Jordan Peterson ~ The Best Way To Show Someone You DO Care About What They Have To Say

we know from our research that such empathic understanding understanding with a person knowing about him is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes in personality some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people and that you have never seen such results the chances are very great indeed that your listening has not been of the type I have described fortunately I can suggest a little laboratory experiment which you can try to test the quality of your understanding ok so this is this is lovely because you don't often actually get a technique from a therapist that actually worked you know you get sort of baby techniques like help the person lay the cards out on the table you know it's it's kind of have a high level of abstraction but this exercise you can actually do and you can do it a lot and if you do it and we'll teach you to listen so the next time you get into an argument with your wife or your friends or with a small group of friends stop the discussion for a moment and for an experiment Institute this rule well you also don't have to be that formal about it you can just do it once you know that the team each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to that speaker satisfaction now that's so cool because here's the typical argument so we're arguing I want to win and so you tell me a bunch of things and so then I take those things then I turn them into the stupidest possible representation of those things you know I weaken your argument and make you look like a fool and then I destroy it and that's a strong that's like that you're making your opponent into a straw man that's the straw man argument right you take you take what they're telling you can you correct it sure it and that way you can make them look absurd and make them be ashamed and then of course you've set up this skinny little opponent that you can just demolish with one punch it's really crooked and it shows that you're a coward because what it means is you have to have an opponent that's you know crippled and thin and starving and inarticulate before you could possibly win before you could possibly progress it's a pathetic way of having an argument what you should do is listen to the person and help them make their argument as strong as you possibly can and then deal with that because then you're sure that you're taking them seriously so and to that speaker satisfaction well that's so cool eh so we're having an argument well I don't know maybe we have an argument about who's gonna be responsible for grocery shopping or for doing the dishes or for cooking or any of those domestic things that continually cause couples to be at each other's throat it's like so you'll have some arguments about why you should do whatever it is that you're going to do and in order for the argument to progress I have to tell you back what you said and you have to agree that I put it properly well that's so annoying like it just runs so contrary to what you want to do of course you want to make another person sound stupid so you can beat them this way you can't do that because you have to listen well enough so you actually understood what they said and then you have to formulate their argument so that they're willing to agree that that actually constitutes their argument well that's really it's difficult but it's so useful because first of all it does mean that you understood them and second it indicated immediately indicates to them they you're not just trying to win you're trying to listen and then they're much less likely to get all irritable and angry at you because at least you're trying to listen you're not making them into a fool and you know often when people are trying to tell you what they want is they're all afraid of telling you what they want because you know maybe they never got what they wanted in their whole life you know if they've had a history of bad relationships and poor parenting and that sort of thing they're just bloody terrified to tell you that they might actually want something and so as soon as you indicate to them that you actually heard what they said and you're willing to take it seriously enough to formulate it properly well then it's like one step towards trust I see you did listen you at least know where I'm coming from it's like that doesn't mean you agree you know just because you understand someone's argument doesn't mean you have to agree but at least you know what the argument is you see what this would mean so one of the things Rogers does continuing his therapy and I do this a lot it's like I listen to the person and they kind of go through a narrative that's spontaneous narrative often following a chain of associations that's Freud pointed out they'll tell me a spontaneous narrative and I'll say okay it sounds to me like this is what you said and I'll try to you know lay out the argument and maybe now and then I'll ask for clarification if there's a part I didn't understand or if I see that there's a part that seems contradictory you know they said this thing here this thing there and I'll tell them that you know it seems to me that you said this here and this here I'm not sure how to put those together I don't say well that makes your argument you know incoherent I say well I don't get how to understand that and then kind of go oh yeah there's because people will admit to that if you just pointed out flatly no it's like I'm not involved I'm just listening it's not my problem it's a problem and that's another thing that's useful to the other person to is entitled to their suffering you don't get to take it away it's their destiny so you can listen to their problems without having to think that you know you have to take them on as if they're yours you have to mirror them but it's their problem it's like they have to figure it out and they and that's good you need a problem to figure out it's not necessarily a terrible thing that they have a problem it would simply mean that before presenting your own point of view it would be necessary for you to really achieve the other speakers frame of reference to understand his thoughts and feeling so well that you could summarize them for him and that's useful too because you know the way we remember things is if you tell me a long story and I tell it back to you I do not tell it back to you what happens is I listen to it and I try to figure out what the thread of the argument is and then when I tell it back to its way shorter and tighter and that means in some sense it's it's got all the essentials but it's got less of the baggage right that's what you're kind of doing when you ask someone to get to point so they tell you this long story it's like this tree that is it's full of dead branches and that hasn't been proved and there it's standing there and you know that maybe that are living branches you can hardly even see but you're concentrating on them and then when you tell it back to them you just tell them the part of the story that's alive and they listen to that they think oh yes that's what I meant and then that means you've changed the memory right if they agree you've changed the memory you've you've divested it of all the excess baggage just like pruning and that's what you're doing it so that that dialogue is it's mental hygiene and that's what people do you know you gotta wonder why do we talk well it's to exchange information yeah there's utility in it Leonore like if you know how to do something and I don't you can tell me but that that isn't the sort of thing that people are doing most of the time most of the time they're telling their stories this is what happened to me right in there and then not a personal saying well this is what happened to me and there's this Mutual of attempt to organize that's how people are organizing their brains we organize their brains by talking and so if you don't have someone to listen to you whoa especially if it's over a few decades you're gonna have a brain that's like a whole forest of trees that mean it needs a forest fire doesn't need just some you know trimming it's really in trouble so you need to have someone to listen to you and best way to get someone like that is to find a bunch of people and listen to them because you know of course they know that's a friendship that's a real friendship you know because you're both trying to move towards a better place whatever that place is and it's a great relationship

Channel: THE BESTS

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson New, Psychology, Philosophy, Personality, personality disorders, self-improvement, Truth, Self Improvement, Jordan Peterson Personality, Jordan Peterson Personality Disorder, How to cure Personality Disorders, Motivation, Inspiration, How to improve myself, Self Help, Clinical Psychology, Depression, Jordan Peterson Depression, Jordan Peterson anxiety, Counseling, Jordan Peterson Psychology, ADHD Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson 2020

Id: H0VfPPzZoYw

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020