[00:00] The Power of Listening: Why Acknowledgment Matters More Than Advice
Andy Fairie :
When you’re listening to someone, they don’t necessarily want you to solve their problems. They just want you to hear them. I get that a lot from clients as well. I tell my friends my problems, and I just want them to acknowledge what a rubbish situation I’m in. But actually, they try to help me, and of course they do.
They’re nice people. They want to help their friends, but the best help they can give is actually just acknowledging where that person is and encouraging ’em to keep talking because chances are. They’ll come up with their own solution. Now, how do you practice this out? It’s about, and it is, the word is just practice.
It’s getting out there. It’s also perhaps, there are a lot of great YouTube videos or news clips. Get a news clip. When you see a politician that you don’t like and you hear him give his bit to the reporter, just try a little bit of what would you do in that situation?
Would you paraphrase? Would you summarize? A bit of silence? Try and every conversation should be some sort of practice. If you go and get a coffee, try and find something out that’s important to the person that’s serving you the coffee, using those active listening skills.
Nolan Martin :
Well as appropriate. The last one is empathize and I have it. So why can empathy often be hard to define as well as put into practice?
Empathy in Action: Recognizing and Reflecting Emotions to Truly Connect [01:17]
AF :
Yeah, it can be hard to define because, and it is easier to say whether it’s not, a lot of people, cause a lot of people confuse it with sympathy. I think, the perfect example is when you hear that, someone close to someone has died you get that phrase that makes me wince, I’m sorry for your loss.
Okay, you are sorry, but how do I feel? I’m the person that’s lost someone. And that’s what empathizing is about. Empathizing, if you have the, when you’ve had that conversation or you’ve got enough information to say, I heard about your mom passing away there. That would’ve been really tough for you and your family, I’m guessing.
And then suddenly that person thinks, this person’s interested in how I feel, not telling me how sorry they are. They want to know how I feel. And that’s what empathizing is. Empathizing it comes from the Greek word into emotion. You are going into the emotions of someone else, and that’s great. But it’s only of limited use if you don’t let that person know that you’ve gone into their emotions.
And again, it’s that thing about existing as a human, someone has recognized, I have got human feelings here and these are my feelings. Someone can see how the emotions and the moods that I’m going through in terms of how do you improve your empathy? Again, it takes practice. Things like emotional labeling.
Yeah. You know when you see a clip of someone, you, particularly if it’s somebody you don’t agree with on tv, and they make a statement, try and empathize what’s important to them. And it’s about that accepting thing doesn’t have to be important to you. You don’t have to agree with them. What have you seen that is important to them?
The emotional labeling? Are they showing emotions? Reading is great for this, if you read a bit of nonfiction sorry, a bit of fiction again, what’s that character thinking? Why is he thinking that way? What is important to them? And again, becoming a CBT therapist improved me here because I wasn’t very good at recognizing my own emotions, let alone anyone else’s.
So what I did and what I still do in the morning, I would wake up and after having my breakfast, I would think, what’s my emotion today? What am I feeling? And the trick with emotions is generally there are single words, okay? So an emotion would be happy, sad, angry, frustrated, nervous, anxious. If it stretches to more than one word, we are a wee bit worried about making this journey in the rush hour traffic, that’s a thought.
Worried, is an emotion. So yeah, every morning I sit and think, what emotion am I feeling every evening before I go to sleep? What emotion am I feeling? I used to write it down. I don’t do that anymore, but I still ask myself that question. And what I found, of course, is actually I kinda had four emotions. Happy, angry, worried, sad. That was it. The rule is write it down, but don’t use the same word twice in any one week.
There are emotions, there are lists, huge lists of emotions on the Internet. Go and get one, write one down. Look at it. Pick one that fits you that day, and that will improve your emotional vocabulary. And when you improve your own emotional vocabulary, it will improve your ability to recognize emotions in others. And, don’t be afraid to practice it on your colleagues. You know, you seem really happy today.
That’s great to see, or actually you look a little bit worried today as if they’re okay and when they, if they, if and when they respond to you, do that thing of paraphrasing or emotional labeling and hopefully along the way that will improve your ability to empathize. It is really interesting to say that about people you don’t agree with because if you could actually practice these skills in real life with people who aren’t agreeing with you, chances are they will find it much easier to disagree with you if they feel that they’ve been listened to. And the only way they’re going to know that they’ve been listened to is if you tell them.
