Trained, Not Taught

My wife changed one word and explained a decade of friction. It also explained how I survived my stroke.

Hi, I’m Michael, and I’m a stroke survivor.

Twenty years ago, I met a young man when we worked for the same company. We kept in touch and ten years later he came to work for a number of years. He was driven and sharp. He had come to Australia as a child from the far side of the Iron Curtain, without the comfortable suburban upbringing I had taken for granted. When he told me, years in, that he now owned his own home and an investment property, and that he chased every opportunity because of the example I set, I was flattered and humbled in equal measure. So, I did what I thought a good boss should do. I trained him. I tried to impart the skills that would smooth the rough edges and let him climb.

When he eventually left, I learned that he had seen it very differently. He told my wife that I had always been harsh with him. That the corrections, this and then that, had felt like bullying. I was genuinely confused. I had never corrected him in front of others. And the things I was correcting, everything from table manners to mindset, were the very things that had been drummed into me on my own way up.

I talked it over with my wife, who sees people more clearly than I do. She said something I have not stopped thinking about since. “You were trained,” she said. “Most people want to be taught.”

It sounds like a small difference. It is an enormous one.

The path that made me

I was trained in the older, harder sense of the word. Years in Japan, working for traditional employers who corrected me relentlessly so that I could fit in. The Royal Military College, Duntroon, and the Australian Army, where standards were not suggestions. Years literally carrying a senior businessman’s briefcase so that I could be in the room, watch, and learn from a proximity that would otherwise have been closed to me. None of it was gentle. All of it was generous, in its way, because at the end I walked away with tools.

You can still see it in something as small as how I dress. People regularly remark that even at the end of a long night, I am still immaculate, tie straight, not a thing out of place. That is not vanity. It is a standard trained so deep that it holds when I am too tired to think about it. Which is exactly the point of training. The tools are there when you have nothing left to consciously give them.

The martial arts taught me something deeper still. People assume the training is the repetitive movements, or being hit in the face, or holding a formal sitting position long after your legs are screaming and never letting it show. That is only the surface. What you are really training is a concentration that cannot be interrupted. You learn to hold your focus while your body is in pain, while something is flying at your head, while every instinct is telling you to flinch. Nothing is allowed to break it.

That is the thing about training. It does not feel like a gift at the time. It feels like friction. The gift arrives years later, when you reach for a tool and find it already in your hand.

Where the tools finally paid off

I found out exactly how sharp those tools were after my stroke.

Relearning to speak is boring, repetitive, humiliating work. So is relearning to use a hand that will not do what you tell it. So is running a business when your brain keeps dropping the thread. There is no soft version of any of it. You do the reps, and you do them again, and you do not stop because it is uncomfortable. That is not a teaching mindset. That is a training mindset, and it is the one that got me through. The hardest years of my early career turned out to be preparation for the hardest year of my life.

So when people ask why I did not simply accept the quieter life the stroke seemed to be offering, part of the honest answer is this. I was trained not to.

The half I still have to learn

But my wife is right, and this is the part I have had to sit with.

What worked on me does not work on everyone, and assuming it should is its own kind of blindness. The young man who felt bullied was not weak. He simply wanted to be taught, supported, brought along, and I handed him the only method I knew, which was the one that had been handed to me. My intent was generous. The impact was not always what I intended. Both of those things are true at once.

The skill I am still learning, later than I should be, is to read which one the person in front of me actually needs. Some people grow under pressure. Others close up under it and open up under encouragement. A good leader can tell the difference.

Because even recovery needs both halves. It needs the training mindset, to do the brutal, boring reps without flinching. And it needs the teaching mindset, the patience and the self-compassion, so that you push through without breaking the person doing the pushing, who this time is you.

I was trained, not taught. It saved my life after the stroke. And I am finally learning, at this late stage, that the other way has its place too.