·
Use these types of answers:
- Giving Advice Response: The listener offers the other person advice on how to deal with the problem, usually based on the listener’s own experiences.
- Probing Response (Asking Questions): The listener uses questions to seek additional information to better understand the other person’s problem or to help the other person clarify her thoughts.
- Feeling Response: The listener names the emotion that the other person seems to be expressing, without indicating approval or disapproval.
- Paraphrasing Response: The listener offers a paraphrase of what the other person is saying, focusing on the meaning of the message.
Avoid these types of answers:
- Interrupting Response: The listener starts responding before the other person has finished
- Unrelated Response: The listener changes the subject to something unrelated to what the other person is talking about.
- Focusing on self response: The listener directs the conversation toward the listener’s own concerns or experiences.
- Discounting Response: The listener ignores the sender’s feelings or uses clichés to dismiss those feelings.
- Blaming Response: The listener suggests that the problem is the sender’s fault, that she should have known better, or that she deserved what happened.
- Evaluative Response: The listener passes judgment on the other person’s behavior. The listener tells her what she did not do, what she should have done, or what she did wrong.