I was talking to a fellow stories professional with years of experience about the difficult conversations we often had while gathering stories within the charity sector. He recommended a book, How to Listen: Tools for opening up conversations when it matters most by Katie Colombus, which shows you how to incorporate the Samaritans’ listening principles into everyday life.
The book is a collection of stories, practical exercises, guidance and tips. It argues that by becoming a ‘nation of listeners’ we can work towards supporting and enhancing each other’s emotional wellbeing and encourage better mental health.
Five years on from the beginning of the pandemic which placed a huge burden for many on both their physical and mental health, encouraging better mental health is something most of us are aware of I’m sure. According to the mental health charity Mind, one in four people in England will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year, and one in six report experiencing a common mental health problem (like anxiety and depression) in any given week. Encouraging people to talk about how they feel means encouraging people to listen. The Samaritans listening model suggests the following ways to have better conversations:
- Use open questions: How? What? Where?
- Summarise: A summary helps to show the individual that you have listened to and understood their circumstances and their feelings.
- Reflect: Repeating back a word or phrase encourages the individual to carry on and expand.
- Clarify: Sometimes an individual may gloss over an important point. By exploring these areas further, you can help them clarify these points for themselves.
- Use short words of encouragement: The person may need help to continue with their story – you could use phrases like ‘say more’ or ‘go on’.
- React: We need to show that we have understood the situation by reacting to it with validating phrases such as ‘that sounds very difficult’.
I found the book useful and I was reminded of it again when, earlier this year, I completed a short introductory counselling course every Saturday for six weeks. We learned about the importance of active listening. We were told that counselling is very much a two-way process which involves both counsellor and client and active listening is an important aspect of this relationship. Active listening involves a range of different skills: questioning, clarification, reflecting, paraphrasing, summarising, echoing, demonstrating empathy, validating and aligning yourself.
Gathering stories for charities is not, of course, counselling but similar skills are required to do both jobs with sensitivity and empathy I believe. While someone gathering a story will have pre-set questions in mind when interviewing a service user or a volunteer, I feel it can be helpful to just listen and not interject too much or dictate what they talk about. I always remind people I’m interviewing that it is ‘their story’ not mine and they should have ownership of how it is told.
A person-centred approach to counselling, on the other hand, involves mostly active listening and asking open questions rather than asking closed questions which, I know, sounds easy but in my experience can be quite challenging. Questions you might ask yourself before having any kind of conversation include:
- Are you feeling distracted? If so, it is difficult to actively listen and pay attention because your mind is elsewhere.
- Are you present? Again, if you are not fully with the other person in a conversation it can be difficult to contribute as effectively as you wish.
- Are you actively listening or just waiting your turn to speak? We all do this sometimes I’m sure, we have something to say and we want to say it but the focus on ourselves can take away from what the other person wants to talk about.
On the counselling course, we were given the opportunity to try out various skills on each other to help improve how we ask open questions and actively listen. But it’s not just trainee counsellors talking to their clients or story gatherers trying to get the possible stories for their charities that can benefit. These are skills that anyone can use to have better conversations.
As Katie Colombus argues, we can all work towards supporting and enhancing each other’s emotional wellbeing and encourage better mental health. In her book, she suggests we keep a listening diary for a week to help notice when we are listening well (and not so well). By first paying attention to how we listen and how we can improve, we can all take steps each and every day to become better listeners. We can then learn to use the necessary skills with sensitivity and empathy. To paraphrase the Dalai Lama, when we do that, we might even learn something new.
