Thank you Neel! These are great points. It is very helpful that you wrote some concrete questions people might ask others to get them to take action.
Regarding 1: I would say the butt-kicking I got was pretty similar to what you referred as “socratic butt-kicking”. The person I talked to did ask several questions and poked around before they decided to be more direct. So one could start in more of a coach role before acting like a parent. I think what helped not to get defensive when they became direct was that they genuinely conveyed having my best interest at heart, which fostered trust between us very quickly.
Regarding 2: This has worked similarly for a specific independent project I started. I had all these fuzzy ideas of something I wanted to do and the person made a bunch of notes while I talked (in a very unstructured way), asked several questions and set accountability systems for me. This made the next steps to take as well as the specific motivation behind the project very clear.
Thank you Neel! These are great points. It is very helpful that you wrote some concrete questions people might ask others to get them to take action.
Regarding 1: I would say the butt-kicking I got was pretty similar to what you referred as “socratic butt-kicking”. The person I talked to did ask several questions and poked around before they decided to be more direct. So one could start in more of a coach role before acting like a parent. I think what helped not to get defensive when they became direct was that they genuinely conveyed having my best interest at heart, which fostered trust between us very quickly.
Regarding 2: This has worked similarly for a specific independent project I started. I had all these fuzzy ideas of something I wanted to do and the person made a bunch of notes while I talked (in a very unstructured way), asked several questions and set accountability systems for me. This made the next steps to take as well as the specific motivation behind the project very clear.