I continue to approach these explanations from a purely ‘black and white’ perspective.

      The ‘asker’ space

      Let’s now go to the other end of our line – we are now in the ‘asker’ or ‘questioner’ space. I invite you for a moment to think about what is different now that we are at the other end of the line. Whilst we could argue that there are many things that are different in the ‘asker’ role, I believe that there are two things that fundamentally set it apart from the ‘teller’. One is to do with what we believe about the person, and the second concerns what we, in theory, need to bring to the table.

      Having thought about it for a few seconds, I hope that you can see that firstly we believe the person with whom we are interacting, in this case your client, has knowledge, wisdom and expertise, and it is our role as the ‘asker’ to draw it out of them. To create a visual representation of this in your mind, please imagine that at the ‘telling’ end of the line you are using your hands to gesture a movement of rolling outwards, which represents the sharing of your knowledge and expertise. At the ‘asking’ end of the line, please imagine your hands moving in the opposite direction – a movement rolling towards you, which I think beautifully represents the role here as a Potentialiser to draw out that knowledge, wisdom and expertise in your clients.