67 The Skills of Enquiry
– you aren’t encouraging them to develop their thinking. You’re
not enquiring properly.
Competitiveness is one of the worst enemies of
encouragement. It’s easy to slip into a ritual of using the
speaker’s ideas to promote your own. It’s
all part of the tradition
of adversarial thinking that is so highly valued in Western
society.
If the speaker feels that you are competing with them in the
conversation, they will limit not only what they say but also what
they think. Competition forces
people to think only those
thoughts that will help them win. Similarly, if you feel that the
speaker is trying to compete with you, don’t allow yourself to
enter the competition. This is much harder to achieve. The
Ladder of Inference (see Chapter 3) is
one very powerful tool that
will help you to defuse competitiveness in your conversations.
Instead of competing, welcome the difference in your points
of view. Encourage a positive acknowledgement that you see
things differently and that you must deal
with that difference if
the conversation is to move forward.
Minimal encouragers
Minimal encouragers are brief, supportive statements and
actions that convey attention and understanding.
They can be:
• sub-vocalisations: ‘uh-huh’, ‘mm’;
• words and phrases: ‘right’, ‘really?’, ‘I see’;
• repeating key words.
Behaviours can include:
• leaning forward;
•
focusing eye contact;
• head-nodding.
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