There cannot be right thinking and right action without right speech. Buddha
The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. The Beginner’s Mind The goal of every helper must be to first understand the person whom they serve. This requires a process of engaging that person in a kind of communication in which the person can and will share their innermost thoughts from which you can infer in a kind of retro engineering of their inner logic. Once the helper understands the inner logic of the person they are serving, they become capable of helping that person either change the inner logic or find better behaviors to serve their goals. The greatest barrier to understanding the inner logic of another person is our own inner logic. It is our inner logic that suggests that we ‘have the right way’. We have a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice, without having taken the time to really understand on what basis the person seeking help is making his/her decisions. Communication is the most important skill in life. As we communicate we give information about the world as we ‘see’ it. But our reality is not the ‘real world’ it is merely our perception of it. Our experience of the world is experience of an interpretation. What is often not understood is that we communicate by being – we do not need to signal is any way. People make meaning out of their experiences. Thus, just seeing you, may trigger many thoughts [meanings] that influence the way the relationships is going to go. In the same way, the client, by just being, influences your thinking, and that meaning is only yours, it has no real connection to the client except in your mind.
“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” Anais Nin
So the first responsibility of the helper is to place his or her own inner logic aside and seek to understand the unique inner logic of the client. This will require a degree of ‘mindfulness’ – a constant observation of what is going on in your own mind – and a constant return to the focus on the client and his or her inner state. It is not how many times you fall off the bicycle, but how many time you get on. Do not castigate yourself for interjecting your own thoughts, just put them away when they occur and get back to your client. The overriding concern is to seek to understand by listening to the other person without projecting your own home movie onto the other person. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own inner logic, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives. When such thoughts occur, you will need to ‘catch’ them so that you can put them aside and refocus. This takes practice. The second major focus is to enable the client to learn mindfulness as well. The client needs to learn to think about thinking. Few people ever become consciously aware of their own inner workings. By asking the client to explain the meaning of specific statements, they begin, perhaps for the first time, to think about their thinking. For example, if a client says: “She told me to do that”, who is she? You may think you know. The client may also think s/he knows. But on second thought ‘she’ may have a different meaning when s/he [the client] thinks about it. In a similar way, if a client says: “I always do it that way”, what happens if you ask what would happen if s/he didn’t do it that way. The client may never have considered the consequences of changing the behavior, or at least not considered the consequences for a long time. Generalizations require consideration – not challenge. To challenge is to operate from your own inner logic. To ask the client to consider is operating from his or her own inner logic. Finally, there are certain distortions that will come up in the conversation. We all use them. The client says: “My mother is the Devil” – and uses the fantasy character ‘the Devil’ descriptively. What does this mean to the client? What is the Devil in the client’s theory of meaning? It may or may not be the same as yours. Learning to ask questions about the client’s own thinking requires that the client think about his or her thinking in order to answer. Since ninety-five [95%] percent of what we do it automatic, including ongoing self-talk, it is important that the client learn to ‘catch’ these thoughts and analyze them. S/he too will need to learn to become mindful. The real key to your influence with the client is your example, your actual conduct. Your example flows naturally out of who you truly are. Your character is constantly radiating, communicating. From it, I instinctively trust or distrust you and your efforts. What you are shouts so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say. Emerson When another person speaks, we’re usually listening at one of four levels. • We may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all. • We may be pretending. • We may practice selective listening, hearing only certain points of the conversation. • Or we may even practice attentive listening, paying attention and focusing energy on the words that are being said. But few of us practice empathic listening with the specific intent to understand. Empathic listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. It involves much more than registering, reflecting or even understanding the words that are said. Communications experts estimate that only 07% of our communication is represented by the words we say. Another 38% is represented by our sounds. And 55% by our body language. You must listen for meaning and the emotional value connected to it. You listen for behavior. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives and interpretation, you deal with the reality inside another person’s head and heart. You’re listening to understand. Empathic listening is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways: • we evaluate – either we agree or disagree; • we probe – we ask questions from our own frame of reference; • we advise – we give counsel from our own frame of reference; or • we interpret – we try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on our own motives and behavior. When you evaluate everything before it is fully explained, what are you evaluating? Probing is playing twenty questions – it controls and invades. It is also logical, and the language of logic is different from the language of sentiment and emotion. Often when people are really given a chance to open up, they are able to unravel their own problems and the solutions become clear to them in the process. Too often, the expert is ready to provide a solution. Our interpretation, even if it is the right one, has not helped the client learn how to address his/her own solutions. Only the client can determine whether s/he is even going to implement the solution, so their participation in finding it is critical. At other times, a person might really need additional perspective and help. The more that this help is offered in the context of training the client to learn how to think through problems towards solutions, the more effective your modeling will be. The Feuerstein construct of mediated learning experience, in which the teacher helps the child think about what s/he is thinking and shares his or her own mindful internal states is appropriate here. The key is to genuinely seek the welfare of the person, to let the person get to the problem and the solution at his own pace and time. Layer upon layer – it’s like peeling an onion until you get to the soft inner core. The client must trust that when you finally find out what the real issues are, you will not become punishing. Being amoral in regard to clients is not ignoring the morality of behavior – it is setting it aside at least until you understand fully the meaning of the immorality to the client. If the client sees the behavior as immoral and seeks your sanction for it, you should be clear to indicate that the behavior is immoral, even though the client may not be. You may need to separate the client from the behavior, particularly if the client is too immature to fully absorb the meaning of the immorality. On the other hand, if the client is truly and deliberately acting in an evil way, you will need to assert that the behavior is inappropriate and that you cannot, and will not, allow it to continue without consequences. At this point, the client will need to determine whether your trust in him/her is worth changing behavior for. However, often the client will see the behavior just as immoral as you do, but not have the solution as to how to replace the behavior. Perhaps they feel pressure from peers, teachers or parents to act in these ways. Until you know how the client feels about the behaviors, you may be acting in a way that indicates that you don’t care about the person because s/he is immoral and you become a person who is no longer able to help with the problem. You are only a source of help if you are truly there for the client, even when s/he is not. Maturity is a balance between courage and consideration. Seeking to understand requires consideration; seeking to be understood requires courage. Your character, your relationship and then the logic of your presentation, who you are, what you mean to the client, and the clarity of your thinking; these are the dimensions of trust.
Homework:
- Select a relationship in which you sense the level of trust is low. Try to understand and write down the situation from the other person’s point of view. In your next interaction, listen for understanding, comparing what you are hearing with what you wrote down. How valid were your assumptions? Did you really understand that individual’s perspective?
- Share the concept with someone close to you. Tell him or her that you want to work on really listening to others and ask for feedback within a week. How did you do? How did it make that person feel?
- The next time you have an opportunity to watch people communicate, cover your ears for a few minutes and just watch. What emotions are being communicated that may not come across in words alone?
- Next time you catch yourself inappropriately using one of the autobiographical responses – probing, evaluating, advising, or interpreting – try to turn the situation into a trust deposit by acknowledgment and apology. [I’m sorry, I just realized I’m not really trying to understand. Could we start again?]