Aram Donigian :
In your bio, we talked about protest groups in Scotland, talking about people who may not agree with. How are you able to implement aspects of the simple model in the process in which you engaged with these groups to reduce their effects on the community? Can you share a little bit about that?
Building Trust Through Dialogue: How Communication Skills Defused Protests and Reduced Police Presence [05:48]
AF :
Certainly. And a bit of background. So I was a public order officer, and what that means is if there was a situation where there was gonna be public disorder, a riot would be the extreme end of it where we’d have to be getting helmets on and protective equipment and shields.
That’s where we would be getting deployed. And in Scotland around about 2010, 2015, we saw a real increase in groups that were protesting about right wing issues, immigration, what have you. And again, part of our philosophy, certainly in the UK, is people are allowed to have the right free speech.
They would turn up. There would generally be another group that were protesting against what they were protesting. The two would come to blows, and you’re not talking huge numbers, you’re talking maybe in total 30, 40, 50 people. But to try and stop them and keep them apart and have a contingency if they didn’t give apart and because we didn’t know how many were going to turn up at any time, we would deploy 250, 300 officers just for that.
And if you were a public order officer, you were getting your rest days canceled left, right and center. And when that was happening, I could see protest groups were spoken to in completely different ways. Some incident commanders would be right there in the middle, in the thick of it, speaking to them, which was great, but you could never get a decision off them ’cause they were in the middle speaking to someone.
Some incident commanders would have nothing to do with them at all. And communicating with them was negligible. And they would get told one thing, one weekend by one group of officers, another thing, another weekend by another group of officers, and it would be very minimal. They would, the only communication with the groups would be on the day.
So we looked at, you know, I was a negotiator at that point, and I considered if we could use any, could we use our negotiation skills to improve that communication? There was also a shift in England at what they called protester liaison officers. So I went down, I was one of the first officers where three of us went down and we went on the protestor liaison course as it was called then.
But it was really, it was a two-day course. It covered public order legislation, public order tactics and terminology. Didn’t really say anything about communicating with people. So we came back and we incorporated that, but we emphasized the communication aspect of it. And it was very important that we communicated with people before, during, and after their protests.
And people would always say such and such a protest group they won’t have anything to do with you. They won’t speak to you, but we would always make the offer and they would always say, yes, come in. So, I remember one particular group. So there were a group of Irish Republican supporters.
They would have frequent marches. They would get targeted by pro unionist supporters. Again, we were told they won’t, the Irish Republican supporters will not speak to you. We phoned them up. We said, can we come and have a cup of tea and just talk about these marches? Cause you don’t seem very happy with the police response.
And they said yes, and we went along and I made a point of making sure we had some milk and some biscuits, and we sat down making it possible to talk. What was our purpose? Certainly the police purpose was to allow people their right to march on whatever issue they wanted to march on, but do it in a way that kept people safe, and that meant that them as marchers, it meant the counter protesters.
It meant the public that were just walking by at the time, they had quite a similar purpose. They just wanted to get the message out and not get into any bother. And so it was sitting down, listening, empathizing, understanding what was important to them. So for example, when the organizer, when the mattress says you always say the police are there to look after the crowd outside the march, but when we march past.
All the police officers are turned and looking at us as if we are the people causing the problem. So we simply, I said to the officers when the march passes. We’ll deal with what’s happening in the march. We’ll keep our eyes on that, turn around and look at the crowd because we’re telling the marchers that the crowd are the problem.
And they did that and suddenly it’s a small thing. But it’s that thing that, that you mentioned, Aram, about building up trust. It’s these, and then next time we spoke to them, we said you know what? You said you had a good point about all these police, they have to look after everyone outside the march, but they’re looking at you, so yeah, we’ve asked them to turn around. We did that for you. And it just helps reinforce that trust building process.
So when it came to designing our own course in Scotland, we went from a two day course, which had the public order tactics and legislation, and we bolted on three days of communication skills, active listening skills, so that when people are engaging. When our officers were engaging with protesters before, during, and after, we were given them the best chance possible.
