This post mostly doesn’t resonate with me, and I’m coming from a place where I really value the advice put forth in the excellent blogpost “To Listen Well, Get Curious” by Ben Kuhn. It was frustrating for me to watch “It’s Not About the Nail” because I couldn’t help but think about how poorly this video characterizes common misunderstandings that happen during conversations where one person is helping another. Kuhn argues that the common advice to not offer help during helper conversations is bad, since it presumes that the one being helped doesn’t actually want their problem solved. He explains that this advice seems good on the surface, since many people offer fix-it advice based off of incomplete or inaccurate knowledge which isn’t helpful, so the alternative to offer kind words instead of solutions tends to be received better. However, kind words are also suboptimal, and Kuhn argues that instead of offering emotional support, you should be genuinely curious to build an accurate model of the person’s problem in order to offer the best possible solution. To quote Ben Kuhn’s article:
“It turns out that reality has a surprising amount of detail, and those details can matter a lot to figuring out what the root problem or best solution is. So if I want to help, I can’t treat those details as a black box: I need to open it up and see the gears inside. Otherwise, anything I suggest will be wrong—or even if it’s right, I won’t have enough “shared language” with my friend for it to land correctly.”
From the outside, good listening can look a lot like emotional support. But the key difference here is that the goal isn’t to merely support someone emotionally; it’s that you need to understand a problem well so that you can actually offer up good practical advice in the first place.
I get the perception from that John Wentworth is engaging in the kind of superficial “good listening” that doesn’t move anyone towards a productive solution. It’s understandable that he’d feel a disconnect between kindness and empathy under this mode of communication, and reframing his assumptions about these types of conversations could fix this problem for him.
This post mostly doesn’t resonate with me, and I’m coming from a place where I really value the advice put forth in the excellent blogpost “To Listen Well, Get Curious” by Ben Kuhn. It was frustrating for me to watch “It’s Not About the Nail” because I couldn’t help but think about how poorly this video characterizes common misunderstandings that happen during conversations where one person is helping another. Kuhn argues that the common advice to not offer help during helper conversations is bad, since it presumes that the one being helped doesn’t actually want their problem solved. He explains that this advice seems good on the surface, since many people offer fix-it advice based off of incomplete or inaccurate knowledge which isn’t helpful, so the alternative to offer kind words instead of solutions tends to be received better. However, kind words are also suboptimal, and Kuhn argues that instead of offering emotional support, you should be genuinely curious to build an accurate model of the person’s problem in order to offer the best possible solution. To quote Ben Kuhn’s article:
“It turns out that reality has a surprising amount of detail, and those details can matter a lot to figuring out what the root problem or best solution is. So if I want to help, I can’t treat those details as a black box: I need to open it up and see the gears inside. Otherwise, anything I suggest will be wrong—or even if it’s right, I won’t have enough “shared language” with my friend for it to land correctly.”
From the outside, good listening can look a lot like emotional support. But the key difference here is that the goal isn’t to merely support someone emotionally; it’s that you need to understand a problem well so that you can actually offer up good practical advice in the first place.
I get the perception from that John Wentworth is engaging in the kind of superficial “good listening” that doesn’t move anyone towards a productive solution. It’s understandable that he’d feel a disconnect between kindness and empathy under this mode of communication, and reframing his assumptions about these types of conversations could fix this problem for him.