Marriage has taught me to go even further than that. I now ask "are you telling me to get it off your chest, or you want help solving it?". If the former, I don't offer any solutions whatsoever, in any kind of format.
My ultimate takeaway is to now default to listening without advice. The result are on average better as people who want to vent are more put-off by advice givers than advice seeks who receive a good listener. It's also made me quite a bit more appreciative of times when I need to vent and someone is there to simply listen.
Let's say someone is telling you they are fearful for their job, they think they will get fired soon, even though they have nothing specific to point to. As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head? Because my default would be to reply that they should do the best they can and if it comes to that they will surely find better pastures, but then I'm giving advice already.
I hear this advice but I have little clue how to put it into practice, moreover because of what I mentioned above, if I'm telling someone something, I definitely want them to think about it and try and help me with advice, otherwise I feel like they don't even care and would not share again with the same person.
"Oh no, that's terrible! Why are you fearful, are you all right?"
and you remain active by asking follow-up questions. For example to plug gaps in the story:
"Wow! Did your manager say that to your face? Or was it hearsay through that one co-worker?"
and so on. Expressing emotions is also perfectly fine:
"I feel bad. Wish I could do something for you."
I'd only interject long enough to get them talking again. If they need your help they'll have asked it by now :)
So with your example, I would first accept their feelings - we've all been insecure about jobs from time to time - and then try to probe into them.
"Has your boss been talking about money being tight? Did one of your big customers just drop?"
"Has your boss been talking about your performance? Do you see others on your team being dismissive of your role?"
Questions like this let the counterparty know that a) they matter to you and b) you're hearing what they're saying. I think that's what you're saying you want to convey. I could be way off base here.
In my experience this is also a women-men difference in brain wiring. Men often looks for help when he fails to solve a problem, women always looking for emotional support before solving a problem.
If you give a solution for someone looking for an emotional support or vica-versa you've expreienced one of the main source of frustration in relationships :)
>As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head?
The "trick" I do is to try to set aside whatever train of thoughts I might have had before the person spoke to me, and try to imagine that the thing they talk about is happening to me. And then, voice my reaction to that. So if someone told me that "I'm fearful for my job. I think I might be fired soon", the first that comes to mind is "Oh my god, that's horrible! Why do you think that happens? Have they hinted about this before?"
Now, this maybe works a handful of times in the conversation. A second thing that you can do is trying to imagine the relations of the thing that just got told to you. By relations, I mean relating to anything, how it connects to anything: the speaker's environment, life circumstances, your shared universe, anything. Continuing the example above: "The timing is such a shame, given what's going on in your life, I would have liked it that at least the job is stable".
Third thing, you could discuss the persons possible actions and reactions to the event, and how others in their life have, or will have taken it. Continuing: "Do you have anything else lined up, just in case?" "Could your side gig support you until you find another job?" "How did your spouse take the news?"
And the fourth thing, it's always worth thinking about WHY the other person told you the thing they did. What are you to this other person? A friend? Colleague? Are you their superior? Spouse? Do you relate, in a way, to the thing that they told you? Are you maybe a recruiter, and that's why they tell you that they are fearful for their job? The answers to these questions can bring you closer to your natural response to the situation.
As a listener, I'm my goal is to create an environment for them to talk about what bothers them in the most vibrant, and exploratory way possible. I realize that's not exactly the most helpful explanation so allow me to go into more detail. There's a few conversational techniques that I pull from heavily when I'm trying to actively listen: conversational orienteering, and open ended questions, non-Sorcratic questioning.
For lack of a better term[1], conversational orienteering is actively being aware of the topic of conversation and its local topology. Given a topic, one should be able to generate several other topics: one that is more abstract, one more specific, and several adjacent. Over time, a listener gets a sense of where a conversation wants to go and uses the conversational topology to orient towards that goal. It took me a bit of practice to be good at picking topics not too far and not too close to the one at hand - too far can make conversations feel disconnected and random, and too close can make someone feel like they are being misunderstood.
Secondly, I don't think open-ended questions needs much explanation, but when someone is venting or needs support, hows, whys, and whens give the speaker much more room to express themselves than 'Do you...'s.
