Be Still And Reflect

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foreign [Music] coming to you from Atlanta this is social skills coaching where you learn to be more likable more charismatic and more productive this is your host Russell and today is Tuesday February 21st 2023. if one of your goals for personal development is to become more empathetic then today's episode from Patrick King's book train your empathy is Right On Target Patrick King explains how we can go quiet and still within ourselves in order to increase our empathic understanding [Music] Here is the story of two good friends, Sky and Lake. One day, Lake asked Sky, “What’s it like to be you?" Sky thought about it for a moment and then created a few impressively shaped clouds. “Like this,” said Sky.

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Lake went very quiet and still until his surface was like a mirror. In a few moments, the clouds that Sky had made were perfectly reflected on the surface of Lake. “Ah, I see what you mean!” said Lake. When we listen empathically and reflect, what we are doing is going quiet and still within ourselves so we can receive as accurate a picture of the other person’s account as possible. Then, we can hold up that same account and show it back to the speaker, asking, “Is this right?

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Is this what you meant?" And in the same way that a lake has to be free of ripples and waves to accurately reflect the sky, we need to be still and free from our own mental noise, prejudice, and ego to properly receive and reflect the narrative someone else is sharing. In our little story, the lake and the sky reflect each other so well that they are actually showing one another the same image. In a truly empathic connection, people can likewise feel that they “get” one another, that they are on the same wavelength, and that there is a real sense of in-tune conversation going on. If you think about it, the only one who can say whether you’ve been empathic or not is the person you’re listening to.

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Only they can confirm whether you have actually understood them. So why not ask? Well, reflecting is a way to check that you have in fact heard. Being empathic and kind doesn’t mean we have to be psychic, after all! When you reflect an accurate picture to the speaker, you convey empathy because you are essentially saying, “I see what you mean!” but also, “Is this what you mean?"

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You are providing them with that precious sense of being seen, validated, and understood. You show that you’re listening and that you care, and that feels good. It strengthens a feeling of trust and connection and helps you become a better and more humble conversationalist. With reflective, empathic listening, you are inviting the other person to have a more authentic, more connected relationship with you, and asking them to teach you about what they need. It also helps you avoid potential misunderstandings or hurt feelings.

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Psychologist Dr. Ann Vertel uses reflective listening in her practice and says if you “reflect back to someone what they are feeling, you meet them right where they are emotionally. You’ve connected with them; they don’t feel quite so alone with this feeling." But that’s not all reflective listening can be used for. When you reflect, you may very well help the other person to better understand their own emotional experiences. By receiving, focusing, and reflecting what you’re told, you show them aspects they might not have seen before—or simply validate what they haven’t felt confident enough to admit they already know.

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In other words, by attempting to gain more clarity, you invite them to do the same. As you articulate their experience, they learn to better articulate it for themselves. What a gift to share with someone you care about! How to Master Reflective Listening Reflecting is: •Paraphrasing and restating all parts of a speaker’s message back to them •Allowing the speaker to “hear” what their own story sounds like •Demonstrating your willingness to understand •A way to encourage the speaker to keep speaking, and maybe even solve problems Reflecting is not: •Asking questions •Starting a new thread or introducing a new topic •Leading, shaping, or dominating the conversation in any way We’ve already encountered two great ways to reflect in the previous section: mirroring and paraphrasing. To mirror, we repeat the literal word or phrase we’ve heard.

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To mirror well, keep it short and sweet and don’t do too much—mirroring is just the start and is not enough on its own. A: “So I looked him square in the eye and I said no." B: “You said no." A: “Damn right I did." To paraphrase, you use words with the same meaning to show your comprehension.

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A: “So I looked him square in the eye and I said no." B: “You totally refused!" A: “I sure did." Be careful here, though, not to introduce your own ideas or distort the speaker’s meaning: A: “So I looked him square in the eye and I said no." B: “Oh no, you rejected him!"

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Whether you are mirroring, paraphrasing, or a mix of both, the key is to be non-judgmental and non-directional—i.e., get your ego out the way! Questions have their place, but they should ideally come sometime after the speaker has confirmed that your understanding is correct, and that you are both broadly on the same page. Your questions should never feel like they come with an agenda. To develop your reflective listening skills, it’s worth understanding what exactly you’re reflecting. You can reflect: 1. Content 2. 3. Or all three. Let’s consider an example. A close friend is opening up to you about her difficulties with dating a man more than ten years older than her.

