You Can't Make Someone Learn: Moving from Control to Influence
What happens when you care deeply about helping someone learn, but they simply aren’t engaging?
In this episode of Life = Choices, Choices = Life, Kim Olver explores one of the most frustrating truths in education, parenting, coaching, supervision, and relationships:
You can teach someone, but you can’t make them learn.
Kim explains the difference between teaching and learning, why trying harder to control another person can actually move us away from influence, and how Choice Theory® offers a more effective way to think about motivation and responsibility.
Rather than asking, “How do I make them learn?” Kim encourages us to ask a different question: What conditions can I help create that will make learning more likely?
That shift opens the door to looking at the relationship, relevance, respect, meaningful choice, fear of failure, competing needs, and the many factors that affect whether someone is ready to engage.
Kim also explores why compliance is not the same as learning. A person may complete an assignment, follow instructions, or produce the behavior we want because of pressure, rewards, or consequences, but that doesn’t necessarily mean real learning has taken place. Real learning requires participation.
It happens when the learner thinks about the information, questions it, connects it to something they already know, tests it, applies it, and makes it their own.
The same principle applies outside the classroom. You may know exactly what would help your adult child. You may have advice that could save a friend months of heartache. You may explain something to your partner and wonder why they don’t see what seems obvious to you.
But caring doesn't give us control.
Sometimes the most respectful thing we can do is offer what we know, create the best conditions we can, and allow the other person the agency to decide what to do with it.
In this episode, Kim discusses:
- The difference between teaching and learning
- Why you cannot control another person’s behavior
- How influence differs from coercion
- What conditions can support learning
- The role of relationship, relevance, respect, and meaningful choice
- Why compliance is not the same as learning
- Learner agency and personal responsibility
- How Choice Theory helps clarify what belongs to the teacher and what belongs to the learner
- Why this same principle applies to parenting, coaching, supervision, and relationships
- How Mental Freedom approaches information as invitational rather than prescriptive
Questions to Consider
- Am I doing what I reasonably can to create conditions in which learning can occur?
- Am I taking responsibility for something that ultimately belongs to the learner?
- Am I trying to influence, or am I trying to control?
- Does the person I’m trying to teach understand why the information matters?
- Am I allowing enough room for the learner to make the information their own?
Key Takeaway
You can teach. You can encourage. You can influence. You can invite. But learning? That belongs to them.