Thirdly, it's important to be non-Socratic in questions and responses. Leading the speaker is much much worse than telling them advice and should be avoided at all cost.
If you've ever worked a problem out verbally, you should be able to recognize that these principles work to cultivate a good verbal environment for the speaker. I don't see them as not helping, so much as creating an environment where they have the best shot at verbally processing their issue. I think it's important to recognize that emotions can get in the way of people being able to take action and that speaking can help diffuse strong emotions so that someone is ready to take a concrete step toward fixing their problem. I've seen that happen a lot. Even just feeling understood can help people feel better about making a real decision.
It's probably also important to point out that there are some people for which verbal processing works really well and some who can complain endlessly. It's important to recognize the difference. For the later, value your time. Maybe give them 15mins of listening and then decide to change the subject, for them verbal processing is not going to help. They probably need to work on issues in a clinical or therapeutic environment you cannot provide.
Hope this gives some insight, and even if it doesn't, feel free to tell me too.
1. If this actually has a term, please let me know. I'm coining one just to be able to talk about it.
In these situations people just want to hear you acknowledge that you understand they are in pain, no necessary agree with their cause of action.
If you’re not sure what to ask, then your best course of action is to enquire about why they think they feel a certain way. Why does they job makes them stressful, why does talking with a certain person make them anxious. You’re not rendering judgement on their emotions or feels, you simply acknowledge they are what they are, and that’s normal.
For some specifics the following might be useful:
“Why do you think X makes you anxious”
Once they answer
“Yes, I understand now why that might make you anxious”
Or
“It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious”
If there behaviour is causing issues:
“It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious, that’s ok, but the way you’re dealing with it is causing issues for X. Perhaps we can find a better way for you to cope?”
For more, it’s worth looking at Mental Health First Aid. It can provide a number of very practical tips of dealing with someone in crisis, which are also excellent for helping those that just need to vent to someone.
This has been a key takeaway for me too, also in the context of intimate partner communication.
However, I would say that there can for sure be pitfalls with it— it's easy to believe that you are communicating only acknowledgment of emotional state, but have the listener receive it as signing on to their interpretation of the facts, the overall premise, their assessment of the other players' actions and motivations in the story, and so on.
This can lead to major misunderstandings down the road, when the person presents concrete actions that they are expecting will be taken. They may not be anticipating any pushback on this because previous validation-of-emotional-state conversations led them to believe you were both on the same page, when in fact you have significant concerns (whether it was that they misjudged the situation, escalated it unnecessarily, viewed someone else's actions unfairly, failed to accept a compromise or take possible corrective actions, whatever it is).
At that point, it's probably the type of conflict best taken to a professional to sort out, but I think of these situations when I see relationship coaches on TikTok talking up this kind of emotional validation as being a silver bullet for resolving all conflicts and achieving lasting harmony.
It is less about "solving a problem" and more about "figuring out how to feel about the problem".
Validation can help reduce emotional turmoil, distill it into a calmer set of feelings.
The feelings may still be strong. The situation may still suck.
But at least you can be sure of how much it sucks - because someone else you respect, see's it as valid too.
Something my sister does, which I hate, is follow up "hello" with a falling-pitch "how are you". This really bothers me every time she does it to me, which is pretty often.
But I have a lot of problems responding to (strangers) asking me how I am, and I've tried her approach of mostly ignoring the question and reflecting back a falling-pitch "how are you", and it seems to work very well. No one ever complains that I ignored their question, and the focus goes back on them, where I want it, instead of me.
If I were to judge this strategy by how I personally feel about it, it would be one of the most grossly offensive things you could say. And it still makes me uncomfortable to use it. But the lesson here appears to be that I shouldn't use myself as a reference for how to interact with other people.
Eve when it’s not listening to someone who’s venting, that can be really powerful anyway.
The best sys admin I’ve ever work with used to keep a teddy bear on the end of her desk. When people came to her with a question or problem she’d say “talk to the bear”. It’s astounding how often explaining the problem to an inanimate object results in the solution becoming obvious to the person ding the explaining.
