fredag 14 juli 2017

Authentic Communication

Talking Stick by Viveca Lammers

Authentic Communication is a concept that is very similar to the idea behind the Talking Stick.


The Teacher of Authentic Communication



I was just looking at a film about Authentic Communication with JP sears. He had got a question from ”Danny” who was wondering about how to communicate with all those people who are in a defensive state and say absolutely nothing about themselves. If you ask: ”How are you?” a person can respond ”Fine!” even if everything is really bad.
We tend to show a nice masque to other people, pretending that everything is super fine even if it is the opposite, and Danny had got tired of this and called it ”too much surface level on everything” and was wondering about how to brake that pattern without violating other peoples´space. So JP talks about how to ”invite” other people to be more openhearted and share their real feelings. 

You say: ”Hi, how are you?” and the person responds ”Fine!” even if he is deadly sick and struggling with a divorce and crying the whole nights. 
The person who answers might not at all be interested in letting you know what is on his heart so you should not force him, as JP also says. But there is a chance that he has huge problems that he would like to talk about with you, without daring to do so, and in that case it is of course OK to try to find out how it is (if you are interested in listening). 

There are some situations that JP forgot to mention and they popped up in my mind:

The person who asks might be a person who always wants to know everything about everyone because he then has good stories to tell all other people. Whoops! Whatever you tell him will soon be out in the whole city. Or maybe it will be secretely spread among all your friends and their friends and others and you would not like that. That is probably what many are afraid of.

The opposite! The person who gets asked might have the idea that every question should always be responded to with an open heart and a full and detailed story about every aspect of every feeling. And your intention was just to say "Hallo!" and not to be forced to listen to the answer for the next two hours.

Another scenario is the person who is constantly telling everybody about all his sad experiences, from birth till now, because he wants to collect love, understanding, acceptance and support from everyone else. 

Yet another story is the one that is using other people by almost forcing them to listen to a bad story over and over and over again in a way that the listener finally has to take up the bad energy (after some hours he starts getting nervous from listening to the repetition and then he swamps it up and looses his temper and energy).

Those were some things that JP did not mention in this film (maybe he does in another one?) and I wrote them down because here are also interesting points.

Maybe it would be a good idea not to say: "How are you?" if you are not prepared to or even interested in listening to an answer! The question can make the other person believe that you want to know, even if you do not. After all, it is a question!

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