Proper Active Listening

Hi, my name is Doug Noll, Lawyer to Peacemaker, and in this video I want to talk about the use of you statements and I statements when you are reflecting back or being empathic with somebody else. There's a lot of misunderstanding about when to use a you statement and when to use an I statement, and in fact this problem goes back 60 years when Active Listening was first invented by Thomas Gordon. And unfortunately, people misinterpreted his work and have continued to use I statements when they should be using you statements. So in this video, I'm going to talk about all of that and show you when to use you statements and when to use I statements. So fundamentally, we want to minimize conflict, calm people down, solve problems, and make durable agreements for lasting peace. Unfortunately, as I'll explain in a few minutes, psychologists and counselors and therapists and mediators Peacemakers, too, have mistakenly tried to create empathy through the use of I-statements during active listening, and it always fails. I-statements are important, but not for creating empathy, and certainly not for de-escalating anger or other strong emotions. The inappropriate use of I-statements comes from a misunderstanding, as I said, of the work of Thomas Gordon, the inventor of active listening. And Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of Nonviolent Communication. So let's start with Gordon and his active listening. Thomas Gordon was an American clinical psychologist and colleague of the great humanist psychologist of the mid-20th century, Carl Rogers. That's a picture of Dr. Gordon there. He was widely recognized as a pioneer in teaching communication skills, and he coined the phrase "Active Listening" to distinguish his method from normal passive listening that we all learn as small children. Gordon believed that an I-Message would be more effective at resolving a potential conflict. He thought that if one's feelings were expressed without blame, the other person would be more likely to change behavior. And so he developed a Behavior-Effect-Feeling method for expressing one's needs. The sequence, Behavior-Effect-Feeling, put the cause of the feeling on the effect instead of on the behavior, which he thought would result in less defensiveness or less defensive reaction from the person responsible for or the behavior. So a formulation by Gordon might be something like, "When you fail to deliver your report on time, I'm frustrated and concerned because our production team must have our reports to be efficient." So the behavior is when you feel— fail to deliver the report. The feeling is frustration and concern. The effect is we've got to have our reports on time to be efficient. Well, there are a couple of problems with the Gordon System, as it turns out. First, the I statements in the Gordon System only apply to someone seeking to change the behavior of another person. I statements do not apply to empathic statements directed to another. Gordon knew this and explicitly described active listening as reflecting the feelings of another, especially children. However, people confused his work with I-statements as the only way to make empathic statements. And this led to the adoption of the following formula for expressing empathy: "What I hear you saying is that you are angry," or "What I think you're feeling is rage." Well, these statements are no longer truly I-statements. They're really you-focused. But the problem is the upset person only hears the "I" and immediately feels patronized and emotionally invalidated. Usually this results in emotional escalation, not de-escalation. And the mistake— but the problem is the mistaken formula quickly caught on in the 1960s as the way to express empathy by psychologists, counselors, mediators, and people like that. And it persists today. When I took my initial mediation training back in the 1980s, This was being taught. And I know for a fact that it's still being taught today in 2020 at major conflict resolution universities around the country. This was not what Gordon taught. And common experience tells us that it doesn't work. I mean, most people hate having I-statements directed to them when they're upset. All right. So that's Gordon. Now let's move forward in history 20 years later. From when Gordon got his PhD under Rogers to the origins of Nonviolent Communication. And the creator of Nonviolent Communication was another psychologist, Marshall Rosenberg. He developed Nonviolent Communication specifically as a conflict resolution process, not so much as a communication process like Gordon, but you'll see that they're very, very similar. He received his PhD in clinical psychology in 1961. Again, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he met his mentor, humanist psychologist Carl Rogers, and credits Rogers with alerting him to the skill and value of empathic listening. Although they never read each other's papers and neither were they colleagues, Rosenberg's formulation of nonviolent communication is only a slight variation on the Gordon system. And I suspect Although this is speculation, I suspect that he basically rebranded Gordon's system as Nonviolent Communication and added a few new twists to it. So Nonviolent Communication claims to teach people compassionate communication skills by focusing on expressing observations, feelings, needs, and requests to others. Similar to the Gordon System, NVC emphasizes the expression of feelings and needs instead of criticisms or judgments. The NVC formula, Observations, Feelings, Needs, and Requests, is often referred to by practitioners as OFNR. And this excerpt out of, uh, one of the NVC manuals basically describes the Nonviolent Communication process. And you can stop the video and take a look at this and expand it if you want to read this, but I'm going to explain what this is all about now. So here's the formulation of a nonviolent communication in the same situation we looked at before. I hear you say you won't have the report complete until next week, and I'm feeling some frustration and concern. It is important to me that our team is timely on reports to the production so the production team can be efficient. Would you tell me what's preventing you from completing the report and what our team might do to get it finished by 4:00 PM tomorrow? So as a comparison, here's the Gordon formulation: When you fail to deliver your report on time, I feel frustrated and concerned because our production team must have reports to be efficient. So as you can see, other than that, the NVC formulation is pretty wordy and uses a lot of passive voice. They're all— the only difference between the two formulations is that the Nonviolent Communication formulation contains a request while the Gordon System does not. So they're essentially the same thing. Now, a couple of things to understand about NVC. I know it's very popular and I will probably be stigmatized for what I'm about to say, but Nonviolent Communication is based on a flawed central premise, and that is that its practitioners describe conflict as originating from unmet human needs. Well, while the idea of conflict originating from unmet needs seems true, there is just zero science to support the hypothesis. No studies, no empirical data, no double-blind