(Note, she was really good at not saying in a rude or dismissive way, but she was somewhat on the spectrum and we ran a lot of cover to ensure the CEO didn’t get told to talk to the bear…)
I've had good luck explaining any thorny technical problem to any inanimate object on my desk. Often times, the mere act of doing this makes me really pay attention to my assumptions and the information I have gathered.
(At first I thought “talk to the bear” was some sort of folksy Eastern European way of telling the asker to go to hell)
It's not something you'd say in response to a text complaint, where there's not enough "bandwidth" to clearly communicate the complainant's emotional state; but it's something CSRs are trained to say on phone calls all the time.
It's also the reason that therapists vastly prefer speaking in person, to video calls, to phone calls; and almost never even consider doing "therapy via text chat." There's not enough bandwidth in text chat to enable a therapist to properly engage with and respond to the emotional content of a client's communication; but with each additional level (voice, video, in-person meeting), that's more possible.
(Interesting consideration, given that: suicide/crisis hotlines should probably consider offering video calls as an option, as the increased bandwidth for emotional content will allow the operator to engage with + potentially help the caller on a deeper level.)
Just reaching out is hard, and you want to be as anonymous as possible.
With my wife? Noooo, it would sound like I'm saying "I'm not interested in your problems unless you have solutions". As her partner, she wants me to share the burden of her problems, even those for which she has no solution.
I may be much slower to adapt. My wife of (almost) 30 years usually starts with explicit “I am telling you this to just get it off my chest”.
If someone is grieving it's probably time to just listen, but when someone is stuck with a social problem they may be rubber ducking with you rather than considering you to be a good approximation of an oracle ;)
"This code is obviously correct, right duck? Look here, this line first does x, then y happens and here... Wait a minute, that doesn't do z at all!"
That frustrates me.
Totally with you on this. I'm a solutions architect by day, and my entire skillset is helping people solve problems.
Do a role-play: someone comes to me complaining about how it's really frustrating having to type all this crap into Excel, so I suggest using OCR, or taking a course on getting quicker with the numpad. Unfortunately, I missed their real problem: they hate their job. Me telling them "here's how you could be better at a job you hate" doesn't really help them, it simply looks uncaring and assumes they haven't already thought of those things.
So I could just nod and say "oh that's sound terrible" every time they mention it. You're right, it might look crass and robotic.
Even better here would be saying "Wow, typing all that crap into Excel, you mentioned it last week as well. Sounds like you really don't enjoy doing that?" and encourage them to expand a bit. Is it the typing? What makes it so frustrating? Do they think it's their job in the first place?
Eventually, they admit to you (maybe they hadn't realised themselves) that they hate this bit of their job, and need to discuss with their manager not doing it any more. (Or maybe they hate the company they work for, and need to find a new job. Or it's actually the keyboard they're using they hate. Or whatever, you need to listen to find out.)
This is how you help them out of their rut. They feel that you're interested in their problem, and when they do find a solution, they'll own it because they found it.
If they go on a rant about something, that dumps emotional and mental load onto me.
If they don’t resolve, or attempt to resolve it, that means they’ll continue to dump it onto me - and even worse, it will be a boring, already heard it problem with no new information!
If they continue to do that, and I continue to listen, I’m essentially their emotional garbage dump and enabling their lack of dealing with their actual problem and frustrations.
Even worse, it is often hard for me to get my mind off an unresolved problem. So then it bugs me.
I like solving problems because then I have a lot fewer things bugging me. They almost always result in progress in other ways too, and accomplishing things, which is nice.
Even worse still if it’s the kind of problem they are making for themselves, or are intentionally not trying to solve. Of which there are many.
Eventually, I just don’t want to be around them, or get progressively more blunt with changing the subject because it makes it exhausting and unpleasant for me being around them.
Some people seem to be able to just ignore the emotional affect or load, and get whatever they want from the convo, and I can do so if I exert effort to do so.
But life is too short for this kind of BS on the regular.
In some contexts, though, offering advice can feel like you want to close the person down rather than listen to them, that you think their problems aren't serious enough because you'd solve them easily. I'm guessing you've had at least one occasion where you have a work issue, and your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn't work, and you were frustrated with them as a result.
