FUNDAY

Better Communicating
SENSITIVITY DIALOG [Thomas Gordon: Parent Effectiveness Training]
- This is from http://www.freewebs.com/codaplus.
- Love would cure much of the world's suffering. Love means respect and respect means being sensitive to others' concerns and feelings. This requires meaningful dialog, but it doesn't mean solving others' problems. Respectful dialog usually helps others start their own problem solving.
- Passive listening is one way to communicate respect. When someone expresses emotional disturbance, we can use body language to show that we're listening attentively, or we can also say things like, uh-huh, I see, really?, wow, oh, etc.
- Active listening is a simple way to show and build our own sensitivity and practice respectful dialog. It is used when someone expresses, verbally or nonverbally, a negative emotion of fear, anger, sadness etc. Passive and active listening can also be used together.
- Active Listening involves paraphrasing what the other person expressed and avoiding roadblocks to communication. Active Listening helps build understanding. Effective Sharing is similar, but expresses our own feelings to others.

EXAMPLES OF ACTIVE LISTENING
- Someone's upset with me for doing something in an undesirable way.
I'm sorry. Are you upset with me for doing something wrong?
- Someone is bored, lonely and sad with no one to play with.
Are you bored or sad because there's no one to play with?
- Someone is worried because another person has not arrived.
Are you worried that something may have happened to him or her?
- Someone says: I can't figure out what to do about this messed up paperwork.
Are you puzzled about how to get all that paperwork organized?

ROADBLOCKS TO COMMUNICATION [Gordon]
- Roadblocks to communicating with someone are roadblocks only when that person has an emotional problem. When the person doesn't have a problem, the same kinds of communication are less likely to be roadblocks.
Some of the Roadblocks are: criticizing, blaming, name-calling, questioning, reasoning, advising and commanding.
- When a kid is frustrated because another kid won't play what he or she wants, you can say by Active Listening: Are you sad [or "frustrated," if old enough to understand] because [someone's name] won't play your game? Or in a different case: You seem sad because [someone's name] doesn't want to play your game with you.
- The formula for this kind of effective dialog is: paraphrasing the person's Feeling + What it's about. This is called Active Listening and it can be in the form of a question or a comment. Active Listening as a question is different from the questioning that becomes a Roadblock. Questioning that doesn't follow the Active Listening formula is a likely Roadblock. That is if it doesn't ask the person's feeling or what it's about.
- Roadblock question examples would be: [advice] Why don't you find something else to play with? [distraction] Do you want to hear a funny story? [criticism] Who died and made you King?
- Active Listening shows sensitivity, while Roadblocks show insensitivity. Most of the time it takes only one Active Listening response to "solve" a kid's problem. That's because their problem is mainly fear, which is due to lack of affection. And Active Listening shows sensitivity, which shows affection, respect, love, or caring.
- Much of the time adults aren't in the mood to be sensitive to someone else. We're in a hurry to get something done and don't want to be interrupted. Having grown up fairly insensitive, we don't appreciate the value of sensitivity to others. To be responsible as adults is to be sensitive to ourselves and others, but it takes practice.
- Adults [and kids] can have practice sessions pretending to have problems and using Active Listening for them.

MALE & FEMALE CULTURE [Deborah Tannen ...]
- It is said that male and female cultures tend to differ quite a lot, though some members of each sex have traits of the other. The male culture is said to have been occupied largely with hunting in ancient times. The female culture is said to have been involved with gathering food or gardening and with home life.
- Effective hunting required that males be quiet and stealthy and suppress emotions so as not to scare prey off. The home life of females benefited from talk and emotional sensitivity. The frequent talk of women helped to keep away predators and pests. Their emotional sensitivity helped women better care for the kids and adults of the group.
- Males learned to cooperate through hierarchy and competition, with the most experienced being dominant. Females learned to cooperate through sensitive talk and equality, but with some subtle hierarchy based on experience.
- Male hunting abilities seem to have led them to learn war against other tribes, and to learn domination. The traits of ancient times seem to remain largely in effect in modern time, but are in great need of modification.
- It is responsible for everyone now to learn emotional sensitivity and try to understand each other's differences. It is responsible for guardians to be sensitive to the conscious and subconscious feelings of dependents. Parent Effectiveness Training and Moral Inventory greatly help to develop such sensitivity.