Dee-Dee Stout

TEAM 4: SAT

CONTACT

• • deedeestoutconsulting@gmail.com

• deedeestoutconsulting.com

  • Member of MINT & ICCE; Trainer, iRest

  • Faculty, Holy Names Uni, Oakland

  • skype: dee.dee.stout

HOW CONTRIBUTE

I would like to:

Writing copy

Part of empathy tent.

Not good at web design but know people that do. Son - does creative design. Get suport

Idea of animation videos

Dee-Dee ask son about it.

COMMENTS

Hello! I am one of Bill and Steve’s MINTee folks (been conducting MI trainings for nearly 20 yrs) and learned of your project/MOOC through our group. Fascinating! I’ve viewed parts of your website and plan to watch the YT of you and Bill later tonite. What’s the next step? A Skype call I believe? If you’d like to connect my Skype addy is dee.dee.stout. I look forward to hearing more about this project and hopefully being a participating member! Warmly, dd

• ( x)Received inquiry

• (x ) Sent email

• (x) on calendar

• (x ) set meeting date

What questions do you have about the empathy training project and MOOC?

DEE-DEE STOUT

Just reading others contributions to this and this is a really rich convo! Like most mentioned, I too feel the content isn’t as important (we have the book after all) so the task(s) is really in how we present, market, and move this forward it seems. Along those lines, I informed Edwin that I have found a volunteer to work with us on animating content, doing branding and generally helping with social media content (my millenial webmaster, Frank Teron, does this for a living and LOVES to help others!).

I would suggest that perhaps this Team - or part of it??- move forward with storyboarding a piece of content as to how we’d like it to look in a 5 min or less animated bit. I’m lousy at the art piece (I gave birth to an amazingly talented artist; that’s my contribution haha!) but would be delighted to take a stab at the content. And I think most? all? of this team have expressed a desire to assist with that part. I will be “in and out” for the next few weeks but after my vacation in early August, I am here for August until Labor Day. Would anyone else be interested in working on this and then spending part or most of our meeting on August 11 presenting what we have? Or something like that…

I also want to check out a few MOOCs to understand the ones that work well. I’ll ask Frank for suggestions, if he has any, and if any of you have taken a course this way, perhaps you could share that link for us all to view? That could also be done during a Sat Team Meeting? Watch part of a MOOC and discuss?

It feels to me as if this Design Team has the empathetic listening down and we could move forward with the design portion of our goals. Not that we can’t continue to discuss the book, etc practicing Empathy Circles but I don’t think we need most of our time spent on that. Last session was really helpful to me re: our goals here and ways to move forward.

What are next steps?.

List the specific skills that you see that are part of an empathic way of being (ie. attitude - mindset - heartset - consciousness)?

Which of these skills do you most want to get better at?

On Empathy and Compassion:

“To "listen" another's soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another.” This is my current definition of empathy and I strive to achieve this with each person I interact with, be it friend, stranger, client, family, etc. I fail regularly though achieve it often too. It’s like hitting the sweet spot in baseball (I think. I don’t actually like baseball much =))

I recently read a great def of compassion in a post discussing client care: “Compassion is an attempt to understand the point of view of the other.” And this is different from empathy. In fact after reading this, I wondered if we should be doing “compassion circles” v “empathy circles!” My concern from the reading is that compassion appears to be needed to learn empathy. So empathy can be learned but what about compassion then? Is this a skill that is either innate or not? Could it be so binary? And if compassion is needed to learn empathy, where does that leave us with some folks? And ourselves? I’m wrestling with this.

One of my greatest heros is the Cheshire Cat. Being a cat person in the first place and a smart aleck, he’s always appealed to me in general. But his real superpower is curiosity. That really grabs me. I want to be childlike in my approach to all things; not childISH but curious like a child. As children we less often have prejudices and fears that get in the way of asking wonderful questions and listening with an open heart. Being mindful, curious, and open are important ingredients to this work for me. And these are skills I’m continually trying to improve through deep listening and “walking a mile in another’s moccasins” to paraphrase an old Chippewa saying I learned as a child.

Challenges: my own life chaos at present. I am learning just how much work it is to be poor- really poor. And am reminded that one cannot carve out each section of our lives; they are all interconnected. Add to this the confusion and struggle with a mental condition (PTSD; typically managed well until sudden recent events stoked the fires) plus the challenges with obtaining prescriptions each month for reasonable and never misused pain medications and it’s frankly a miracle I’m not a bigger mess per my wonderful MD and psychologist! However, developing this chronic pain condition has also made my compassion extend far beyond what I thought possible, exponentially greater as the years go by (my condition will never get better or be cured; in fact, it will get worse though is not technically “life threatening”).