How to Stop Nagging and Start Teaching episode artwork

EPISODE · Aug 1, 2026 · 6 MIN

How to Stop Nagging and Start Teaching

from The School of Life · host tscol

Nagging is one of the most understandable but counterproductive patterns of behaviour – that kicks in when we have failed to teach someone what we want and are feeling tired and bruised emotionally. But if we really want others to change, there is no alternative but to gather our strengths and try to convey information in a way that can be understood by someone else. Enjoying our Youtube videos? Get full access to all our audio content, videos, and thousands of thought-provoking articles, conversation cards and more with The School of Life Subscription: https://t.ly/iQDLh Be more mindful, present and inspired. Get the best of The School of Life delivered straight to your inbox: https://t.ly/Qpplr FURTHER READING “Nagging is the dispiriting, unpleasant, counter-productive but wholly understandable and poignant version of a hugely noble ambition: the desire to change other people. There is so much we might fairly want to change about them. We’re an entirely imperfect lot. And so we want them to be more self-aware, punctual, generous, reliable, introspective, resilient, communicative, profound… At home, we want them to focus more on the sink, the children, the bins, the money and the need to put the phone down and look up. At a macro dimension, we want them to think more about the suffering of encaged animals, the destruction of our habitat and the iniquities of capitalism. We are, most of us, very far from our ideal selves – and at the level of the species, come close to an evolutionary error. The desire to change people is no pathology; it’s a clear-sighted recognition of human wickedness…” You can read more on this and other subjects here: https://goo.gl/9gqCd6 MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Watch more films on RELATIONSHIPS in our playlist: http://bit.ly/TSOLrelationships SOCIAL MEDIA Feel free to follow us at the links below: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theschooloflifelondon/ X: https://twitter.com/TheSchoolOfLife Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theschooloflifelondon/ CREDITS Produced in collaboration with: Steve Kirby https://stevekirby.co.uk/ https://vimeo.com/stevekirby #TheSchoolOfLife Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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