The Tell-Me-More Buffer

Of course, I know the benefit of listening.

Gives space for more meaning to come in, helps people feel heard (duh) and there was that realisation that when people are speaking they’re saying something.

You might have also caught the fact that I think active listening is evil.

However.

I am looking at how I am in conversation – not just crisis/conflict conversations which is kind of my focus here (yeah, kind of) – but also just, you know, normal conversations.

Like the night before last.

I was at a friend’s house for steak and chat. Five of us.

I watched myself reply almost immediately to everything, like there wasn’t enough time to let people finish and get what I wanted to say said.

Hyuh.

The Tell-Me-More Buffer

The Tell-me-more Buffer is making a habit of saying, ‘Tell me more,’  or ‘Oh, right?’ or ‘Huh – what’s that like?’ or at least shutting up and allowing someone to keep talking.

Especially if what they’ve just said has triggered some sort of adrenalin reaction in you.

For me, what the Tell-Me-More Buffer does is it puts space between stimulus and response.

It allows me more time to (a) not respond and (b) find more information/meaning as it’s likely I will have jumped straight up my ladder of inference quite quickly without even noticing and it gives me a chance to add more information to see if I’m barking up the wrong ladder and also it stops me talking.

Pant, pant.

Ah yes, the overwhelming desire to speak

One of the things I’ve been struggling with working on becoming conscious of  is that I have an overwhelming desire to speak.

(It’s also probably the reason I’ve been teaching presentation skills for the past 6 years, but let’s leave that particular topic for another time. As my friend Beverley says, we all walk our limp, right?)

If I can somehow get around it and let the other person talk, even for a moment, what I find is that new things happen.

Thing is, although not everyone has the affliction, I think we almost all get it when the adrenalin starts to flow.

One of the things about the Tell-Me-More Buffer is that, like a lot of the practices you need during conflict and crisis, you have to practice them before you’re in crisis and conflict because by the time you’re in that situation it’s too late.

It’s about developing habits, about how you can stay awake, about how you can carve a groove before you get there.

Argh – Active Listening – p’tooee…

The danger with this one is that it can seem a bit like active listening:

‘Tell me more about that…’

Ew. Ew! Ew. Ew! Ew. Ew!

Yes I want it to be a habit to listen to people more and to allow space for them to be actually heard.

But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do all that nodding stuff so that they feel heard when I’m not actually hearing them.

It is, again, about remembering

The TMMB (no?)  allows enough space for me to remember that I’m meant to be listening and then I can genuinely listen.

This week

So this week I get to play with getting one more sentence out of people before I speak.

I ask that I might somehow find the humility to see  that perhaps I don’t completely know where they’re going, I don’t totally know the end of their train of thought, perhaps what I see as adding value might actually be arrogant rudeness.

I’m all about the humility, see.

Then if I happen to be in a situation of conflict or crisis (SoCoC?) maybe it will become a reflex.

We’ll see.

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