John built this boat by asking questions.

When I first met John’s parents I expected at least some questions.
But I got none. 

Not getting a single question made me feel really uneasy; it made me feel unwelcome, as if they did not care about me, as if I did not count.

Of course they cared but the fact that they never asked anything made it very hard for me to give them some information about the woman their son was living with. 

How do you volunteer information about yourself when not invited by questions?
Thus they got to know very little about me.
So how can they relate to me when I am virtually a stranger to them?
How can we create any intimacy and personal relatedness when there is nothing to talk about other than the weather and the color of the blooming bougainvillea?  

I see a friend of mine struggling with questions too.
Her son’s career takes him all over the world and when he married his wife knew that travel would be in store for her.
However after several years in their marriage, my friend’s daughter-in-law has returned to New Zealand to pick up her career, sick of  all the travel and having nothing to do.  They now live separate from each other, spending only a few days together every second month.  
My friend expressed her obvious concern but when I gently enquired if she had asked what was going on, she said that she hadn’t as she did not want to interfere.
I know that this line of questioning could be considered out of bounds but after all, it is her son and her questioning might actually unleash some enquiry into a solution that eludes everybody at present.

Her inability to ask questions has her judging her daughter-in-law as being wrong and it is affecting their relationship.
She admitted that she struggles to be supportive of her daughter-in-law who she feels, has abandoned her son.
With her ignorance about what is really going on, she has put herself into a position where she can add little or no value which also affects the flow of love.

Luckily my culture and my work has taught me to ask questions; lots of personal questions which means I know a fair amount of what is going on in people’s life. 
As people feel that I come from a genuine interest in knowing more about them, I seldom meet barriers to deepening the conversation this way.
I would never have stopped John’s parents from asking me questions; on the contrary it would have made me feel they had an interest in me.  

With my questions I pick up on clues that pop up in conversations.
For instance, my sister and her husband had planned a trip to New Zealand and they were bringing their adult daughter with them.
One day, close to their arrival my sister rang me to announce that her daughter was bringing someone with her.
I thought the way she said it was weird so I asked; ”Who is this someone?”
My sister answered; “A friend.”
I could have left it at that but I had to know more; “What kind of friend do you mean, is it a boy friend?”
She then said; “It is a girl friend. She just told me she is in a lesbian relationship and although I am fine about lesbian relationships in principle, I am struggling to get used to it now it is so close to home.”
This opened the door to us having a fantastic intimate talk. 

Thank God I was not stopped by thoughts that all this was none of my business, because I would have missed out on this deeper understanding of what was going on for my sister.
I could have left my sister hanging there and then, after the call moaned to John about how awfully small minded she was.

Questions open doors and WomenLikeMe has this to say about it;

As we share things about our self to someone who is genuinely interested, intimacy, love and compassion grows.
As we better understand others, our being judgmental declines, misunderstandings clear up, the doors to forgiveness open, we are better positioned to solve problems and love is allowed to flow.
All this becomes possible from asking questions free from our own agendas.
(WomenLikeMe on How to Create our World through Conversation)

Asking questions can also add tremendous value at a very practical level.
John is a class act to go shopping with, if you can handle it. 
Building his own 28′ sail boat with no formal skills taught him how to ask, because he never just buys any tool or material, with his questions he buys education as well. 
It is amazing how he keeps asking questions until he is fully satisfied that he knows all there is to know and he can get the best use out of the tools or material he buys.
It is funny though, in these situations I am NOT good at asking questions and obviously NOT good at listening either. 
I think ”Will you just buy the damn thing, go home and read the manual, be independent!”
So I find myself making faces to stop him from, what I consider to be annoying the sales person. I’m just itching to grab his sleeve and drag him out of the shop.
All this is totally unnecessary behavior on my part, because both the sales person and John always have a ball. The sales person loves sharing knowledge with a genuine customer who pays attention and John loves learning.
Hmm. 

We listen every day, many of us are trained at it and do it for our work and yet Tess said similar to Joy who shared that; “only one person in my own life has been an active listener.”
Zeenat went on to say; “I’m still searching for that great listener.”

I’d love to hear more examples of how listening has made such a difference that, as Tess says, these people stand out “head and shoulders above the rest.” In these sharings of how listening has made a difference, we can be inspired by what is possible for all of us.

Robin, thank you for sharing how listening makes a difference for you. Your words revealed something that I’d never thought was possible:

There is something (for me) about listening. When done intently, fully, where I set aside my own thoughts or desire to be seen or express and so on, something happens when I simply listen fully intently as if I were meeting god in physical form and god was telling me about itself. When I can listen with NO agenda of my own, not relating what the speaker is saying to some book, something I learned, some new-age trend or psych trend or, or, or…Then I DO see god in that person and my soul connects with theirs. They become me and I them. And it is one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever done.