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She tells you about a hurtful occasion when her partner declined to spend Christmas together because he was spending it with his children from a previous marriage. What’s worse, he ignored several messages and spent the day coordinating with the ex-wife, forgetting to wish your friend a Merry Christmas. When your friend brought up the issue with him, he was confused and eventually hostile—did he expect her to put his own kids second? Now, your friend is extremely upset. As you talk to her, you reflect back her story, but on several levels: Content – the factual information, events, and actions that have been shared—for example, the fact that your friend has never met her partner’s kids but has been seeing him for many years.

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Feeling – the emotional material behind what you’re being told. Why is your friend upset? She might be feeling side-lined, undermined, or put in a difficult position. She may be feeling jealous, left out, undervalued, or even suspicious. Meaning – Reading between the lines, you pick out what this episode means for your friend: She may conclude that this means she’s not as important a person in her partner’s life as he is in hers, and she feels rejected.

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The events mean, in her world, that she is not number one to her partner. As you reflect her story back to her, you may start by confirming the more factual content and gradually move to the emotional content, finally reflecting what the ultimate meaning of the story/experience is (sometimes, this will be as much as a revelation to the speaker as it is to you!). Even better, see if you can link the content with the emotional or meaning elements. For example, “I mean, I’m not crazy to think that after two years, I should have met his children by now, right?" “Do you think you feel a little left out?"

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Note in the above example that the question being asked is not literally looking for confirmation that the speaker isn’t crazy, but something more subtle than this—a validation of the hurt they feel. The question, then, is not about the factual content (after how many years should you meet your partner’s children from a previous marriage?) and more about the emotion and meaning behind these facts. If you had merely stayed on the superficial and factual level, the speaker would not have felt as validated: “I mean, I’m not crazy to think that after two years, I should have met his children by now, right?" “My cousin never met her guy’s kids until they had been dating for like five years, so it’s not unusual."

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“Oh." When we listen empathically and reflect back someone’s emotional experience to them, it can sometimes feel like we are taking a bunch of different pieces and putting them all together in a more understandable order before handing it all back to them. If you are very empathic and listen well, people may tell you at the end of a conversation, “Thank you so much for helping me figure that out; you’re completely right!" Of course, you haven’t done anything but reflect—they are the ones who have found insight into the situation because of the coherent picture you reflected back to them. There is no step-by-step guide to help you master reflective listening—how could there be when the other person is guiding it all and the conversation is emerging organically?

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But there are a few things to keep in mind. Remember, also, that practice makes perfect. If you get something completely wrong, that’s not a problem—just an opportunity to reiterate your interest in getting it right. The emotion and meaning behind your actions will be registered even if you’re inaccurate on the details/content. •Slow down, relax, and be natural.

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Nobody is in a therapy chair, and there are no prizes or report cards. While you’re busy not judging them, don’t judge yourself either. •As you’re told facts and details, try to listen for the emotion and meaning behind them. (“He spent the day with his ex but couldn’t send me a single text?”) What is the possible emotion here? What does this mean for the person in front of you?

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•Proceed gradually. Don’t dive in with the deep and heavy stuff. Take your time and let them set the pace. •When you paraphrase or mirror, check to see how the image is received. Ask, “Have I understood?” or simply be alert to a nod, a smile, or any other body language clues.

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•If someone uses a very pointed metaphor or image, use the same one as they do, and even keep it going (“It’s like he has these two sides to him, and I’m only allowed to know one side. I feel like a fool." “Do you think you feel like a fool because you’ve shared your full self with him?”). •Imagine yourself as an “emotional highlighter”—when you hear someone speak, pay close attention to emotions or implied emotions so that when you reflect back, your understanding contains the most important emotional aspects. If you merely reflect back, “Your partner didn’t wish you Merry Christmas,” you give a truthful account but not the full account.

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•Be careful when making links and associations. If you tie together facts, feelings, and meaning and present them to the speaker, they may feel profoundly heard and understood—but if you’ve made sweeping assumptions, you might cause offense. Rearrange the material given to you, but don’t add anything extra—especially not your own biases, fears, or assumptions. (“I guess I feel left out." “I get it.

