The Relief of Being Teachable
- Aug 17
- 6 min read
Written by Taiye Aluko, Relationship Coach
Taiye Aluko helps individuals and couples find purpose in life and happiness in marriage. An excellent encourager, she is passionate about seeing people unlock their personal power and attain the best version of themselves.
Lately, I have been sitting with a question I don't have a tidy answer for. What actually makes someone teachable? Not in the sense of being agreeable or easy to manage, but in the deeper sense of staying open enough to keep growing, especially in the relationships that matter most.
I did not arrive at this question from a theory. I arrived at it by noticing how differently it feels to be near different kinds of people.
Some conversations leave me tight. Not because the other person was loud or unkind. Some of them were gentle, even soft-spoken. But underneath the exchange was a subtle conviction that they already knew what they needed to know. Any new information felt like a threat to be managed rather than a gift to be received. I would leave those conversations carrying something heavier than I walked in with.
Some conversations leave me loose. Someone hears something hard about themselves and says, "I hadn't thought of it that way." No defensiveness. No scrambling to explain why the observation was wrong. Just a pause, and then an opening. I leave those conversations lighter, almost like I have exhaled something I did not know I was holding.
I keep coming back to that contrast. Tightness on one side. Relief on the other. I am wondering if that contrast is really what teachability comes down to.
As a marriage counsellor, I see this contrast play out in almost every session, though rarely in the clean way I just described. More often, both people are bracing. They walk in already defending, already anticipating what is about to be said about them, both shoulders up before a word is spoken. In those cases, counselling is not about identifying who is right. It is about slowly showing each of them what it might feel like to lower the armour first and letting them discover that the room does not fall apart when they do.
It is not about intelligence
Here is what surprised me most as I sat with this. The people who struggle most with being teachable are often not the ones who know the least. They are often the ones who have been right before. Competence can quietly become armour. When you have solved problems, built a career, held a marriage together for years, it becomes tempting to trust your own conclusions more than the moment in front of you.
So the tightness is not always loud arrogance. More often it looks like silent confidence. A nod that says, "I hear you," while nothing you say is actually being let in. That version is harder to spot in ourselves, because it does not feel like pride. It feels like confidence. It feels like having already done the work. But confidence without curiosity calcifies into something rigid. Rigid things do not bend. They break.
I think of the couples I have worked with over the years where one spouse says some version of, "I have been doing this longer than you. I know how this works." Sometimes that is even true. But the moment expertise stops making room for new information, it stops serving the relationship and starts protecting an image. The person is no longer in the room with their spouse. They are defending a version of themselves they built a long time ago.
Curiosity is a daily choice
I used to think of curiosity as something people either had or didn't. A personality trait, like being outgoing or careful with money. I no longer believe that. Curiosity is closer to a decision made each day anew, sometimes each hour. It is the choice to ask, even when I already have an answer, "What am I not seeing here?"
In marriage, this shows up in small, ordinary moments. My spouse says something that stings, and I have a choice at that moment. I can explain why it should not have stung. Or I can get curious about why it did. One of those closes the conversation. The other opens it.
After more than two decades of marriage, I have learned that remaining curious about the person I married is its own form of respect. People do not stay still. Neither do I. The moment I decide I already know someone completely is the moment I stop actually seeing them.
I have watched this play out with couples who have been together thirty or forty years, long enough that you would think all the surprises had run out. Yet the ones who are still discovering each other, still asking, "Who are you becoming?" are almost always the ones who describe their marriage as alive rather than settled. Curiosity, it turns out, does not run out with time. It only runs out when we stop offering it.
The fear underneath the armour
If tightness is not really about arrogance, then what is it about? I have come to believe it is almost always about fear. Not fear of the other person, but concern about what being wrong might mean about us.
Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that not knowing was dangerous. That admitting a gap in our knowledge made us smaller, or less capable, or less safe in the eyes of the people we needed to keep loving us. So we built a kind of certainty that had less to do with actually being right and more to do with never being caught not knowing.
I say this with compassion, because I recognise it in myself. There have been seasons in my own marriage where being corrected felt like being diminished, and I met that feeling with defensiveness instead of curiosity. It took time, and no small amount of humility, to realise that the fear underneath my tightness wasn't really about the disagreement in front of me. It was about an old story I was carrying, one that said if I am wrong about this, I might be wrong about more than I can bear to look at.
Naming that fear does not make it disappear. But it does make it easier to recognise in the moment, and recognising it is often the first step toward loosening its grip.
Where the tightness comes from
I do not think unteachability starts as arrogance. I think it starts as protection. Somewhere along the way, we learned that being wrong was dangerous. That not knowing made us small, or unworthy, or vulnerable in ways we could not afford. So we built a kind of armour. Certainty became safety.
For a while, that armour works. But past a certain point, it stops protecting and starts isolating. The very thing meant to keep us safe becomes what keeps people at a distance. Tight shoulders. Guarded conversations. A slow loneliness that certainty was never supposed to bring.
Relief, by contrast, costs something up front. It asks us to lower the armour before we know how the other person will respond. But what I have noticed, both in my own marriage and in the couples I sit with, is that relief tends to be contagious. When one person softens enough to say, "Tell me more," the other person's shoulders come down too.
What teachability is not
I will be careful here, because I don't want to leave the impression that being teachable means agreeing with everything, accepting every criticism as truth, or losing your sense of self to stay open. That is not teachability. That is closer to self-erasure, and it carries its own kind of damage.
A teachable person can still say, "I hear you, and I do not agree." What makes them teachable is not that they bend to every opinion. It is that they remain willing to sit with the possibility that they might not have the full picture, even while holding their own ground. Teachability and conviction are not opposites. The healthiest people I know hold both at once, a settled sense of who they are alongside a genuine willingness to keep learning who they might become.
The question worth sitting with
I am not going to end this with a list of ways to become more teachable. That would be its own kind of lecture, and lectures rarely change anyone.
Instead, I want to leave you with the question I keep asking myself. Where, right now, am I bracing instead of breathing? What would happen if, just once, I let the breath out before I had all the answers?
Teachability, I am learning, is not a trait you either have or lack. It is a posture you keep choosing, moment to moment, especially in the relationships that matter most. Every time you choose it, something in the room, and in you, gets to loosen.
Read more from Taiye Aluko
Taiye Aluko, Relationship Coach
Taiye Aluko is your guide to personal and professional transformation. With over two decades of counselling experience, she understands that our personal and professional lives are deeply intertwined. Taiye helps individuals navigate these interconnected spheres, empowering them to achieve clarity, fulfillment, and lasting success.
