Summary of How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Can Talk

How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Can Talk is a parenting / communication book written by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. While this book is specifically intended for parents to have better relationships with their children, the vast majority of the advice contained within applies universally to all interactions, and I have written this summary specifically to abstract away from parent-child relationships. I consider the first chapter alone better at helping people internalize the principles behind nonviolent communication than Rosenberg’s entire book. HTTSKWL is currently by far my most highly recommended communications book, and because it is appealing to parents and children it is a remarkably easy read.

Note that unlike most books, this one contains a very high ratio of exercises and prompts and anecdotes relative to its advice. The authors recommend going through the book slowly, and doing all the exercises. This summary will only contain their explicit instructions – I highly recommend buying a copy of the book and completing it. The many specific example conversations will give a much better understanding of the principles I lay out here than I can convey in a summary.

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How to Build a Tribe

It is important to preface this entire document by saying that I had very specific objectives for creating a tribe. In particular, I wanted a group that was emotionally vulnerable with each other, who are reacting in real time to each other’s responses, where we create a safe space to say and feel and process anything. If you’re looking for something else, only some of this will apply to you. If you share this vision with me, a list of concrete steps to get there from here is below the fold:

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How to Listen Effectively

I recently had a conversation with a friend about listening that seemed worth writing up.

There are a bunch of things we humans like to do when other people are talking to us. Thinking up what we’re going to say in response is a big one, crunching social rules that we’re afraid of breaking can happen too. Trying to fit what the person is saying into our existing worldview, wondering what we’re going to have for dinner, having a reaction to something it reminded us of…

There’s nothing wrong per se about doing all that stuff, but it is distracting. Sometimes, this doesn’t matter much. Human conversations are often pretty compressible, and it often works out fine to make full use of our autocomplete and use our spare thought cycles elsewhere.

But there’s something else that we can do that involves actually listening to people, and it’s really useful to have that one in your toolkit.

I didn’t used to be able to do it much, at least not on command. People had to be saying something particularly interesting and novel to me to get my full attention, and even then I might not be able to stick with what they were saying.

I’m much better at it now, and I think it’s entirely possible for most people to develop the capacity easily.

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Relationship Tests and How to Respond

I want to try to point at and describe a particular phenomenon I’ve often seen in relationships: testing. While I’m more familiar with the ways women test men, and I would never claim the testing is on average totally symmetrical, certainly men test women as well. This post will be about the ways that most women seem to test most men.

By my standards, I’d say that a “communication” strategy qualifies as a test if the tester is exerting any optimization power in the direction of confusing her partner. Asking for one thing with words and a separate thing with body language and context is a very broad description of how testing often works.

Taking the request at face value and granting it may be a quite unsatisfactory response.

A classic test that the PUA community likes to talk about is one where a girl will ask a guy to hold her purse, but in fact respect him a bit less if he complies. An example that sees very central to me is that a woman will hit on, by accident, an emotion of hers that seems to throw her boyfriend off-balance, and then keep serving it up to him, basically looking to get a different, less reactive response.

Perhaps testing is the wrong word. These tests are usually at best semi-conscious. But I’m sticking with the word because it feels descriptive, it lands with me, and it’s landed with other woman that I’ve talked to. Empathy and introspection will reveal that no resolution that precludes the guy learning a new skill feels satisfying.

I spent some time this past week trying to pin down a particular dance move one guy I was talking to was missing. I tried unsuccessfully for a while to describe non-reactive compassion, but I’ll take a stab at it here too.

When we humans are suffering, typically there’s some tangle of meta-emotions. Single emotions are negative affect, but they rarely last long on their own. But add some shame into the mix and they become much harder to sort out. If I were overstating my claim a bit, I’d say that all extended triggers involve shame of some sort.

Luckily, this diagnosis suggests a solution. As a listener, if we can manage to communicate that we are as close as possible to fully aware of what’s going on with the other person AND we’re okay with it, it goes a long way. Curiosity, openness, reflecting back emotions and needs verbally and, more importantly, nonverbally, will show the awareness.

A calm, somewhat compassionate, perhaps even affectionately amused face will communicate that we’re okay with it. And building the muscle of being okay with ever more and weirder twisted human social/emotional strategies is one of the easiest ways to better the lives of those around us.

Note: If the suggestion that you’re testing your partner lands at all with you, I highly recommend acceptance and conscious strategy. For me at least, testing seems to be a pretty fundamental drive, for better or for worse. I can tell an ev-psych story that makes me okay with it an a naturalistic way, and once I’ve stopped feeling shame about it (see above), I can usually make sure the channel the drive in useful ways. Tests he can pass are fine. If he repeatedly doesn’t pass, I need to either make it easier and gradually ramp up the intensity to build the skill, or coach him somehow. Coaching in the moment or at different time are both workable.

Why Don’t We Empathize First?

Last week, I advised empathizing before advising. To attempt to remedy my hypocrisy, I will now empathize with the desire not to empathize. Because there really are a bunch of good and legitimate reasons we try other tacks. I’ll say some reasons I don’t empathize, so I’m not speculating too much about general motivations, but I think my reasons are common ones.

A big reason I don’t empathize is that when I perceive what seems like an obvious gap in someone’s thinking, or thing they could do to fix their situation, I get excited! I really do want other people to be happy and like helping them, and often I feel impatient about getting right to the heart of things. Plus, people are often asking for non-empathy things, such as advice. 

A related thing is that a big part of me likes conversations to be fast-paced. This goes along with being impatient, but it’s not the same thing. I like the energy and positive affect that comes from getting ideas out there quickly. I like conversations where everyone is interrupting everyone. Not everyone does, and I try to reign in this tendency of mine depending on context.

