Scott_Arizala
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Nov 21, 2006, 2:54 PM
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Reading Minds… and other interesting tips!
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By Scott Arizala
Consultant & Trainer - The Camp Counselor
I used to teach listening skills during all of my staff trainings. I thought to myself, “This has got to be one of the most important skills for counselors to have!” I was right. But I went about it all wrong. My first mistake was thinking that it was “a skill for counselors to have.” This may seem elementary, but I never thought that I should be a good listener so that my staff had an excellent role model. As it turns out, I am pretty good at listening (or making people feel heard… more on this in a bit). However, I missed the boat completely when it came to developing myself in order to help teach or “train” my young staff. So, let me tell you how I do it now…
I’m currently not a camp director. Instead, I have the tremendous opportunity to go to camps as a consultant and trainer, where I can role model for staff and administrators alike better ways to listen… among other things. When I am training counselors and other care providers I like to try and make things as interesting and memorable as I can. I tell stories and teach tricks. When it comes to listening, I always talk about my relationship with my wife. No matter how long you have been in a relationship, there comes a time when you are expected to know what is going on with the other person. We get comfortable (maybe a little lazy too), and we start to make a lot of assumptions. The expectation then becomes, at its most simplistic level, an expectation to read each other’s minds.
I try and relate this idea to people’s experience with kids. Sometimes kids have a hard time expressing themselves fully, other times they are fully expressing very contradictory messages. Everyone who has worked with kids has been there… with little ones they get frustrated that you don’t understand, with school-agers they express incomplete ideas, with teens… well you know, every day is very different with teens. The point is that kids unconsciously make the same assumption: my counselor knows what is going on with me. So, let’s teach our staff how to read minds!
I thought the best ways to train any specific skill was to break it down to the smallest steps and practice. So I would take my trusty flip chart and markers and make a list. As a group, we would spend a good deal of time generating an awesome list of 20 or 30 steps or skills that make people good listeners. Then we would tape our list to the staff room wall and say “Great! Now we know how to practice listening and we can refer to our list all the time!” Weeks later, or sometimes days or hours, I would find myself frustrated that they didn’t seem to get it. The counselors weren’t “practicing.” Well, I think I figured out why.
Did you know that the American telephone number was developed into a 7 digit number based on a psychological understanding of memory? According to scientists (yup… Listening Scientists) we can only fit up to 7 things in our short term memory, (most of us probably come in at more like 4 or 5) and that if we try and put more stuff in there we can actually overwhelm and frustrate our memory. When we get overwhelmed and frustrated we tend to give up, to quit, to decide, “Well, it can’t be all so I guess it’s nothing.” Same goes for our brains.
So, back to staff training. My list of 20 to 30 steps and skills to becoming a better listener was correct and a great tool, we just can’t remember it all. Here is how I started to teach it… If reading minds is what we have to do, then I’ll teach you ESP. Yes, I’ll teach you how to use your ESP to always (or at least most of the time) know what is going on with the campers around you. It’s simple, but it’s not what you think.
Eye contact
Smile and nod
Paraphrase
Let’s take a closer look. According to a study done by UCLA the messages that people hear when you are speaking to them are based on 7% words, 38% tone & 55% non-verbal cues. What does that mean? Ask a dog owner… it is more about how you say something than it is about the actual words you use. So, if we are going to teach great listening skills, let’s teach counselors what works. E.S.P. broken down is a third verbal (paraphrasing) and two thirds non-verbal (eye contact and smiling). When someone is looking at us in the eye, we think they are listening. Have you ever had the opposite experience? Maybe a boss or supervisor keeps glancing at their watch or worse yet at their computer screen while you are telling them something important… we don’t feel heard. When someone smiles and gives a quick nod in reaction to your statement, we think they are listening. Try it: watch someone’s reaction when you smile or not and when you nod or not. Finally, when someone can tell us something they just heard or better yet ask a follow up question on what we just said, we know they heard us.
There are tons of other great steps or skills to practice if you want to be a better listener. When it comes to training summer camp staff, the trick is that you have to make it memorable, easy, and not overwhelming to their brains.
One more thing, I need to finish where I started: role modeling and our part in it. Like I said, I missed the boat on figuring out this role modeling stuff, so please don’t make the same mistake. Practice listening, being patient, offering more choices, asking for accountability for people’s choices, taking responsibility for mistakes…. and the rest of the long list we wish for our counselors. It’s simple: when it comes to listening and many other skills, we don’t change the skill but we change the expression. Here is what I mean… When we teach counselors and care givers working with our littlest ones, we teach them to bend over or crouch down when they are speaking to the kids so they can be on the same level (non-verbal stuff). Does that change when we train our school-ager staff? What about our teens staff? What about our new supervisors and camp leaders? NO! We just teach a different expression. If you’re talking to a 14 year old and you crouched down, you would probably be shorter than they are and it would be awkward. Instead, teach them to sit, lean, move their body to be facing the camper, or to walk in stride with the camper. These non-verbal cues mean essentially the same thing: I care about you. I am listening to you. I am interested in what you have to say. My very technical name for this technique is “Same stuff, different words.” The more you do, the more they will too. If you use the ‘same stuff, different words’ approach you will be role modeling the skills and your message will be more consistent. It’s these little things that help us train, teach and deliver a quality camp experience, plus we get to practice and develop great skills ourselves!
Scott Arizala is owner of The Camp Counselor, and is a summer camp & youth organization consultant, trainer, educator and speaker. He has been involved in camping, education and social services and is considered an expert in his field.
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(This post was edited by Scott_Arizala on Nov 27, 2006, 8:35 AM)
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