Catalytic Conversations – Diving In
Hi all
Each week the recording and handouts will be uploaded here. The page will not be publicly visible on my website. It can only be accessed by the link I send you. Please don’t share the link.
Session 1:
The recording had be chopped into segments to allow me to upload it
What would you like to get out of this program? Take a few minutes to write. Th clearer you are on what you want the more likely you are to get it.
Module 1: How to Listen and Speak to Connect and Direct
A Catalytic Conversationis one that changes people, for the better.
- helps the speaker(s) FEEL seen and heard, understood and appreciated as they are
- encourages the speaker towards self-awareness, self-reflection, self-responsibility and empowerment
- stimulates neural integration in the brain
What a Catalytic Conversationcontains:
- silence ….. giving the speaker time to think,
- reflection …to let the speaker know they are being heard
- question asking to drive understanding of the speaker’s experience, feelings and thoughts …in that order
What it does not contain:
- unsolicited advice (you should or shouldn’t ….),
- hijacking and taking over to talk about yourself (I know how you feel …let me tell you about me),
- psychoanalyzing (here’s why I you think you feel the way you do),
- fixing the other person’s problem for them
Four Components of a Catalytic Conversation
1 – Reflect
2 – Empathize
3 – Validate
4 – Redirect
The Brain
The three-part brain
- I – Brain Stem / Reptilian Center– Fight, Flight, Fall Asleep – concerned with survival.
- II – Limbic Brain: Amygdala, Hippocampus, hypothalamus – primarily involved with emotion and memory
- III – Cortex– mapping reality, thinking, creative problem solving
- Mirror Neurons – are found throughout the cortex. They allow us to learn through imitation, enabling us to reflect body language, facial expressions and emotions. They make us wince when we see someone else wince. They make us cry in sad movies. They are what make yawns contagious. They allow us to feel what others are feeling.
The Pre-frontal Cortex: 9 functions:
- Body regulation / impulse control
- Emotional balance
- Attunement to others & communication
- Insight / knowing who you were and are in the past, present and future
- Fear modulation
- Flexibility – pause before acting
- Empathy
- Morality
- Intuition
Amygdula Hijack – Aka: Flipping the Lid
Vital Ingredient: an Integrated and Skillful Listener
The responsibilities of the listener:
- Be authentic
- Self-regulate
- Stay curious
EXERCISE – Listen to Listen
In partners: each person will have 8 minutes to be the speaker, while the other is the listener.
Think of a subject about which you have questions. Something that’s been on your mind. Something that might have been worrying you. Talk about that
The listener’s only responses can be: ‘Tell me more’, or ‘what else do you think and feel about that?’
feedback
Three things you can do to self-regulate:
- Use your breath
- Use your body
- Use your words
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Session 2
Catalytic Conversations
How to Listen and Speak to Connect and Direct
Step 1: Reflect
Recap of last week’s ideas
Feedback on homework, communication experiences – positive or negative, questions
What makes staying calm and present difficult?
- Boredom, judgment, defensiveness, other priorities ………………………
How Values Systems affect our listening
Values: definition ………………………………………………………………………………
How to Identify them:
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Catalytic Conversations – 4 Steps
Step 1. Reflect:
Intention 1:To give the speaker a chance to tell you what’s going on for them, to let them know that you’re listening and to make sure that you are accurately hearing their words. To show the speaker that you are trying to perceive the world as they see it and that you are doing your best to understand their messages.
Intention 2:to make sure that the speaker has actually told you what’s bothering them. It also causes them to self-reflect and think (frontal cortex) about what they’re experiencing. To allow the speaker to ‘hear’ their own thoughts and to focus on what they say and feel.
Intention 3:To encourage the speaker to continue talking.
Howto:
The first thing do is to repeat what you’ve heard, exactly as you’ve heard it. As much as possible use their words verbatim. This has a two-fold effect: it calms your brain and it will start to calm theirs. Your key practice: repeat their words VERBATIM
Example: Speaker: “Yesterday I heard that my company is going to be laying people off!
Listener, repeating it back: “so, what I hear you say is that you heard yesterday that your company is going to be laying people off!
Next, to make sure that you got it right, ASK:
- Did I get that?
- Is that correct?
- Did I hear that right?
If the speaker doesn’t feel that you heard him/her accurately they should use this opportunity to restate what they said. Reflect their words to them again and ask if you got it. If the speaker says yes, you got it, lean in and encourage them to say more.
ASK: Tell me more about that.
What else do you want to say about that?
Help me really understand your experience … tell me more ….
Mistakes we often make:
- We paraphrase or interpret using our own words
- We jump too quickly into wanting to address what we think we’ve heard without making sure it’s the real issue.
- We say we understand what they’re talking about before we’ve actually checked
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Session 3
Emotions and Empathy
Empathy is all about connecting with the feelings or emotions that the speaker is expressing
E-Motion = Energy in Motion
Emotions are messengers. They are the bridge between our outer and inner worlds. They give us information about our outside circumstances and our internal interpretation of them, and then they generate energy to make us move in the direction of our highest values. Our emotions exist to keep us moving. Why? Movement = life.
When we learn to decipher their messages we can use them to move ourselves in the direction of wisdom, love and fulfillment.