studies, nothing. And in fact, the reason for that is because there are two central questions that bog down human needs theorists. And Rosenberg wasn't the only human needs psychologist. There were other people like for example, John Burton out of George Mason University, who built a whole theoretical framework with his human needs theory. But the problem is this: first, what is a human need? I mean, we can say, well, as humans we need to have— we need air to breathe, we need water to drink, we need a place to stay, we need shelter, and we need food, minimum for survival. So we can talk about survival needs, but is that sufficient? If you were to talk about needs to a person in Silicon Valley, what would they say? They would say, well, I need better, you know, I'm living in my multi-billion-dollar mansion or million-dollar mansion in Montecito or in Mountain View. And their needs are going to be perceived by them as being very different. Than a person living on a subsistence existence in Africa, for example. So science shows us that the perception of needs is not fixed. It's contextual. Where you are in your life, your socioeconomic status, even your culture, all influence how you would describe your needs. And the problem with this is that universal needs cannot easily be described. And even more importantly, from a science perspective, You can't develop a null hypothesis around human needs because they're not definable. And you need a null hypothesis in order to build a testable hypothesis through some kind of empirical double-blind study. So the second problem with this central premise is, how do we know when a need has been met? How do we know when a need has been met? In other words, because needs are personal and subjective, there's no objective way to measure satisfaction of a need. Nevertheless, Nonviolent Communication assumes that someone else will fulfill my unmet need if I express it nonjudgmentally. And practitioners seek to avoid the use of fear, guilt, shame, blame, coercion, or threats when seeking needs satisfaction. That's, that's a good thing. I have no criticism with that. But implicit in this premise is that humans are unable to meet their own needs and are therefore dependent on others. And of course, maybe as a practical result, this is true because many adults never grow out of the infantile idea that other people will meet their needs. And in fact, there are many, many adults who become angry and resentful when their unspoken, unmet needs are not satisfied, especially in relationships. But a self-aware, emotionally mature adult will not look to another person for, for example, love, appreciation, or acceptance. Instead, that person will love herself, appreciate herself, and accept herself. And when she experiences a loss of love, appreciation, or acceptance, She's going to look within herself, not to ex— not to outside for external validation in order to have those needs satisfied. But NVC implicitly rejects this idea. It claims that by stating one's needs openly and honestly, one is more likely to have another person fulfill those needs without conflict. In addition to resting on this flawed premise about human needs, researchers have found other challenges. First, learning and mastering non-vonotic communication takes many months of practice. It is not easy to learn because it is a natural way of thinking and communicating. Skilled practitioners must be self-aware, schooled in advanced verbal skills, and able to make the verbal mechanics of the formula sound natural. Most people are not motivated to take the time or effort or money to master these skills. Second, using Nonviolent Communication techniques takes time, discipline, and patience. And the problem is that most conflict situations, at least those that I'm called into as a mediator, arise quickly and do not allow for extended discourse required by the Nonviolent Communication basics. Third, because Nonviolent Communication is a skill used from the speaker's frame of reference, it cannot de-escalate anger with strong emotions. At best, it can help someone who perceives an offense call out the problem without anger or judgment. Nonviolent Communication will not de-escalate anger or incipient violence because it is "I-centered," not "you-centered." The speaker's emotional experience is unimportant to the Nonviolent Communication practitioner. Fourth, as with the Gordon System, many people feel manipulated and patronized when a Nonviolent Communication practitioner attempts to have a compassionate communication. And fifth, Nonviolent Communication leads to what we call crude paraphrasing, which leaves people feeling discomforted by the directive or subjective reflections, some of which are quite emphatic. And so that leads us to 4 eye-opening truths about Reflective Listening. First, I-statements should only be used to state your own feelings. So Gordon and Rosenberg were right to teach I-statements when you talk about your own feelings. You should say things like, I'm anxious and angry. I'm frustrated. I'm sad and alone. When you label your own feelings, you are engaging in a process known as Self-Affect Labeling, and this is a powerful process for calming yourself down in any emotional situation. In addition, if you state your feelings out loud, no one has a right to question or judge or invalidate you. Your emotions are what they are, and you own them. Stating your own emotions only becomes a problem when you blame someone else for making you feel the way that you do. Do not say, 'I'm anxious and angry because of you,' or 'You make me anxious and angry.' Instead, focus on the behavior, not the person. When you talk in a loud voice at me, I'm anxious and angry. I statements should never be used to establish empathy. Never ever use I statements in expressions of empathy. This error has existed for over 60 years and it's time that we stop. Do not say, "What I see you feeling is anxiety and anger," or "It sounds to me like you're angry," or "What I hear you saying is whatever." It's wrong formulation. All it does is emotionally invalidate the person you're talking to. It's rude, it's patronizing, and it's manipulative. You don't like it when others do this to you, so don't inflict this type of I statement on others. You statements should be used to reflect back another person's emotions. Gordon was wrong to declare that you statements should never be used. Brain science shows us the power of third-party affect labeling. However, only use a "you" statement when you are reflecting back another person's emotions. You should say something like, "You're anxious and angry," or you would say it a little bit more emphatically, "You're anxious and angry. You're frustrated." Do not add any reason for why the person might be having an emotional experience because you really don't know. Keep the use statements simple and direct. Gordon correctly states that use statements should never be used to judge, label, or condemn. So to wrap this all up, deep reflective listening is the most powerful relationship tool in your toolbox. Remember these 4 simple truths and you'll— will see immediate and profound transformations around you. And if you like what you saw here, please watch my other videos and also visit my website, DougNoll.com. Thanks for watching.