Dr. Stuart Ablon
speaker
223 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dr. Stuart Ablon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
To help them figure out how to solve a problem? Practice problem-solving with them and not some hypothetical problem like in a workbook or something, but take a real problem. and problem solve using a structure that's proven, an evidence-based structure for solving problems. And that's what I think we should go to next, which is, okay, what do those ingredients look like?
Okay. Three ingredients to this process.
Okay. The first ingredient, the hardest, the most important. We call it the empathy ingredient. Okay. And the reason it's so hard is I think most of us misunderstand what the word empathy means. What does it mean? It means understanding. Okay. And we think that empathy means sort of expressing that we care by saying something like, I can tell you're really struggling. People think that's empathy.
It's actually not really empathy. Empathy is really trying to understand somebody else's perspective, point of view, concern, what's hard for them. So the first ingredient, the empathy ingredient, is not coming in with your perspective, your point of view, your solutions, which is the mistake we make all the time. Instead, it's starting with, let me understand where you're coming from.
So there's a situation I want to talk to you about. Let me understand where you're coming from. And empathy... is the most powerful human regulator we have. You wanna calm someone, make them accessible, it's all about empathy. It is the most powerful way. And I'm sure, Mel, you've experienced this, I've experienced this.
If somebody really empathizes with you, really tries to understand where you're coming from, it is incredibly calming. And it's calming upon your whole system. I mean, this is why your words can literally change the person across the table, next to you, thousands of miles away. It can change their blood pressure, their skin conductance, their heart rate. Empathy
And when people are regulated, they're much more able to express what's going on for them.
Yes.
You got it. Now, I think though, that is really hard to put into practice. And so I actually spent, this is going to sound ridiculous.
I spent like five years.
intensively studying the first ingredient of our problem solving process.
You got it.
You got it. And so I spent these years with all these recordings of people doing this from different places and people we work with. And I basically poured over them my own work and basically said, when this first ingredient, empathy, goes well, what are people doing? And when it goes off the rails, what are people doing? And I'm pleased to say, like, the result, it's not rocket science.
When we do a good job of empathizing with another human... We're doing four things and four things only. Okay. And anytime we do anything other than those four, it tends to go off the rails. So here are the four. I promise they're not rocket science, okay? Two of them are information-gathering tools. Asking questions, clarifying questions, like any good detective would do. Yeah.
Trying to understand what's going on, okay? Because that's your job. You're a detective. Trying to understand the other person's point of view. Ask questions, number one. If they're having a hard time filling you in, take some guesses, educated guesses, do it tentatively because you're not the expert on them and their experience, but educated guesses.
Questions and guesses, those are the information gathering tools. The other tools are what I call the regulating tools. They are what calm someone down if they're getting upset, shutting down. And those two tools are reflective listening and reassurance.
Reflective listening simply looks like when I ask you questions or take a guess, anything you communicate back to me, I let you know that I heard you. OK, and I try to tell people, especially with adolescents, but with anybody, you know, avoid the sort of rote, just like saying exactly back to you exactly what you said, because that's that's cheesy. It upsets people.
And it doesn't show that you really heard them. Instead, in your own words, reflective listening is saying something like, OK, so let me see if I got this straight. What I hear you saying is and then in my own words and other people call this active listening, it's crucial. OK. Fourth one, okay, because we've got questions and guesses. Yep. We've got reflective listening. Last one, reassurance.
And by the way, kids are onto this like unbelievably. And we do it so much that I have to say one of the biggest impediments to getting this off the ground is kids are skeptical. Like when we start this, they're like, oh yeah, what new form of plan A did you learn?
I get serious. I've had kids say like, what did you do to my mom? She doesn't even sound like herself anymore. But so reassurance to be more specific, the way to do it is to say something like, I just want to understand.
Showing 141–160 of 223 · page 8 of 12
← Previous
Next →