Values Systems: our highest Values are driven by our deepest Voids plus the Pain we associate with the void. When someone is emoting they are, at some level, expressing a void. Your listening, reflecting, empathizing presence can help them hear the void that is calling to be filled. You can help them identify something that is high value to them. (we don’t cry or get upset over things that are low value to us). Stay curious.
Empathy
“Empathy fuels connection; Sympathy drives separation ….Empathy is feeling with someone” Brenè Brown
4 characteristics of Empathy:
- Perspective taking – ability to take the perspective of another person, or recognize their perspective as their truth
- Staying out of judgement
- Recognizing emotion
- Being able to communicate that
“Rarely does a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.” Brenè Brown
Exercise: Think of a time that was emotionally challenging ….Please be kind to your listener ….this is a practice exercise – probably not the place to lay bare your deepest darkest secret or wound ……
Each person gets 10 minutes to talk about this. The listen’s role is to:
- Hold space (tell me more; or what else do you think or feel about that?)
- Reflect – so you …. Did I get that?
- Empathize – how did that make you feel?
Or: I can hear that was …(insert emotion …eg difficult, frustrating, upsetting, hard) for you
Or: I hear your …..(insert emotion ….eg anger, sadness, frustration, disappointment etc)
TIP: use their emotive words when reflecting and empathizing.
Mistakes we often make:
We assume we know what they’re feeling and then respond to that without checking. This makes the speaker feel misunderstood and even anxious. Our words or description are not congruent with the speaker’s experience. Incongruence triggers confusion and anxiety in the brain. It registers as a threat and activates the amygdala.
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Session 4
Validation
Reflecting can in some ways be about clarifying ‘just the facts, ma’am’
Empathizing is tapping in to the emotion…acknowledging it and naming it
Validating is about showing that it makes sense to you that the speaker feels whatever they feel.
It’s not enough to just empathize without validating ….eg … “so you crashed your car and you’re really upset … uh huh”
We have to go a step further: “of course you’re upset ….it’s a big and scary thing to be in a car accident’ or “I’d be upset to!” or “it’s understandable that you’re upset. It sucks to have crashed your car.”
How to do it
Effective validation has two main components:
- It identifies a specific emotion
- It offers justification for feeling that emotion
Other example of validating statements
- “Wow, that would be confusing.”
- “He really said that? I’d be angry too!”
- “Ah, that is so sad.”
- “You have every right to be proud; that was a major accomplishment!”
- “I’m so happy for you! You’ve worked incredibly hard on this. It must feel amazing.”
Notice again how each of these responses refers to a specific emotion and shows some justification for or acceptance of it. Including both elements of validation shows the other person that you not only hear them, you understand them.
SAY:
- It makes sense to me that you feel …(emotion) because …..
- If that had happened to me I think I would also have felt …(emotion).
- Looking at it from your perspective I can see that you might have felt ….(emotion).
- I can see how your assumption that …….had happened would have caused you to feel …(emotion)
Mistakes we often make:
- In our efforts to convey that we understand what they’re feeling we launch into stories of our own when we felt what we think they’re feeling. In this way we hijack the conversation. It’s natural to do this, but in a catalytic listening conversation we need to keep our own stories to a minimum. There will be a time to share them when the speaker is complete.
- We invalidate their feelings. This happens when we say things like:
- I hear you’re angry but you should just let that go.
- Angry? You’re not really angry. You’re just annoyed
- You’re angry? That not an appropriate/ useful / wise response. You should feel …(emotion) instead.
- There, there, don’t be sad / upset / angry etc
- You just need to be positive
- It’s not that big a deal
- It could be worse
- At least it’s not …..(fill in the blank) ….
- You’ll be fine!
- We get defensive:
- You’re wrong
- I didn’t do that!
- I don’t know where you’re coming from (with tone)
What do you do if you don’t understand or agree with the other person’s feelings.
Validating does not mean agreeing with their story or perspective.
It’s about saying: if I were on your shoes/ knowing only what you know/ looking through your eyes ….it make sense to me that you would feel that way.
It’s about saying you have a right to have feelings ….
What if you still can’t really validate them?
ASK more questions to help you see the situation from their side, get more details about what they think happened, get more information to help you make sense of why they are feeling what they’re feeling.
Validation gives the other person permission to feel what they’re feeling. It shows that you’re not judging them for reacting the way they are. You’re saying—in complete honesty—that it does make sense to react the way they have, given their perspective and experience.
Session 5: Redirect
(skip the first 2 minutes of the recording as we were just chatting)
In this step you are asking questions that can redirect the speaker from remembering the past to creating the future.
Intention 1: To encourage the speaker to take responsibility for what they want to experience in the future.
Intention 2: To empower them by giving them a chance to come up with their own action steps and experience themselves as capable, thinking, creative human beings.
Think of the speaker as a person on a raft, trying to get to the island. Your job as the listener is to facilitate their quest, not row them all the way there.
ASK:
- What needs to happen for you to feel differently?
- How do you want to feel instead? ………
- What can you do to help yourself feel that way?
- What would you have to believe to feel that way?
- What have you done that worked in the past?
- What do you want me to do to help you?
Mistakes we often make
We try to fix the problem for them. We offer solutions before they’ve had a chance to come up with their own. In this way we deny them the chance to become self-responsible and accountable, and to feel empowered. Brainstorming is fine. Taking over is not wise.