Fantastic post. the mechanical repetition is a good first step for practicing listing, but sometimes people have a hard time going beyond that, and sometimes instructors/books don’t do a good enough job of conveying the attitude you need to cultivate in order to do this effectively and non mechanically (personally i think NVC does a great job at that).
Though I do think there are times when people simply want someone to listen to them without offering solutions, and not because they don’t want to solve the problem. some examples:
i just want to share with someone what’s going on with me, but I’m not interested in solutions to my situation from them.
I’m having a hard time with something, but not because i lack a solution, and i just need some support/listening
I’m feeling down for some reason and decide that talking with someone would help, since that is what on my mind, i talk about the reason i am down, but any solution offered would be the wrong one since i already decided talking to someone is the best solution.
I also had personal experiences where someone came to me with something that troubled them, and i wasn’t sure if they were looking for me to just listen or to offer solutions, so i simply asked them and they said they wanted me to just listen (i can say with fairly high confidence this person wasn’t familiar with these sorts of approaches, so they wouldn’t think “oh, that’s what I’m supposed to want”)
P.S: the chat excerpt at the start was hilarious :D
Fantastic post. the mechanical repetition is a good first step for practicing listing, but sometimes people have a hard time going beyond that, and sometimes instructors/books don’t do a good enough job of conveying the attitude you need to cultivate in order to do this effectively and non mechanically (personally i think NVC does a great job at that).
Though I do think there are times when people simply want someone to listen to them without offering solutions, and not because they don’t want to solve the problem. some examples:
i just want to share with someone what’s going on with me, but I’m not interested in solutions to my situation from them.
I’m having a hard time with something, but not because i lack a solution, and i just need some support/listening
I’m feeling down for some reason and decide that talking with someone would help, since that is what on my mind, i talk about the reason i am down, but any solution offered would be the wrong one since i already decided talking to someone is the best solution.
I also had personal experiences where someone came to me with something that troubled them, and i wasn’t sure if they were looking for me to just listen or to offer solutions, so i simply asked them and they said they wanted me to just listen (i can say with fairly high confidence this person wasn’t familiar with these sorts of approaches, so they wouldn’t think “oh, that’s what I’m supposed to want”)
P.S: the chat excerpt at the start was hilarious :D