https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nz83MefZ3SA
How do we continue to encourage children to question and develop their own moral compass in a world that is so determined to tell us what to think? I think probably in your own home you just encourage that kind of behaviour. I think one of the things we did reasonably well with our kids was encourage them to think. We listened to them, right? And negotiated with them. And so if you model that in your home, first of all that will alert them to the difference between a functional home and a pathological learning environment. That’s a good thing for them to learn. And second, you can help them become sophisticated in their capacity to articulate themselves. A lot of that with kids, I would say, and this is true for the other people in your life too, is you might think as a parent, well I’m not that articulate, how can I help my children? And I would say listen to them. And if you don’t understand what they’re telling you, ask them some questions and get them to represent what they’re attempting to communicate clearly. You can do people a world of good by listening to them. There’s almost nothing you can do for someone that is more productive and generous than to listen to them. And I can tell you a little strategy. This is a good one. This is also from Carl Rogers. This is a very good strategy. Try this with your wife or your husband. You could make this a rule. It’s about the only psychological technique that I know that actually works because most of what constitutes psychological technique is too sophisticated to boil down into something like a procedure, you know, without it becoming false. But this works. So imagine, here’s the rule. I’m going to listen to you. We’re discussing some problem we want to solve. I’m going to listen to you. And then I’m going to wait until you tell me that you’re done talking, right? So you’ve said what you have to say. And I’m going to leave that up to you. And then I’m going to tell you what you just told me. But here’s the rule. You have to agree with my formulation. And so what are you doing then? Well, first of all, say you talk to me for 10 minutes and then I reflect back to you what you said. I’m not going to take 10 minutes to do that. I’m going to have reduced it to its gist. It’s sort of like extracting the punch line out of a joke, right? If you go tell someone else about a conversation that you had, you don’t duplicate the whole conversation. You reduce it by some mysterious means to its essence and you communicate that. And so one of the things you do for someone if you do this is to reflect back to them the essence of what they said. And if you get that right, they’re pretty damn happy with you because part of what they’re trying to do when they’re communicating is to reduce what they’re communicating to its essence. And so then if you allow them to be the determining judge of whether or not what you reflect back is accurate, then you also indicate to them extraordinarily clearly that you actually listened and understood. And even if you’re arguing with someone, they’re so thrilled that you did that that half of their annoyance with you will disappear right there and then. They think, oh my God, you actually listened. And you know, I had people in my clinical practice who’d never been listened to ever in their life by anyone. Not their parents. They had no friends. Their parents never listened to them. They had no friends. They had nobody close to them. They were so incoherent and inarticulate and so and suffering from such a backlog of noncommunication that it was a miracle to see. And it would take those people thousands of hours. Thousands of hours to lay out what they had to say. And so I know one had ever listened to them. You can help people by listening to them in a manner you can hardly imagine. Because what you’re doing when you’re listening to them is you’re actually allowing them to to speak themselves into existence in some real sense. Why are they talking to you? Because they want to get something straight. And why don’t they just do that by themselves? It’s because most people can’t do that by themselves. In fact, I don’t know if anybody can really do it by themselves. We think by talking. And even when we think by ourselves, we talk. It’s internalized. It’s still a dialogue. Almost everyone thinks by speaking. And so if they have no one to listen, then they can’t think. And if they can’t think, then they fall into a pit. And so if you listen, then you facilitate their thinking. And you can you can encourage them to speak and think by your careful attention. You can indicate your careful attention by your capacity to reflect and summarize. So you try that. Try that as try that in your life. Just every time you listen to someone from now on, it’s like they go off on some communicative tangent. You say, this is what I think you said. Did I get it right? And maybe they say, well, no, not exactly. Here’s what I really meant. You know, there might be some tussling about the precise meaning of the utterance. But I’ll tell you, man, people will be thrilled with you if you can do that. And they will. Here’s something else that’s ridiculously cool about this. If you’re bored by people, you are not listening to them. If you listen to them, they will get so interesting that you want to run away from them. Because if you listen to people, they will tell you everything. And that’s really something, because once people start to reveal themselves, they get so interesting that it’s almost unbearable. It’s one of the things I loved about being a clinician, because I could I could listen to people and they would tell me who they were. And wow, that was quite the trip, man, because people are very strange and and mysterious and remarkable and even simple people, you know, who weren’t. Who weren’t sophisticated in any philosophical sense, they weren’t educated. Man, if you could get them telling their story, they’re so damn interesting that is unbearable. And so and if and you’ll know people so well if you listen to them, because they will tell you who they are and they’ll be so happy with you that you’re there to allow them to think things through to facilitate that process. They’ll flock to you and you’ll learn so much. It’s so useful. And this is such a good technique. This works so well. And you can you can learn it pretty quickly and you can implement it, you know, in your own relationship. That’s the rules like you get to talk. I’ll tell you what you said until you agree with my summary. Then it’s my turn. You do the same. Roger said, if you do that with your partner, your wife or your husband, you’ll find that 80 percent of what you’re arguing about will vanish just as a consequence of the process. And then what you’ll have left is the actual problem, you know, because you guys might be working out a real problem. But at least you’ll only be working out the problem. You won’t be facing the consequences of failure to communicate. And you’ll have also signaled to each other that in a deep sense that each each of you are acting out the proposition that what the other has to say is worth attending to. And there’s nothing that people need and want more than to be attended to. That’s attention is everything. That’s why advertisers pay for it.