Monday Motivation - Teaching & Guiding

Happy Monday, Blue Eagle!

This weekend I got to spend some alone time with my 7-year-old daughter. There are not a lot of things we liked to do together. Swimming is one of them but it was waaaayyyyy too hot. Instead, we opted to play a game: Guess Who?

She Lost…

In this game, your opponent draws a card of a person and your job is to guess who the person is. You guess by asking yes or no questions to narrow down the suspects. The best way to play is to ask questions that eliminate half of the people. For example, "is the person a boy?" "does the person have brown hair?" etc.

Except, my daughter doesn't like to play like that. She likes to ask very specific questions. In our first game, she asked, "does your person have an orange beard?"

My answer was, "Yes!" which was amazing because only one person on the board has an orange beard. Her win using this strategy caused her to think I was wrong and she was right. But I am her dad and I need to teach her when to play the odds that favor her. Getting lucky does not mean it's a good strategy.

Twenty games later (and twenty losses for daughter), she wanted to know how I kept winning. Now she was ready to learn. So I taught...

The best first question to ask is, "Does your person's name start with a letter A-G?" For a second-grader looking at pictures of people's faces, this question never crossed her mind... until she cared about winning.

I spent the next 30 minutes teaching my daughter how to think differently, predict how answers might change her strategy, and win. 

She Won!

And then what happened? She won! Multiple times. And we had a blast!

Who are you teaching? Who are you guiding?