A buzz spreads through the city of Athens as news of a prophecy ripples through every corner. The oracle has spoken: Socrates, a local philosopher, is the wisest man in Greece.
When word reaches him, he doesn’t believe it. Not in a ‘I didn’t prepare a speech’ kind of way. He literally does not believe it. ‘Me, the wisest? Surely there has been some sort of mistake. I don’t know anything.’
Equipped with his insatiable curiosity, Socrates sets out to disprove the oracle. He starts questioning Athens’ most respected thinkers, poets, and politicians, investigating everyone with a reputation for wisdom.
When the so-called wise men he encounters appear to be mostly ‘full of themselves’, bragging about their boundless knowledge and endless wisdom, he realizes that true wisdom comes from recognizing our own ignorance. Proving the oracle right.
Socratic coaching
Socrates realized that wisdom isn’t about hoarding endless knowledge, it’s about recognizing that our knowledge has limits. By straight up defying the oracle and setting out to disprove the prophecy, he created a method (now called the Socratic method) that everybody can benefit from today.
The Socratic method acknowledges that to get down to deeper truths, we need dialogue. A conversation where the listener is probing and questioning the talker, to uncover deeper thinking and understanding.
Instead of trying to think our way through our challenges alone, Socrates recognizes we need another person on the outside of ourselves to help guide our thinking process.
Today, the Socratic method is mostly associated with teaching, debate, and discussion. If however we add a supportive attitude to its core of questioning, we can use it to help other people think out loud and clarify their thinking.
This is what I do as a coach, and I feel I owe a lot to Socrates.
In newsletter 16 and 17, I write about the difference between listening and advice. Socrates shows that this comes down to humility. Not believing you’re the wisest means you’re the wisest.
This requires being humble enough to step out of the expert role and acknowledging our ignorance, realizing that the person you’re talking to is, and will always be, the expert in their own life.
Being ignorant doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions though, on the contrary.
How to be (helpfully) ignorant
Gleaning from the Socratic method, the following are some helpful principles to pursue in a supportive conversation.
Ask open-ended questions: Pose questions that cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no" to encourage deeper thinking.
Challenge assumptions: Identify and question underlying assumptions in their responses.
Encourage self-reflection: Prompt them to think carefully about their beliefs and ideas.
Call out inconsistencies: Examine the coherence of their ideas and challenge contradictions.
Coaches evoke, elicit, and ‘pull from’ people instead of dropping knowledge on them. But you don’t need to be a coach to apply these principles.
You can be someone who helps others think by listening carefully, asking evoking questions that make them dig deeper, and putting their half-baked thoughts up for reflection. So they can examine them and reach a greater level of clarity.
And maybe you too will be the wisest without even knowing it.
This takes me back to being 1L. The Socratic method struck fear in the hearts of would-be lawyers, even though 15 years ago, it wasn’t as caustic as it was half a century ago. It’s application has been popularized as a tool to encourage preparedness, not necessarily seeking.
This is a good reminder that ultimately Socrates’ gift to us was seeking—a reminder that we don’t know it all.
Excellent Rik. This reminds me of the book, "The Coaching Habit" by Michael Bungay Stanier. He says that having someone asking you what they should do is like cheese in a mousetrap. If you take the bait, you both wind up trapped.