When someone tells others what to do, we may find it directive, unasked advice, or useful assistance in learning something new.
It remains an instruction one can choose to follow or not.
There is nothing in such an instruction that allows to contextualize it or integrate it into a larger scheme.
It is left to the recipient of the instructions to find a way to do more than follow the steps.
That is to figure out, why these individual steps are useful, why this instruction helps the person receiving them or the person giving them, and why carrying these instructions out like that complement a larger scheme.
There are many “why” linked to a “what”.
It is understanding these why that gives the what meaning in the given situation and allows to transpose the meaning to other situations.
One of the main reasons why people will prefer to share the steps is that they are unsure of the different why. They can’t explain the steps they’ve become accustomed to simply reproducing.
It starts with the way people communicate. By using complicated vocabulary and jargon, people create a distance in their communication with each other. It is as if they could raise themselves into competence. One the other person will not dare to question as it would show that they don’t know the “elaborate” vocabulary. It’s a challenge for both, as acknowledging that they don’t know could make them risk feeling like an apprentice or outsider.
Without realizing it, they are competing for status and are afraid they could lose theirs. This could be that they perceive themselves as having to show competence to belong to the group they are in, or that they want to make themselves noticeable as leaders to feel useful.
However, using such a vocabulary keeps them in a rigid frame of mind, which is sad, as the ability to use simple words to explain what they are talking about would enable them to share their understanding in much more ways than the given instructions.
Trying to explain things in simple words, requires hard work. If you want to give it a try, “The Up-Goer Five Text Editor” might be useful for you. It’s a text editor that invites you to only use the thousand most common English words.
Learning the way starts by learning to see the gaps in our explanations, that is to find the vocabulary we use and can’t easily explain or describe.
