How can you help people to find the solutions to their problems by themselves?

Illustration of two persons taking a coffee together

My two cents

In short: Make people give advice to their twin.

That's a technique that I learned from a Motivational Interviewing course I followed. When someone has a problem, instead of giving them an answer about how to solve it present to them a made-up character that has a similar problem but works in another company and has a different name. You can ask:

What would you recommend to Johnny to do in order to fix his issue?

This exercise of asking the person to give advice to someone else really helps people to come up with solutions and hear themselves explaining the value of these solutions.

Because often people already have the knowledge of what they should do. But what they miss is the motivation to do it. The good news is that one way to build the motivation of doing an action is to hear yourself saying how good it would be to do that action.

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