Back in 2008 I had the opportunity to join Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and go through a day long program called Forum Training with the excellent Ellie Byrd. In addition to meeting a number of great people, the most valuable education to me was learning about the Gestalt Protocol.
The Gestalt Protocol, in it’s simplest form, says to share personal experiences for the purpose of giving advice only using ‘I’ and never ‘You.’ Most often, when people give personal advice based on their experiences, it’s in the form of “You should do X because that’s what worked for me.” Instead, remove the use of ‘You” and reword it with ‘I’ so that it’s like “I did X and here’s what I learned.”
When giving advice, especially from a person that’s in a position of power or more experience, it’s too easy to start telling the other person how to do things, even while they lack the details and context of the situation, beyond what they’ve been told. In addition, when receiving the advice, it becomes less valuable when the advice comes across as directives without the corresponding experience and learnings behind it.
By following the Gestalt Protocol and using ‘I’ instead of ‘You’ when giving advice, it becomes more about experience sharing and letting the other person understand what did, and didn’t work, from a similar situation in the past, without passing judgement on the specifics of the current scenario. Personal experiences, delivered via the use of ‘I’ make for much better sharing and mentoring.
Mentors would do well to follow the Gestalt Protocol and focus on sharing personal experiences.
David Cummings on Startups 
HI David, Ellie is a fantastic EO/YPO trainer. We used her for our YPO Forum retreat last summer. I agree that the concept of the Gestalt Protocol is one that applies equally to general business coaching/meetings, as it does Forum. It takes some practice as everyone has such an embedded habit of saying “YOU should do this based on MY experience in xyz…”.