How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances | Page 145

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view! talk about me.” Empathic statements represent your attempt to understand the way your stakeholders see things. Interpersonal statements represent your attempt to explain your “take” on the way your stakeholders see things. Empathic statements can take you only so far. To really explore how things look to your stakeholders, you have to put more of yourself on the line. Projective Statements Projective statements are the simplest form of interpersonal speech. The word “projection” here has nothing to do with Freudian projection (in which people attribute characteristics from one person or situation to another). A projective statement is simply a declarative sentence. You’re projecting some new content into the dialogue. But the purpose of a projective statement isn’t mostly to convey information. Its purpose, Havens says, is to evoke. “A mark has been placed and the patient is stimulated to add, correct, or erase.” A projective statement is a gentle probe. Havens illustrates this with a short dialogue. The patient is talking about some past event. “It was a nice day in August,” the therapist says. The patient disagrees: “No, it was raining. I remember mother said it would be clear.” “Then your sister got mad,” the therapist prompts. This time the patient adds rather than disagreeing: “She said mother was crazy.” As Havens points out, this is how people (empathic people, anyway) usually talk to each other. People make empathic exclamations, ask questions, and listen in silence to reveries and associations; yet perhaps the most powerful engine of verbal intercourse is the statement of fact or possibility. Stakeholders who will quickly grind to a halt if you listen silently, who will get defensive or evasive if you ask questions, may tell you everything you need to know if you probe with projective statements. In Havens’s illustrative dialogue, for example, the projective statement “It was a nice day in August” leads naturally to the response, “No, it was raining. I remember mother said it would be clear.” Two things are crucial about projective statements. First, as I have already said, they should keep the focus on your stakeholders. The value of your statement is in what it evokes, not what it says. And second, they should be hypothetical, tentative, conditional. You’re probing for a response, not taking over. You’re willing to be wrong, happy to be corrected, content even to have a particular probe ignored (you’ll try another). Your pursuit of truth – your stakeholders’ truth – is a series of successive approximations, like tacking a boat. If you have any doubts about whether this conditionality is clear to your stakeholders, add some explicitly conditional language to your projective statements: “Maybe it was a nice day in August.” “I’m guessing it was a nice day in August.” “It sounds like it might have been a nice day in August.” Havens summarizes this eloquently: “Projective statements are free offerings meant to be taken, amended, or set aside…. The evocative powers of projective statements are directed both at finding the other and, by means of the hypothetical element, testing what has been discovered.” Let me reiterate Jody’s excellent advice to listen to Terry Gross interviews on NPR. If you listen to Gross’s program, Fresh Air, listen for projective statements – and the responses they evoke from her interviewees. Counterassumptive Statements Your relationship with your stakeholders differs in many ways from a therapist’s relationship with a patient. But there are also similarities. Among the similarities is this one: Just as patients make false assumptions that can get in the way of the therapy, stakeholders often harbor false assumptions that similarly complicate their interaction with you. (Of course you often harbor false assumptions about your stakeholders that also get in the way.) In both cases the assumptions may be unstated, maybe even unexamined. In both cases confronting the For [email protected] Property of Bookemon, do NOT distribute 147