Quick read
To listen well, get curious // Benkun
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In each case, the “helper” tried to learn about the “complainer’s” reality in as much detail as possible—not just the problem, but the whole person and whatever else was behind the immediate issue. And that’s what made it possible for them to actually help.
It often feels like I understand enough to be helpful without knowing all those details. But when I think that, I’m usually wrong: I end up giving bad advice, based on bad assumptions, and the person I’m talking to ends up having to do a bunch of work to argue with me and correct my bad assumptions. That makes the conversation feel disfluent and adversarial instead of collaborative.
It turns out this is a really common failure mode of helping-conversations, which is what I think generates the old saw at the beginning of this post, that “sometimes people don’t want help, just to be listened to.”
But I think that’s actually too nice to the helper, and uncharitable to the complainer (in that it assumes they weirdly don’t care about solving their problem). What’s really going on is probably that your advice is bad, because you didn’t really listen, because you weren’t curious enough.
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Visual
Fact
Winston Churchill was born in 1874 when there was no electricity. No radio. No television. No telephones.
He died in 1965 when we had orbited earth, walked in space, and an automobile had driven 600mph.
Tune
Quote
"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you’re a good person is like expecting a bull not to attack you because you’re a vegetarian." // Dennis Wholey
Something to ponder
Pain without purpose is torture. Pain with purpose is simply a price.
Personal update
Celebrating, colliding
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Until next week,