Should I Address This?
Picture the scenario: a participant in a financial literacy workshop asks the facilitator about investing. Should the facilitator answer that question?
Most curricula have no real answer beyond “yes, financial literacy includes investing, so let’s talk about it.” That’s the wrong instinct, or at least an incomplete one. The right first move isn’t to answer the investing question. It’s to assess three things before responding at all: is this person currently housing stable, are they facing any immediate financial threat, and what’s their actual timeline. Someone stably housed with reliable income asking about investing is a very different conversation than someone asking the same question while facing eviction next week, where the honest answer might be that investing isn’t the relevant topic yet, emergency assistance is.
This sounds obvious once it’s stated. In practice, almost no curriculum builds in this pause. The instinct is to answer the question asked, not to check whether it’s the question that actually serves the person asking it.
We train our educators to run this exact check before answering, every time a participant raises a topic outside that week’s immediate focus.
I walk through this decision process in more depth in this week’s episode.
Has anyone ever asked you a well-intentioned question that, if you’d answered it directly, would have actually taken you further from what they needed?
Author: Sandra Roussel
Copyright © 2009-2026 Sandra Roussel. Reproduction and distribution of all materials without written permission is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.