Short lecture-style video (monologue) by Jim Johnson arguing that teaching the reason — the "why" — behind actions is more important than teaching only what or how to do them. The speaker warns that rote instruction creates mimics who fail when conditions change and emphasizes understanding mechanisms, psychology, and process to gain insight and adapt methods while preserving goals.
Why am I doing it that way? The why is the most important part. I can teach a lot of people what to do, I can teach a lot of people how to do it, but all I'm doing there is I'm creating mimics or parrots. In other words, they can say what it is I taught them to say, or they can do the thing I taught them to do, but they don't understand why they're doing it in context and in relationship. And so with anything gets off kilter at all, it throws them completely off. So we have to take into consideration at all times in our training, what are we doing, how do we do it, and why are we doing it the way that we're doing it. And you can't teach somebody why something's being done unless you actually understand the mechanism. Psychology, the process. All these things that are super important. Because what they do is they give you something really valuable. They give you this thing called insight. And if I have insight into why I'm doing something, if I get thrown off track at all, I can now start to make some decisions of going, hey, I know where we're at and what we're doing. I know why I'm doing it and why this is important. And if I have to say different words and do it a different way to accomplish the same goal, I'm still goal because I understand what it was that I was trying to accomplish.
