How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view! P: I feel so terrible. H: It may not be possible to imagine any time free of it. P: I thought if I died it would stop. H: That might be the only time. P: No, now I feel I will be better. Extensions make more of a contribution to the dialogue than Havens’s other sorts of empathic statements. They don’t just echo what the stakeholder is saying or not-quite-saying; they go on from there – in baby steps – to probe what else you think might be going on. Although Havens doesn’t say so, they’re a sort of hybrid between empathic statements and interpersonal statements (see #8 below). When Havens writes about empathic statements, his focus is on how to get closer to other people’s unacknowledged feelings and how to express that closeness without intruding too far. Empathic statements neither endorse nor dispute what others are feeling, just gently get closer to what they are feeling. In risk communication, this helps get your stakeholders’ feelings closer to the surface and, with luck, “into the room” – but not quite “onto the table,” since that would probably be too intrusive. Getting stakeholders’ feelings into the room is useful partly because it helps your stakeholders feel understood, partly because it helps you address their feelings and the issues that give rise to them, and partly because it helps everyone disentangle stakeholders’ feelings from the substantive issues that the feelings may be distorting. Sometimes it is possible to go beyond bringing your stakeholders’ feelings into the room; you can actually put them on the table. This is too intrusive for everyday use – but when it’s used appropriately it can be breathtaking. In the wake of the December 2004 tsunami, Malaysia’s New Straits Times published a superb January 17 editorial on the post-tsunami fear of eating locally caught fish. The editorial acknowledged (in a segment I’m not quoting) that eating the fish was only minimally risky, but argued at length that the fear was natural and inevitable. Notice the editorial’s use of deflection; it describes the public’s feelings very explicitly, but framed in terms of how “Everyman” and “people” are bound to be feeling – never “you” the reader: Primal fear has dealt a double-whammy to the fishing industry. Finally putting out to sea again after repairing their boats and reassembling lives so rudely shattered and washed away by the December tsunamis, they now find no one wants to eat the fish they catch because … well, who knows where they’ve been, what they’ve seen – and eaten? The finger-in-a-fish-belly rumour that cut Penang’s fish sales in half in recent days was too obviously waiting to happen, and too predictable to be true. As with all urban myths and legends, someone was bound to find a way to express, in the simplest and most graphic way imaginable, Everyman’s deepest dread. Let us not, therefore, dismiss these notions too disdainfully. The revulsion people feel at the very thought of eating an animal that has recently eaten a human being is not superstitious but primal. It is not irrational but subrational; it stems from the deepest and darkest recesses of the conscience, where resides, perhaps ironically, what it means to be human…. So this is a scare that must run its course…. [New Straits Times, January 17, 2005] 8. Kinds of Interpersonal Statements: Another Typology Havens identifies three kinds of interpersonal statements: projective statements, counterassumptive statements, and counterprojective statements. In Havens’s terms, all three are interpersonal rather than empathic because they operationalize skepticism rather than credulity. That is, they assert something different from what your stakeholders are trying to assert, rather than just repeating or clarifying or even extending what your stakeholders are trying to assert. They move the conversation to a different place. They are therefore more real, even more “I-Thou” than empathic statements; they are communications from one authentic person to another. But in a broa FW"6V

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