As such, the consequence of offering solutions is that it can damage your relationships with people, or at least not use an opportunity to strengthen them.
In a work context, it should (always) be about most efficiently solving the problem at hand. When I have a work issue, I preface my request for support with the steps I have taken to attempt to solve the problem. Anything else wastes the time of everyone involved. When this is done correctly, the first thing to come to the mind of the people I'm asking is often exactly what I'm looking for.
> your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn't work
Casual, useless, unsolicited advice is also a waste of time and energy (see "seagull management"). If my manager did this I would promptly tell them to either dig into the problem properly with me, figure it out themselves, or leave me to it.
Yep, and allowing other person to do all this to you is definitely spoiling. At the same time, a possibility and ability to spoil someone you love - is one of the biggest pleasures in life.
(I’ve shown the video to my wife. She said: “See, you could have done much worse”)
I couldn't agree more, I would amend the above with "unless you are sure you are loved by your listener, and are willing to impose on them" =)
That would be a rather strange reaction. A single brain gets easily stuck on a problem, so if involving the second brain helps that does not mean that the problem was easy. Or that the first brain was defective. (Frankly, I think it was evolutionary “cheaper” to implement the rule “if stuck - consult” than to implement an unstuckable brain).
I mean within reason I'm sure it's fine.
But we probably all know people who complain about the same things incessantly, with no desire to change them. And at some point it's reasonable to decide if those are people who you really want to continue to invest time into.
But at work, I understand this mindset. Though personally, I still actually don't mind hearing people complain. And since I'm a manager, complaints are a very useful signal for me: even if I'm just in listening-mode, they give me more clarity on precisely what's going on in my team.
As a leader, actionable complaints (read: criticisms) are indeed a very useful signal, and I try my best to pay attention to them.
If this is actually true then clearly there's no need to apologize. However if I've selfishly imposed a one-sided conversation on someone else in order to soothe myself, of course it's correct to apologize. Who enjoys participating in a one-sided conversation? Most people tolerate them out of sheer politeness.
The whole idea of good manners is to avoid imposing on other people, be that physically, emotionally, or conversationally.
You are projecting. Some people are flattered to be a trusted confidante or emotional support, and glad to be able to help someone they care about. This is situational and dependent on factors (if someone's emotionally leaning on me every second of every day, it's going to get tiring pretty quickly), but even if the experience of the conversation _itself_ isn't exactly pleasant it might still be considered a worthwhile discomfort to go through for the emotional closeness generated (as a parallel - physically exercising isn't (often) pleasant, but the sensation afterwards and the physical well-being generated are considered worthwhile, so the activity is net-desirable even if it's unpleasant in-the-moment). In fact, apologizing for the act might insult the listener, implying that your relationship isn't strong enough to warrant such sharing. Further, the listener might care about the speaker's mood and state of mind so much that, even if the experience is net-negative _for them_, they're still glad to be able to provide that support to someone they love.
This is all subjective - you and your partner might so dislike being vented to, or feel such negligible positive effects from it, that the calculus ends up negative and an apology _is_ genuinely warranted. But it's not necessarily true for all (or even, I'd guess, most) people. You're right that avoiding imposition is good manners, but it is not necessarily the case that sharing feelings with someone is an imposition on them.
You'd surely apologize when asking even the closest friend for financial support, why not when asking (or worse, demanding) emotional support?
In this way, listening and solving aren't too dissimilar. Simply listening can give the speaker an appropriate environment in which to solve their problem. A listener can play a part in helping to solve the problem, but helping foster the environment in which the problem can be solved. Don't mistake this as a silver bullet, but simply recognize that being a listener is an underappreciated role and listener vs solver isn't as dichotomous as it sounds.
Not really. The question, more generally, is: what should my role be in this conversation? Should I be an active participant in solving the problem? Or should I support you as you work through it?
As with so many things in life, the hard part is working out if your actions should be motivated by actually helping or feeling like you helped.
I think generally the person you’d say this to is already aware how the conversation will go if you don’t clarify beforehand.