I had some similar thoughts about how to listen to other people’s problems here:
Start by trying to understand what problem the person is trying to solve. “I’ve been trying to sign up for dance lessons but can never seem to get around it.” One possible approach would be to immediately start offering ways for the person to sign up for dance lessons. Often a more fruitful one would be to first ask—why do you want to attend dance lessons? Maybe it turns out that the person doesn’t actually care about learning to dance, but is feeling bad because their friend, a great dancer, always gets all the attention at parties. Then the actual problem is not “how to learn to dance” but “how to get other people to notice me”. It’s quite possible that not knowing to dance isn’t actually the biggest issue there.
Test your understanding of the problem. When you’re formulating an understanding of the problem, it can be useful to frequently verbalize it to the other person to make sure that you’ve understood correctly. “So you seem to be feeling bad because your partner just became the President of your country while you mostly spend time playing video games, is that right?”
A rule of thumb that I sometimes use is “do I feel like I understand this problem and its causes well enough that I could explain to a third person why this person wants to solve it and why they haven’t been able to solve it yet?” If the answer is no, hold off proposing solutions and try asking more questions first.
Even “obvious” problems may benefit from questions. Someone once mentioned that they tend to often jump to being critical of others, which tends to be harmful. Here the causal mechanism seemed to be pretty obvious, but asking “how does it tend to be harmful” was still useful in bringing out details of the exact nature of the typical criticism and how people tended to react to that.
Bad / insufficiently curiosed-through advice is often infuriating because the person giving it seems to be assuming you’re an idiot / have come to them as soon as you noticed the problem. Which is very rarely true! Generally, between spotting the problem and talking to another person about it, there’s a pretty fucking long solution-seeking stage. Where “pretty fucking long” can be anything between ten minutes (“i lost my pencil and can’t find it )=”) (where actually common sense suggestions MIGHT be helpful—you might not have through up all the checklist yet) and THE PERSON’S ENTIRE LIFETIME (anything relating to a disability, for example).
An advice-giver who doesn’t understand why you still have the problem is going to have a lot more advice to give, and they’re also often going to be SO patronizing and idiocy-assuming and invalidating sounding.
As opposed to the person who is at the point of “ok yeah that does sound like a problem” first, before they might move on with “hmm but what to do though” along with you.
(You might well be ahead of them anyway, but at least they’ve listened first!)
Great post!
I had some similar thoughts about how to listen to other people’s problems here:
the magic part.
Bad / insufficiently curiosed-through advice is often infuriating because the person giving it seems to be assuming you’re an idiot / have come to them as soon as you noticed the problem. Which is very rarely true! Generally, between spotting the problem and talking to another person about it, there’s a pretty fucking long solution-seeking stage. Where “pretty fucking long” can be anything between ten minutes (“i lost my pencil and can’t find it )=”) (where actually common sense suggestions MIGHT be helpful—you might not have through up all the checklist yet) and THE PERSON’S ENTIRE LIFETIME (anything relating to a disability, for example).
An advice-giver who doesn’t understand why you still have the problem is going to have a lot more advice to give, and they’re also often going to be SO patronizing and idiocy-assuming and invalidating sounding.
As opposed to the person who is at the point of “ok yeah that does sound like a problem” first, before they might move on with “hmm but what to do though” along with you.
(You might well be ahead of them anyway, but at least they’ve listened first!)