Let's
spend a little time talking about mirroring/reflecting to continue our
conversation about active listening skills. This is a fairly simple concept in
a conversation and one that is not used too terribly often. It is very
effective in demonstrating understanding of what they're saying and encouraging
them to keep talking. It's a brief fall along after they finish a sentence, by
repeating the last few words. It also helps you get oriented to what they are
saying and to obtain agreement and confirmation. The best way to understand
this is to give you an example. Let's say you're talking with a friend about
problems they are having with a spouse it might sound something like this, “she
doesn't pay any attention to me anymore and it's really starting to make me
angry”.
Your response just to get him to understand that you heard him and to encourage more dialogue would simply be “it makes you angry”. Typically after you save this to the person you're talking to, they are going to say, “right, it does make me angry”. Not that you're trying to incite more anger into the conversation, the point of this is to make a further and deeper connection with the person you're talking to. Your intervention into their anger and helping them through it will come later when you start talking about solutions. Mirroring and reflecting is a very simple easy technique to integrate into conversations and specifically conversations where there are some emotions involved. People just want to be heard and being authentic about how you are listening and being present in the conversation will go a long way.
Your response just to get him to understand that you heard him and to encourage more dialogue would simply be “it makes you angry”. Typically after you save this to the person you're talking to, they are going to say, “right, it does make me angry”. Not that you're trying to incite more anger into the conversation, the point of this is to make a further and deeper connection with the person you're talking to. Your intervention into their anger and helping them through it will come later when you start talking about solutions. Mirroring and reflecting is a very simple easy technique to integrate into conversations and specifically conversations where there are some emotions involved. People just want to be heard and being authentic about how you are listening and being present in the conversation will go a long way.
I
have a ton of new ideas that I've been formulating over the last few weeks that
I am eager to get onto paper and on my blog. Hopefully within the next few
months these blog posts will start to be the framework for book that I want to
write about a lot of these topics and many more including my thoughts on seeing
your life from a different point of view, and why is it that we get so stuck
that we can't seem to move forward. It's all about creating the possibilities
for yourself that you want and deep down know you can have. One of the things
that I have really learned for myself in the past few weeks is that most of our
inability to take action revolves around fear. I will be talking about this
more in the coming weeks and I am very excited about helping people create the
possibilities for amazing things.
