Listen Without Judgement — Steps to good conversations.
This week I took a couple of hundred staff members at Sensis, from the CEO to the sales teams, through training to improve the quality of their conversations. Working with the great team at RUOK Day whose mission is to improve connections and conversations across the community. I was dealing with the second step of the 4-step process to looking after people who are having a rough time.
Ask — Listen — Encourage Action — Check In.
Listening seems to be a pretty intuitive thing to do, especially after asking if someone is ok. Listening without judgement can be a little bit more difficult. I believe that we have issues with judging problems from two sides. Often the things which cause distress to people are embarrassing, shocking, unusual, socially unacceptable or difficult to talk about. These circumstances can sometimes be hard to hear without passing some kind of judgement.
“I wet myself on the weekend at the club.”
“What on earth did you do that for you idiot?” The immediate judgement statement is likely to prevent me from continuing my conversation about what upset me in the first place. It is ok to be shocked, its ok to be confronted by something that you haven’t really got any experience with, but we need to temper that shock and try not to pass judgement right away.
“I wet myself on the weekend at the club.”
“Oh my goodness! I can’t imagine what that’s like, and I wasn’t expecting that! Are you ok?” You can still be shocked, but by avoiding the judgement piece, you are encouraging the person you are speaking with to continue to tell their story and discuss how it affected them. Our preconceived notions of what it is ‘ok’ to talk about often prevent people from speaking about issues that are important or extremely upsetting to them. I bet you were shocked by my example earlier, and it is such an entry level embarrassment on the scheme of things, that I ask you to consider what else you might be unconsciously preventing people from talking about. Bodily functions, accidental stuff ups, things that happen when we are drunk, sources of shame etc. It is important that we open up lines of communication for those close to us, no matter what the issue is. Etiquette and timing aside, we should be doing our best to listen to problems of any kind without judgement. We don’t need to have the answers, we simply need to be able to listen. The other end of the judgement scale is to judge issues that aren’t deemed serious enough.
“How are you today?”
“Arghhh terrible, I dropped my donut on the way into the building.”
“Come on mate, Is that really a big deal? Don’t you know what is happening overseas?” Now, we all know someone who loves to make a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to complaining, however, our judgement on whether a problem is serious or not can prevent us from seeing when something really is wrong. Without judgement, the same conversation could go two ways:
“How are you today?
“Arghhhh terrible, I dropped my donut on the way into the building.”
“That’s annoying! Are you ok?”
“Yeah mate, it’s just a donut!” The problem wasn’t a serious one, and the colleague/friend/family member was just having a little morning complain, which is fine. Everyone agrees a dropped donut isn’t the end of the world. The conversation could also have gone a little differently though:
“How are you today?
“Arghhhh terrible, I dropped my donut on the way into the building.”
“That’s annoying! Are you ok?”
“Not really, it just feels like this is the millionth thing to go wrong this week.”
The donut could simply be the straw that broke the camels back. Listening without judgement provides an opportunity to have the real issues come to the surface so they can be heard.
The other valuable listening piece that is perhaps not spoken about enough, is to take a moment to understand what upset the person about the story they are telling. We get told to pay attention, summarise what people are saying and repeat back to them what they’ve said so that they know that we’ve heard them. Perhaps we share an anecdote of our own experiences to relate to them better.
What we aren’t doing so well is working out why they were upset in the first place.
“How are you today?”
“I’m not amazing, my parents were up all night fighting.”
“Your parents were fighting all night?”
“Yeah”
“Oh man, I know how that is, I used to hate when mum and dad would yell at each other, its pretty confronting.” What’s wrong with that? Summary, paying attention, relating to your friend. Its good right? Well, it isn’t terrible. But it could be better.
“How are you today?”
“I’m not amazing, my parents were up all night fighting.”
“Your parents were fighting all night?”
“Yeah”
“What upset you the most about that? Are you ok?”
“Yeah I’m fine, they fight all the time, it’s just how they are. I’m just tired because they kept me up all night.”
In the first example, we assumed what upset them from our own experiences. Turns out, they weren’t upset by the fighting as much as the lack of sleep. If you take the time to work out why people are upset by particular circumstances, you can better help them through it. In this case, perhaps all that is needed is a double shot espresso.
I take my hat off to the team at Sensis who came through with open minds to improve the way they look after each other, from the CEO all the way through. It’s great to see everyone getting behind a few simple things that can help them look after each other better.
For more information on RUOK and the 4 steps to good conversations head to RUOK.ORG.AU There are valuable resources there regarding looking after your peers and what to do when people are in need of help you are unable to give. Check out the resources there.
Keep listening, keep asking RUOK and as always, Just Be Nice. — Josh Reid Jones
Originally published at www.joshreidjones.com.