How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances | Page 141
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There is little room for empathy in an endless rebuttal. Be particularly careful not to find yourself busily
rebutting minor factual errors and exaggerations when you should be conceding the truth of a basic proposition.
I worked some years ago with the complaints department of a U.K. railway company that almost made a fetish
of these sorts of rebuttals. A passenger who wrote that her train was 90 minutes late would get back a huffy
letter documenting that it was only 83 minutes late – with no acknowledgment that 83 minutes is as
unacceptable as 90. Nothing empathic about that!
In a typical risk controversy, your stakeholders are going to get a lot of technical things wrong. They’ll probably
get most of the process things right. This is a rule with plenty of exceptions, of course. Still, more often than not
they’re right (or mostly right) that you have been arrogant and unforthcoming, but wrong (or mostly wrong) that
your dimethylmeatloaf emissions are giving the neighbors cancer. You will be tempted to spend all your time
insisting that there’s no proof your emissions have had any effect on the neighborhood cancer rate. And to be
sure, it’s a point you need to make. But if empathic risk communication is one of your goals, try to start by
conceding that you have been arrogant and unforthcoming, or that you have sometimes been arrogant and
unforthcoming, or at least that you might sometimes have come across to some people as arrogant and
unforthcoming.
7. Kinds of Empathic Statements: A Typology
Havens divides empathic statements (as opposed to interpersonal statements; we’ll get to those next) into four
categories: imitative statements, simple empathic statements, complex empathic statements, and extensions.
Imitative Statements
Imitative statements are a close cousin of what I earlier called echoes. Havens writes: “Thus ‘How can I
decide?’ might be said to the doubtful person; ‘What hope is there?’ to the depressed one; or ‘Where does one
find the courage?’ to fearful ones.” Notice how these statements are made less intrusive. They’re reframed as
questions, and they’re deflected. “Where does one find the courage?” is a lot easier to hear than “You sound
frightened.” Even so, Havens warns that imitative statements should be bland.
The goal is to comfort by our presence, not to startle by our prescience. Not everyone knows that minds can be
read or that only a few people are so creative and unique that their thoughts could surprise anyone. Many people
are deeply private; they believe their thought should never be known.…
Here’s a slightly longer example:
One day Jeanne seemed especially still and distant. I mused aloud, “What is one supposed to do?” To my
surprise, she crisply replied, “Right!” and after a long pause, “I don’t know what to do. I never know what to
do.” I had put myself in the midst of her uncertainty, verbalized it for her, and shared her desperation by my
tone. At the same time, there was no implication that she should know or decide, as many ways of calling
attention to her indecision might have suggested.
Similarly, you can echo your stakeholders’ emotions, their situation as they see it, without suggesting that they
should see it or handle it differently. “A Superfund cleanup in the neighborhood – how to bear it?”
On the day I was drafting this section, doctors and parents in Perth, Australia were worried about an upsetting
disease cluster. Four very young children had died suddenly from streptococcal illness; three of the four also had
seasonal flu. Health Department officials openly (and appropriately) expressed their own frustration and anxiety
in the media. Communicable disease director Paul Van Buynder, for example, said, “We are desperately trying
to get to the bottom of what’s causing these illnesses.” But many local doctors, inundated with worried parents,
didn’t want the parents to be concerned. Consider this typical quotation from the head of the Western Australia
Council on General Practice, GP Steve Wilson: “If a child is sitting up, taking fluids, cooing and kaaing and
looking fairly well, there’s no cause for concern, because the vast majority of these infections will just be
straightforward viruses and not the flu.”
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