Module 3.3

Welcome to Module 3.3 Return to dashboard

[audio:http://www.transformingcommunication.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/3_Track_424.mp3|titles=Module3.3.mp3]

Attending skills include:

1. Being close to the person and at their height. (How close varies from person to person and people from some cultures will find it easier if they are a little lower than you, as a gesture of respect.)
2. Facing the person and/or leaning towards them. (People who get a lot of information visually – through their eyes – will want to face you, while people who get more information from your voice or from how they feel may prefer to sit next to you.)
3. Using open body gestures (legs and arms uncrossed)
4. Mirroring the speaker’s body posture, breathing and voice tonality.
5. Nodding your head occasionally as they speak.
6. Having your eyes facing somewhere near them, so they are available for the other person to make eye contact as they need to.
7. Not doing other things such as gazing out the window, playing with a pen, or reading a book, while the person is talking. (If you need to do something else, perhaps right now is not a good time for you to listen, and you will have to tell the person that.)
8. Minimal Encouragers: These are the ‘sound effects’ for attending—what Thomas Gordon’s Youth Effectiveness Training Course calls “helpful grunts’. They are brief grunts or words of acknowledgment (‘Mmm’, “Ufa-huh’, ‘Right1, ‘Sure’, ‘Yeah’) which tell the speaker that you are still awake and listening. They don’t imply agreement or disagreement, just interest. On the phone, they may in fact be the only way you have to assure the speaker that you are still there, without interrupting.

This may sound like a lot to remember when it’s written down in a list here, but in real life good and bad listening are both pretty obvious. You can probably remember a time when someone didn’t listen to you (perhaps a parent, a child of yours, a teacher, a health professional, or someone serving in a shop or office). Check through the list and find out which of the six principles of attending they forgot. Once you remember how it feels not to be attended to, you’ll realise how very important it is to actually show someone you’re listening. It’s not enough to know that you can sometimes listen while you do other tasks. People need to feel listened to, and they need to see that you are attending. Nowhere is this more obvious than in a group or classroom. Try it out. When you and your colleagues or fellow students lean a little forward and attend, the leader or teacher’s energy will improve.

To practice attending skills, get together with a friend, explain what you want to do. You could:

• each think of a topic that interests you, or a book/film/TV programme you’ve enjoyed recently
• one person will talk about their interest while a second person listens to them,
  talking only minimally (use mainly minimal encouragers). For the first two minutes the second person (the listener) should break three of the principles of attending. In the next two minutes they will use all the principles of good attending
• After the four minutes are up, the talker describes what each section felt like
• Change roles and start again

Using attending skills is often a revelation for people. It’s easy to assume I know how to do that… until I try to do it completely. Then I may find that I’m tempted to do everything else: ask lots of questions, give advice and so on!

Learning communication skills is an amazing business. In a way, most of it doesn’t involve learning anything ‘new’ at all. It involves understanding what you already do well, so you can do it whenever you need to. It’s like falling asleep. Everyone can do it. You’ve fallen asleep hundreds of times. And yet I’m sure that there have been times – perhaps times when you really needed to sleep, say because you had an exam the next morning – when you couldn’t do it. Learning the skills of falling asleep means you can do it every time. It means that if you find it doesn’t happen automatically one night, you can do it step by step anyway.

Mostly, people’s communication works okay. But when they own a problem their normal ability may not be available. For example, the person who can’t get to sleep. That is the time they need to know the step by step how to do it. Unfortunately, when people first hear about the idea of learning communication skills, they often suspect there’s nothing to learn. After all, you can either talk to people or you can’t. Arent some people just naturally good at it and some not? And isn’t it all just theories anyway?

This kind of question always occurs at the first stage of learning something. Remember learning to ride a pushbike? Quite often very young children are eager to get a bike. Perhaps they’ve had a tricycle before; that’s much the same thing, right? Wrong. Going from three wheels to two turns out to be a major problem. The kid who was just waiting to ride off into the sunset suddenly comes to suspect that she or he may never ride a bike. Perhaps it’s just not their scene. They have now reached the second stage of learning.

Stage One: Unconsciously unskilled. You cant do it but you don’t know you can’t do it
Stage Two: Consciously unskilled. You can’t do it and you know you can’t. A lot of people give up at stage two, but for those of us who stuck at it, riding a bike gradually became more possible. At first, someone pushed you, letting go for a brief time. You could ride at those moments, but you knew you had to hold on for your life. The slightest move to the side and you came off. Some people give up at this stage too. They say, ‘Sure, I can do it. But it’s a lot easier to get around the natural way – the way I always have before. Maybe it only works for certain people. I know when I’m doing it I feel really phoney.’ This is stage three.
Stage Three: Consciously skilled: You can do it, but it’s something you have to keep remembering to do. It’s just practice that enables you to get past this to stage four. Did you make it with bike riding? Can you ride a bike while thinking about where you’re going, while carrying a parcel or waving to someone? If you can, the actual work of keeping your balance on a bike is now something you know so well, it’s unconscious.
Stage Four: Unconsciously skilled: You can do it and it just happens without thinking about it. Learning communication skills is exactly like that. Ever known someone who got married and was unconsciously unskilled about building a relationship: someone who thought there wasn’t anything to learn? Then watch them as they learn new ways of behaving. Probably they feel phoney when they try and act or speak in new ways: they’re consciously skilled. It takes a lot of practice to change fully. You may even ‘fall off the bike’ a few times in the early stages. But in the end, it works. The skills you learn in the next few modules may seem trivial at first, or they may sound phoney when you use them for the first time … but once you have integrated them into your natural way of talking they will enrich your life beyond anything you could have imagined before.

To practice these skills learned in this module, pay attention to Problem Ownership and identify in any challenging situations exactly who owns what problem.

David Brandon had spent hours trying to help Joanna feel better, feel calmer as he typed his article. What finally worked was when he realised that he too owned a problem. His note to her said “Dear Joanna, I am trying to write another pamphlet like “Homeless in London” which I enclose. It has to be finished this weekend. Please help me by remaining silent.” An hour or so later, Joanna slipped another note under David’s door, and returned his paper. Her note said “David, I enjoyed the pamphlet. Please continue.” She was silent the rest of the day. Brandon speculated that perhaps no-one had ever before actually asked her for help. They had always tried to help her. And as often as not, it wasn’t her who owned the problem.