And it’s significant, it took so much heat out of those protests, whereas before you could quite easily get 250 or so police officers, it very quickly went down to about 56 days because our management had confidence that in what was likely to happen as a result of the information that we were getting and feeding back to them so they didn’t have to pile on lots of extra police officers in case or what if.
And then eventually it went from 50 down to you might get on a van or 2, 8, 16 police officers. Anytime there’s any kind of major event or protest, police liaison officers, as we call them now, are very much a key part of that and it’s very much embedded in the negotiator unit. So the negotiator unit in Scotland has a small country of dedicated full-time officers, and at least one of those officers.
At any one time is dealing with the police liaison kind of coordination role. And two years ago we had COP 26, huge environmental gathering of the parties as they call it, or the conference of the parties. Huge problems, major riots at previous ones. And yes, there was, there were a lot of protests, there was some manners.
Disruption rather than disorder. And a large part of that was due to putting police liaison officers on the ground and encouraging them to utilize the communication skills that we were teaching them.
NM :
That’s awesome. And it’s good to see the positive effects of everything like that. So I also know that you’ve referenced your work as a CBT therapist a few times. What can you share with our listeners about this work and that might apply in their own lives?
CBT in Practice: How Small Shifts in Behavior, Thoughts, and Emotions Create Big Changes [12:36]
AF :
Yeah, cognitive behavioral therapy, it can be applied in a number of ways. It can be applied online, it can be, you can get apps that sort of lead you through various sorts of flow charts. For me, it’s a talking therapy and it’s very much evidence-based.
There’s a lot of evidence to show its effectiveness now for conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, addictions. And the core philosophy of it, if you like, is the cognitive bit, what you think and what you feel relates to the behavioral bit, what you do. So you’ve got those three things, what you feel, and that might be physical or emotionally, what you think and what you do.
That forms a triad, a triangle, and the idea is that they are connected, you change one, it will have an impact on the other two. So if there is something that’s troubling you, for example, it might be your thoughts. If you’re depressed, you may have a negative view of yourself or of other people, or if your future or you, it’s difficult to change those thoughts on the road.
It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult. But actually, ’cause you’re depressed, you’re generally not doing anything. So if you can change your behavior, even if it’s just, getting outta bed, walking around the house and going back into bed, that will have ever such a slight impact on your thoughts.
And on your feelings of depression and you, so what you do, like I say, you target the area that’s easiest to target and eventually it will affect the other two. So that’s CBT in a nutshell, in terms of how to apply yourself. First of all, be aware of your emotions. That was something that I really had to work hard at.
I went through my police service. And people would always say, Andy, you know what, no matter what’s happening, he is a sensor of calm. He is placid. He will not be getting flustered or excited or panicking. Whatever happens, he will deal with it. And I took that as a compliment. Until I started thinking about it from a CBT perspective and I thought, actually maybe it meant I was just emotionally dead.
That’s why I can only name four emotions when I try. And it’s about becoming aware of those emotions. So becoming more aware of your emotions, becoming aware of your thoughts, and becoming aware of what you are doing and how those three things are linked together. Quick example, five minutes before tonight’s podcast, my heart’s racing.
I’m getting nervous. I’m thinking, why do I do this? Why do, I’m gonna make a hash of it. Why do I put myself through this? And what I have to do is you have to stop. You have to say and name it. Name the emotion to tame it. I’m nervous, right? I can do a bit of breathing. Just 10 seconds. A bit of breathing, right? Okay. Get it. Okay. What are my thoughts? What’s gonna happen?
Nothing. So far, no one’s been emailing me. Seems a nice guy. I’ve watched the other podcasts. They all seem good, and if I was, I do a sort of hobbyist podcast on the side and I get nervous, so when I am interviewing people, so maybe I have a normal be getting nervous too.
So we’re rolling it together. I’m now, and because I’m breathing, my heart’s slowing down and suddenly I’m thinking, ah, maybe I can do this. So it’s just. In terms of how people can apply that to themselves at a very simple level, be aware of your emotions. So work on that. Do the emotion thing in the morning, in the evening.
Be aware of your thoughts. Feel your, know your feelings and your physical body and what you are doing and just think of these, I can’t tackle some of them. What can I tackle? And go with that. And you’ll probably find the other things that are troubling you will follow.