But probably the MOST amazing thing that happens when I listen this way is that I feel as if “I” have been the speaker and expressed all my own inner things through THEIR expression, their talking. It is wild, because I feel as fulfilled as if “I” had done all the talking. I feel set free, REALLY set free and I may not have said a word. For me to experience humanity and all the honest aspects of it through another human being is one of THE most healing things I’ve ever known. I literally go away feeling healed, totally set free, and with a stronger sense of myself and Life.

Thanks Robin, your experience certainly shifts listening from the mundane to a place it deserves.

As a group of good listeners, the most common theme to come through the comments was the issue of boundaries or as Suzen put it;

… just when I feel I am doing a really superb job of listening to people, the Universe sends me a chronic whiner or somebody with totally negative energy spouting off endlessly about the injustices of life, or government or what have you!

I’m sure we can relate to Suzen on this one.

Or Patty’s concern that “sometimes I unwittingly let it take me to that martyred place…I give and I give and I give…

Or Zeenat, when she said: “my problem was nobody ever wanted to hear ME”

Listening is not to be taken lightly; it requires lots of energy and is a special gift we bestow on others. To not treat our gift of listening respectfully is to not look after base camp. I’m all for setting boundaries, and not letting others assume that because I listen that I’m prepared to accept any old chit chat from them.

It is a noisy world we live in where people shout for our attention (listening) all the time in all kinds of unmoderated ways. Setting boundaries with who we are prepared to listen to and when is a necessary survival skill if we don’t want our listening to be downgraded to just filtering out the noise of random dumps disguised as heart felt stories or worse.

We have a right of refusal here. It is a clear communication that you won’t be ‘dumped on’ by the other person. It is important that we set out boundaries around our listening especially when it is listening that will not make a difference.

I applaud those who took action and commented last week. And I leave you once again with a request (which you are free to decline) from me to all our readers who have yet to summon up the courage to comment, I’d love to hear from you on how you are going with listening.

Walking, talking and listening.

Listening is a very powerful skill.

I, as base camp benefit hugely from excellent listening skills as they create intimacy and a shared understanding with my sponsors. And listening ultimately allows for coordinating effective actions that make me fly.

I can finally confess that I can do something very well after having unraveled my struggle with requests.
I am very well trained in it professionally.
I also have the advantage that I love observing and observing is definitely part of listening.
I adore getting a handle on what is going on, I guess it also served me to become a perfect people pleaser.
I listen with my senses. I listen with my ears, my heart, my eyes, my smell and my intuition.
I listen with all of me and the information I gather that way is quite extensive and often unique.

Listening can make or break a relationship and being careless with our listening can have huge negative consequences.

To quote WomenLikeMe;

 ”Language creates our world and our listening can bring a world into being. This makes sense when we observe closely what happens when we talk, we can literally see how our conversations manifest a world”                                                                                                     
(WomenLikeMe on How we Create our World through Conversation)

Now that is powerful and worth paying attention to.

I have had the good fortune to have been a receiver of a great listener and as I am a great listener myself, I can see both sides and have seen different worlds unfold because of quality listening.
I have only been impacted by a great listener once, that is how rare they are.
It was when I was still married and when I never let on how my marriage was not working.
In the beginning I felt like such a failure, after all, I thought I could sort anybody out, especially my husband.
However over time I knew that the marriage was wearing me out and I could not make it work.
In my usual independent way though I thought “if I cannot figure it out, nobody can“, so I never sought help.

Although I let snippets drop here and there in conversations with colleagues and friends about how marriage was a weird thing, nobody listened carefully enough to pick up these clues and run with them. It was also because people actually did not want to hear too much more.
They all had their own problems that they would rather talk about and I was more willing to listen than share anyway. So I never got passed those very subtle hints that all was not well. 
With their limited listening they created a world in which all was well for me and I lived into that by never saying it loud and clear that all was terribly wrong.
As a listener THEY had that power in the conversation.

My good fortune happened because my profession required me to have supervision and I ended up with Glenda, who is a master of listening.
She certainly did not skate over my subtle throw away comments about relationships and marriage.
She kept fishing them out of the conversation until she had them well and truly hooked. I knew then that I had finally found a listener. 
I so remember my astonishment when I experienced her total presence to me.
Until now I had always been the listener and for once being the one who was listened to with such skill was a new sensation. It was delicious.

I did not feel a failure when finally spilling the beans about my confusion and inability to keep the marriage going.
I did not feel that in the conversation I had to look after her well being as well, she did not ask anything back, she did not judge.
She was totally at ease when I, who always pretended to be this switched on operator, was not as switched on as I had let on to be.
Glenda did not blink an eye lid, she just sat there inviting me to open up more and more.
Until then I had always spoken into the listening of people who wanted to see me as capable and confident and at any little sign of a crack they quickly turned away.
They were not interested; they wanted their pillar to stay a pillar they could talk to.
But not Glenda, Glenda did not need a pillar, for once somebody clearly showed with their listening that they were prepared to be my pillar.
I think that those conversations opened the door for me to finally come clean about my marriage and to give up my failing efforts.
Her listening created intimacy and shared understanding that finally opened me up to her, as well as to myself.
Eventually her listening sponsored me to quit a destructive marriage that was not serving anybody.
That really showed me how listening is such a powerful skill that can achieve great results and yet there is not a lot of listening like Glenda’s around. 

