Do you sometimes find yourself ‘telling’ someone to do something and wish, deep in your heart, that you could let them make their own mistakes or just be themselves? Do you watch other people ‘telling’ and think that you’d never do that yourself?

As M Scott Peck says in The Road Less Travelled we have something called an ego boundary. When we’re babies we think we control the world: we’re hungry – someone feeds us; we see our fingers – they move under our control; we smile at people – they smile back. Then, when we reach the age of about 2 years old, someone says ‘no’ to us for the first time. My word don’t we get cross about suddenly finding we don’t have ultimate control? That’s why people talk about the terrible twos. They realize they can’t control everything.

That inner belief that we should be able to control everything in our sphere never really leaves us, particularly when we grow important enough to be ‘responsible’ for others. Parents try to control their children, bosses try to control their workers, husbands/wives try to control their spouses.

Students of transactional analysis will be familiar with the models of different relationships: parent-child, adult-adult. Two children together will do little more than play, two people trying to ‘parent’ each other they’ll just compete to be top dog and achieve nothing. If one person acts as a parent the other will assume the role of the child and be completely subservient to the ‘parent’ bringing nothing to the relationship. The adult – adult relationship is the most balanced and effective. Both partners contribute their skills and thoughts to any task.

Our desire to control causes us to want to ‘parent’ others and ‘tell’ them what to do. But everyone has their own skills opinions, knowledge and perspective. As soon as they feel they are being dictated to they will resist or contribute the minimum they think they can get away with. In the military, as in lots of other hierarchies, there are lots of people who believe that they have the right to rely on their rank or position to ‘tell’ others. Even in the military it’s a bit of a myth that you have to be able to order people around. Orders only really applied when large bodies of men were needed to react as one like parts of a machine – rifles providing a weight of fire before machine guns were invented – sailors trimming the sails on fighting ships. No thought was required. It’s one of the reasons bureaucracies are so inefficient: no jobs require action without thought. If the expediency is there the inner adult in everyone will understand when a task is essential, particularly if they are treated as an adult. A friend of mine, a senior officer in the British Army, used to spend time talking to his sergeants about why they had to walk up and down the road in Afghanistan even though it was incredibly dangerous and seemed largely pointless. By obtaining their ‘buy-in’ he got them to approach the task with greater enthusiasm and effort.

The more emotional capital in a relationship the greater the chance that it will become parent-child: one telling, one resisting. On top of this, when someone sees a problem in a relationship they try and control others before they try to control themselves.

The only thing we can control is ourselves and inanimate objects in our direct control. Try and remember this whenever you’re tempted to ‘tell’ someone to do something or how to do something.

Whenever you see how someone else can make their life easier try one of the following:

Offer an idea as how someone else, not connected with the relationship, solved a similar problem.

Offer an idea how you solved that problem but show why it worked for you and how you got to that idea caveating the differing circumstances: “this worked for me but I did have….”

Lead them by the metaphorical hand through their own thought processes until they reach their own ‘a-ha’ moment.