So I have this good buddy who has this blog, and for some reason he has comments disabled. Which makes me feel like I’m at a Republican Town Hall meeting. I can listen, but no discourse is allowed. So that had me irked, but then I realized that I could just write my comments here and vent. No one will be the wiser, and in fact no one will probably have a clue what I’m talking about.

The question of the day was about being a good listener and probably more to the point about being a good communicator. The idea was that sometimes people don’t listen. If you tell them something deep and personal and completely out of the range of their life experiences they will try to find an appropriate anecdote from their own life and extrapolate advice based upon that. Which can be sort of irritating if that’s not what the communicator is looking for.

But that does beg the question - What is the communicator looking for? Normally when we talk about our problems we’re looking for someone to comiserate with. We may ask them a question. We may even give them a couple of choices we’re leaning towards, but the fact of the matter is that generally we’re trying to lead them towards agreeing with our already predetermined outcome.

I.e.
yes, you’re right the President is a rat fink
no, your toes do not smell like an old soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich
etc.

So the question then, is how do you reply when the communicator is not looking for one of these answers. Personally, I’m fond of “Man, that’s rough. I don’t know what to tell you.” That seems to work for me, and people tell me I’m a great listener. But I think it has to do with my technique rather than what I say. A technique I invented for a teacher in high school who felt like none of us were paying attention (and would shout at us to try and make us pay more attention to her). I got really good at nodding along to what people say. Which doesn’t mean I’m not being sincere. It’s that listening to another person’s problem is like a ritual. Actually it probably is a ritual. It’s basically a catharsis. “Let me get something off of my chest.” The ritual takes the proverbial monkey and throws him clear. So the question is what do you do when there is nothing to say in response? Because I am pretty sure the answer is not to say nothing.

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Comments

Julie

2005-06-20T21:19:52.000Z

Yes, but Tim’s obsessive nodding continues when he watches plays.  Which means he often gets picked out of the audience during audience-participation type things.  And he HATES audience-participation.  It’s kind of cute the way he nods along and then freaks out when picked to participate:)