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It can be hard feeling like a man’s leaving you on the shelf.”) Psychologizing—A Peculiar Kind of Invalidation Before we conclude this chapter, it’s worth taking a look at a conversational phenomenon that is seldom noticed and called out for what it is—psychologizing. When you psychologize, you understand and analyze complex human situations in (sometimes reductive) psychological terms. Psychology is a specific, non-neutral set of assumptions; it is composed of a collection of various models, but that’s all they are—models. And all models are necessarily flawed. These models and the assumptions they take for granted are now commonplace for everyone, not just those in the mental health professions.

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A strange side-effect of increased mental-health awareness also means that the public sphere is awash in terms that used to be reserved for professionals, such as trauma, anxiety, narcissistic, obsessive, and so on. When we intend to be empathic listeners, we may unconsciously start acting the role of a therapist or psychologist. We immediately engage in a kind of listening behavior we assume is standard practice, and this means interpreting the experiences of ourselves and others in psychological terms. The only trouble is, this can be precisely the thing that makes us terrible listeners! When we are interpreting, we are no longer listening.

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We are no longer genuinely reflecting. Imagine a friend tells you about an experience they had. They explain how they were camping one day in the mountains and had a mind-blowing religious experience where they encountered the spirit of their deceased grandmother, who told them that she was safe and sound on the other side. You listen with care and empathy, and then say, “Well, it was probably a dream. Dreams can reveal our unconscious desires,” and, “It must have been so traumatic to lose your grandmother.

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The brain will make up all sorts of things as a coping mechanism!" These explanations, to put it bluntly, are wrong. That’s because your friend did not have a psychological experience. They had a spiritual/religious one. When we empathize, we enter into the whole world of the other person—and that really means their whole world, including all their epistemological assumptions, their philosophical framework, and how they see the very universe and their place in it.

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Sometimes, when we are too quick to look for psychological explanations, or when we try to squeeze living breathing people into archetypes or popular theories, we invalidate how they understand themselves. And empathy vanishes. If you find yourself readily announcing that certain people are psychopaths or narcissists, if you accuse people in arguments of projecting, if you call someone else’s opinion a bias (but your own is a preference), and if you mock those who disagree with you as having unresolved childhood issues, then realize that you are using psychology as a weapon. In our attempt to reflect, we may give back a picture that is heavily tinted by the (flawed) concepts of psychology, and this may do damage to the people we’re trying to encounter authentically and spontaneously. If you recognize some of yourself in this, try to counter the tendency by imagining that every person you talk to is actually a theoretical outlier—a person who doesn’t fit any mold at all.

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In other words, if you must use a psychological frame, imagine that every person gets their own completely unique and tailor-made model that’s just for them ... and that it’s up to them to tell you about this model, not for you to tell them! One of the best ways to cure yourself of the psychologizing habit is to really notice how bad it feels when people do it to you. Is it really helpful to have someone reflect back a psychological theory about your deeply personal, sensitive, emotional experiences? Wouldn’t you rather have them just listen, treat you like the individual you are, and hear what you say without analyzing it? Banish psychological jargon from your vocabulary, and whatever you do, don’t start sentences with, “Well, Jung once said ... ” or “according to the early behaviorists ... Refrain from trying to “explain” people’s behaviors to them or justify the present by looking to childhood or to the unconscious mind. Most of the time, this feels pretty invalidating. After all, people don’t want to be examined; they want to be supported, valued, heard, and appreciated. They are not stereotypical examples in a psych textbook, but unique people experiencing all the joys and sorrows of life. If your friend says they had a religious experience and met the spirit of their dead grandmother on the mountain, then that’s exactly what happened. Likewise, if your great aunt tells you she is a “tomboy,” don’t invalidate that description by diagnosing her from your armchair with “gender dysphoric disorder”! [Music] this has been social skills coaching I'm Russell founder of Newton Media Group producer of social skills coaching you can find us at newtonmg.com and you can learn more about the author at bitly slash pkconsulting join us again next week for more tips on learning to be more likable more charismatic and more productive [Music] foreign