Ears: The Soft Power of Listening - Part 5 (Episode 42) Help! I’m Hurting!
Highlights
Be kind to everyone you meet because everyone you meet is fighting a battle.
When it comes to helping the hurting...this is almost always true of our words. Less is more.
Job’s comforters did everything right for the first seven days, and so do we when we do the same three things they did.
First, show up. (90% of success is just showing up.)
Second, empathize. To the extent we can, we express our own grief at their loss.
Third, shut-up! We don’t need to say anything! Our biggest mistakes happen when we open our mouths and begin to talk. Less is more.
One key is to let the person suffering set the agenda for the conversation. Not you.
In all my years of doing this work, I’ve never found words that are as helpful and as loving as attentive silence.
Three things to do:
First: Practice good listening skills
When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. (Henri Nouwen)
Second: Find a good setting to talk.
Third: Encourage feelings to be expressed.
Three things to avoid:
First: Avoid giving advice preemptively
Second: Avoid telling your own story
Third: Avoid filling the silences with your own words
There is no music in a rest, but there’s the making of music in it. True listening requires a setting aside of oneself
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When the people come here it's like they are going to a field hospital," father Gomez said. "They so badly need to be heard, it's like a wound; they’re in a critical state. I’ve begun to think there’s a crisis of listening in our world. There are a lot of people who want to talk but very few who want to listen, and we are seeing people suffer from it. I just let the people talk. At the very end, they say how nice it was to talk, but I didn’t talk. I think it’s just making yourself available to listen to the people; that’s what they are starved for. ( from You’re Not Listening, Kate Murphy)