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Reminder: Empathize First!

If you’re talking to someone who is seeking support, it is incredibly useful to empathize before giving advice. This is true even if the person is nominally seeking advice. 

I know to do this, but in the past few weeks, it’s happened at least three times that I can think of that I’ve been in a group situation where someone who was visibly upset came to the group for support with a difficult situation, and then we all jumped in with advice. I won’t go as far as to say that the advice was useless. I know from experience that I can partly take in advice even when I’m triggered, and that I will often go home and think about what the people told me to do.

But empathy first is still the way to go for a few reasons.

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Conversation Rules for My Birthday Party

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The feedback I got indicated that the “ask a personal question” rule was the most helpful. 

I suspect that setting the intention to have good conversations in the first place was more effective than the specific ruleset, but it’s hard to know with these things. I consider the ruleset an alpha version, and I want to experiment much more with parties specifically designed to produce good conversations.

I’ve Been Resisting Unblending

There’s been a pattern going on in my own life recently that I’m going to try to articulate, mostly in hopes that doing so will help something shift.

There’s a sense in which I can always unblend from my current trigger, go into Self, get some more perspective, laugh at myself, and get into a good mood. But I don’t always want to. There’s something that feels newish about this way of being, and something that feels much older. I used to be much less emotionally aware, and I didn’t take the data from my emotions seriously. That changed in a big way a few years ago.

I am interested in the progression, even though I suspect it ultimately won’t inform my current situation that much. I think I used to be very practiced at stepping out of my emotions and saying something more aligned with my verbal loop goals and beliefs. Though it was also uneven. I was much more reactive and prone to emotional displays with my family than I ever was with my friends, and I remember knowing it was that way and wondering about it at least by the time I was 12 or 13. 

Then, I leveled up in things like NVC, IFS, and rationality, and I made a huge push to try to use those tools in difficult situations when I was feeling triggered.

I think I’m better than ever at those skills, since I still practice, but I’m also feeling a yearning, that I’m pretty sure has in fact been there all along to let my more triggered, vulnerable, reactive parts have more of a role in my life. But then, I have a decent amount of tension around this desire because intellectually I’m actually not all that convinced of the value of doing so, except in some more abstract sense that I’ve decided over the years to take my yearnings and intuitions more seriously.

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How to Keep Going When You’re Triggered

One of the topics I get the most questions about is what to do in the moment when you and your partner are both triggered. It makes a lot of sense that this would keep coming up, because this is the hard relationship/communication situation. It’s easy to deal with situation where one person is acting like an adult and the other person is acting like a child.

So, I thought I’d throw a few ideas out there from my list of things to try.

Try something new.

Anything works for this one. (Obviously don’t violate your ethical system or anything like that.) Give yourself permission to experiment. The thing about being triggered, is that nobody ever does anything terribly original in that state. That’s sort of the point. You go on autopilot. If you can’t think of anything that seems likely to work, just experiment. Physically move in a way you wouldn’t usually. Say what’s on your mind if you usually don’t. Keep quiet about the things you usually bring up. Change contexts. A good friend of mine once told me that “Consciousness is the ability to interrupt yourself.” Interrupt away, and don’t feel like you have to have a solution in mind. Do anything except for what feels most familiar and natural.

 

 

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The Comcast Gambit, or How to Save $35 Per Month in Five Minutes

I really didn’t expect that was going to work.

By nature I am pretty conflict averse: I don’t like to directly confront people or get angry or fight for myself. For this reason I will almost never do things like return food at a restaurant, or complain to customer service, or anything like that. I considered this a personal failing – not because I was leaving money on the table, but because I was passing up opportunities because of my own fears. I managed to convince myself that I would rather pay that money to avoid conflict.

Once I developed more of a self-improvement mindset I recognized this as a valuable growth opportunity. Even knowing that this was something I wanted to do wasn’t enough – I had absolutely no practice, I had no idea how to have these kinds of negotiations. It wasn’t until reading some of Ramit Sethi‘s work that I found myself a script. Truthfully, I didn’t need a script, just having it was enough. Just knowing that it was there gave me confidence, something to fall back on.

At this point in my life I’ve done this a handful of times, but was still afraid of getting on the phone with Comcast this afternoon. They had raised my cable bill twice in the last year, once as part of a stepped promotion that I was expecting, the second not so expected. I had seen Ramit talking about this case, and I also read this helpful article that inspired me to call.

Sure enough, his advice worked. I called their hotline, pressed the buttons to disconnect my service (3-2-1-2 if I recall correctly), and they put me through to a representative. That article claims you have to threaten to disconnect to get their best deals – I have no idea if that’s true, but I wanted to maximize my chances. I was appropriately angry, complained about the double rate hike, and told them to disconnect my service. The operator said she would look at what they could offer me, and she gave me another year long promotion at the original rate I paid before, less than half my current bill. She ended with the caveat that this would end in one year and that I should be aware of that, I told her I’d have that conversation in a year from now.

In this case, I managed to cut my bill from $65 down to $30 for a year. That’s $420 for a year, in a phone call that took me just over 5 minutes including the wait time. In terms of an hourly rate that is over $5000/hour. Mind you, this is for cheap internet service. How much could I have saved if I had phone, internet, and cable? How much could I potentially save on other areas of my life? (Ramit definitely recommends getting your APR down on your credit cards, though I pay mine every month anyway.)

I highly recommend trying this for yourself, as either a lifehack or an exercise. Let me know if you have any more tips like this, because I want to try them!