How to coach a builder

So far I’ve mostly written about the individual work of building oneself into a builder. But if we want to fill our world with builders, we also need to know how to encourage and support this work of self-creation in others. 

The idea of coaching someone to build themselves may seem paradoxical: how can we coach someone else to do what, by definition, they can only do for themselves? 

This is not a mere matter of semantics: it poses real, ongoing challenges for any mentor, educator, parent, manager, or leader who wants to inspire or empower people’s agency. If you’ve ever tried to build an organizational culture around values like independence, autonomy, or first principles thinking, you know how easily such values can degenerate into empty slogans, leaving people without direction or accountability. Rather than take initiative to investigate and solve problems within the organization, they start to complain and externalize; rather than conceive ideas of their own and execute on them, t…