Embedded Files
Notes to sort
Challenges
Issues that may arise
People come late or leave early
Different language backgrounds and skills
Technical Issues
Audio breakup
Background noise
Video breaks up
HMW Deepen the speaking and listening. people want a deeper experience?
Body Language
For Active Listener: What about the role of body language when listening or reflecting. What is the role or effect of that?
For Silent Listeners: What about the role of body language of the silent listener,, shaking in affirmation or looking irritated, shaking their head No, etc.
Not Having wide Variety of Voices - concerns, it's all moderates
Meagan's concerns. 12/29
Not an NVC Group
Many of people who take part in these empathy circles have had NVC training. We are so glad to have them take part since they bring deep empathic: skills, vision and presence.
NVC trained people would like sometimes to talk more about feelings and needs. The empathy circle does not focus on this since most people who are in the polarized political space have not had this training and don’t know what is meant by this. Just being able to reflect back what the speaker is saying to the speakers satisfaction, is already a challenge. It can take a lot of practice to learn these skills of reflecting deeper feelings and needs.
We focus on empathic listening. On the speaker feeling heard to their satisfaction. As a NVC trained participant, you can reflect using feelings and needs to reflect to the speaker. It’s deeper skill that we can bring up in future levels.
NVC would love to have you learn facilitation.
Issue of Confidentiality
Empathy Circle Roles
Speaker Speaking -> Listener Listening
Speaker experience -
Selecting listener
Selecting topic
Listener experience -
Silent Listeners Experience -
Listener Reflecting -> Speaker Listening
Listener Reflecting Experience -
Speaker Listening Experience -
Silent Listeners Experience -
Speaker Speaking -> Listener Listening
Speaker experience -
Listener experience -
Silent Listeners Experience -
Changing Speaker
Regarding your question.
Why Are 12 Steps So Effective?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tt7xQyKzkw
- people had a therapist
- had a sponsor. – empathy buddy.
- having a group of people with similar experience
- an actual set of steps to follow.
etc
Combat or Transform Authoritarianism
I see Empathy Circles as a way to combat or transform authoritarianism. It's to bring authoritarians into an empathic dialogue.. that by itself transforms an authoritarian when they start to dialogue with others as equals.
Empathy Circle as Democracy Circle
Democracy is an integrative process. It's about
Empathy Circle Benefit
models democracy. Democracy is an integrative process. It's about different people listening and understanding each other and taking mutual action to govern themselves. The empathy circle models and practices this Democratic way of being.
Empathy Circle Challenges
takes a lot of time
Original Material
Here are some of the materials on empathy circles that are already available. These are all resources for you to draw from.
You can add comments to this document. You can also make your own copy of this document, in order to play around with it, edit it and upgrade it.
4) Link to Empathy Circles Book (By Lidewij Niezink)
6) Excerpts from older Empathy Circle Handbook (work in progress)
Questions about the Empathy Circle?
What has been your experience of taking part in an empathy circle? How would you describe What is an Empathy Circle?
Why would people want to participate in an Empathy Circle?
What do you see as the benefits of taking part in an empathy circle?
What do you see as the difficulties of taking part in an empathy circle?
Empathy Circle Preparation
Remember that empathic listening is not agreeing with what is said. it's an attempt to deeply listened and understand.
Empathy Circle Turn Taking
There are different ways of taking turns to speak.
1. turn by who spoke last
2. go around in a circle. one person speaks and then the next person clockwise speaks and selects who they want to reflect.
3.people raise their hand with 1 to 5 fingers up. This is a scale of who has the greatest desire or need to speak.. 5 being the highest.
Remember one of our tasks during the week between meetings is to hold Empathy Circles with family, friends, coworkers, etc to practice initiating, hosting, facilitating and developing the empathy circle dialog process. This is a foundational practice that we need to do over and over and over again to practice. See the instructions at http://j.mp/HowToEmpathy
This a foundational and gateway practice for all that we do.
1. We need each person staffing the empathy tent to be able to host an empathy circle on the spot at the tent.
2. This is also the basic practice for becoming a better listener when offering listening at the tent.
3. This prepares you to become a mediator between conflicting parties.
4. This is the process for your personal support and grounding for being in difficult and highly charged feeling situations.
6. When we do trainings we will need people at each table to facilitate empathic listening.
5. It is also the gateway to many, many, many other empathy building processes.
I came across this talk called
The Closing of the Modern Mind Tim Keller & Jonathan Haidt at NYU
https://youtu.be/XFD5odFv36k?t=1h7m17s
(1h 7m 17s to 1h 10m 0s)
Tim Keller is a pastor and he talks about having been a marriage counselor and how he would use empathic listening between the couples and how well it worked for them to start hearing each other and work out their issues and conflicts. He suggests using dialog circles like we are doing in the Empathy Tent to talk across the political divide and bring people together. So this is good support for the approach we are taking.
Tim Keller says;
"Something I used to do in marriage counseling... When things were really bad between two people there was a ...method I used. I would say, and here is a husband and wife just yelling at each other. And the husband had just said something, before the wife responds, the wife has got to restate as best as possible what the husband just said and you've got to say it until the husband says, “I couldn’t have said it better myself, that is what I meant.”
Put it in your own words. It took forever to have a conversation this way but when the person says something to you, you have to restate what you thought they just said to the place where they said, “That’s exactly what I meant and you said it a little better than I just said it."
And then you can respond to that.
Now that is actually a very good thing to do, get people together. Say we are going to meet together, monthly, or weekly. We have very different views, we are going to listen to each other, we are going to do something like that where we say, “I’ve listened to you and this is what I hear you saying,” to the place where the other person says, "Yep, that’s what I meant, you said it as well as I could". Then you can go ahead and critique.
It slows the conversation down, but do it. I think you will learn tolerance, you will learn humility, you will learn patience with each other. It can’t be done in the courts, it can’t be done in the social media, it can’t be done actually in this room that much even thought we are both urging you all to do it, and I sense we are doing something really good here tonight.
But to actually do it means a round table with people with different moral frameworks and moral visions who are actually willing to say, “For the next number of months, or weeks, we are going to get together to know each other and really do this, hearing each other, listening to each other, restating each other’s points of view, and then critiquing. And trying as much as possible, when trying to convince the other person, going into their moral framework, respecting it. If you are going to change their mind, try to change their mind inside their framework, because that is the only possible way the person is going to make any more anyway."
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