We rush and after a few words we think we know what is being talked about and start giving advice. And we assume, we do not even realize that most of the time we do not even want to know. 

If we are not careful certain listenings can easily influence us in a way that does not serve us.
Once I had to assess a client who was described by doctors, therapists and case managers as very uncooperative and difficult. In the end nobody knew what to do with him and hated dealing with him. My task to interview him was part of the process to get him off the insurance payments he was on.
Everybody in the office felt sorry for me. I must say I was not thrilled with the assignment either but as a senior it was up to me and saying no was not an option. 
He lived rurally and could not drive far in his condition so I had to make a house call as well, yippee.
With dread I rang him, but to my surprise he did not make it difficult to find him, he gave very helpful and accurate directions.
I thought that was strange. When I arrived he was outside waiting for me and his wife offered me a drink. Again I observed behavior that was not in line with the listening of everybody else.  
I then did what I always did, I acknowledged his injury and then I asked him to tell his story.
Well, I was glad I asked.
Nobody had ever given him a chance to have his say. 
Once he realized the disdainful listening of my fellow professionals for this supposedly uneducated, difficult and uncooperative farm worker who was out to cheat the system, he took great delight in speaking into their listening and giving them hell. 
But the information he volunteered and the stories he told me, once he knew he had a different listening, were awesome and for once there was information on his file that he agreed with and could be worked with productively. 

This again shows the power is in the hand of the listener.

As base camps we too have a certain listening to people and if we want valuable sponsors it pays to become aware of how we listen to people.
It pays to start noticing how we listen to people we are in a relationship with. It pays to amplify our listening to people who comment on our blogs. It pays to listen carefully period.

Through our observing and listening we create a world of shared understanding. With it we get to really hear if our purposes are aligned and we get to hear the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ to our requests, as clear as a bell. 

No is an acceptable response to a request

Thanks guys for playing with us and sharing your examples with making requests and your issues with saying and hearing ‘no’.

I think we probably can identify with Tess and her picking up her husbands shoes. As she shared

For the first 5 years of our marriage I requested and commanded he pick up his shoes. Of course he didn’t. So I picked them up for him but I griped loudly the entire time.

A few years went by and I no longer griped but I had the victim “attitude.” Yet I kept picking them up.

Then after another few years I noticed one day I was picking up his shoes and did it matter of factly. No longer upset by his not taking care of his shoes.

Then one day I became grateful that I had the opportunity to pick up his shoes and I became grateful that he was in my life.

The bottom line for me concerning the shoes was “Do I want to be happy or right?”
I decided happy!

Tess was getting a ‘no’ from her husband but was not accepting the ‘no’ at all, eventually sinking into “victim attitude”. Eventually she noticed that she was “picking up his shoes and did it matter of factly. No longer upset …”
Tess was now accepting her husband’s ‘no’. Finally, Tess shares that her acceptance had moved to becoming “grateful that he was in my life.”

Tess could have stayed in being “right” mode all her life and continued grappling, failing to hear her husbands ‘no’ as valid and missing out on happiness and the flow of love between them.

Both Patty and Nadia brought our attention to the importance of how we make requests. Nadia said

I think one important factor about making a request is the tone in which we make the request. I notice that if I ask for something in a nice way or compassionate way, the person usually is very inclined to comply or an agreement is reached that makes everyone happy.
However, if I make the request with any sort of impatience or frustration due to something else, things never go smoothly.

I agree that if we ask from impatience and frustration; the ‘no’ response may not be a no to the request, but a no to the impatient mood. The request doesn’t get a hearing in instances like this, as the ‘no’ is directed at our impatience and not at the request.
If we want our requests to get a fair hearing then it is important how we make the request.

Thanks Angelia for sharing your circumstances:

I have a couple of twenty yr old roommates. This helps with that situation. I’m still learning how they operate in a household, which is different than what I thought.

I’m sure many of us will relate to your situation Angelia, tell us more about how you are getting on, accepting their ‘no’?

Thanks Lisa for your comments and focusing our attention on the issue of our children when you said:

This is what I struggle with overall in our culture with our kids, both at home and how they are treated in schools, because I do think the current practices place an emphasis on obedience above all else, and this contributes to these issues with requests and rights of refusal later on in life…

I completely agree with you and Wilma’s response to you; the confusion started for all of us as children when everything became treated as commands and “an emphasis on obedience above all else”.
We have grown up failing to learn the difference between requests and commands. As a result, requests remain commands-in-disguise as long as we do not respect and lovingly accept both children and adults right to say ‘no’.

This is the second week now that we have mulled over this topic of making requests and the right of refusal. For me, this has been a valuable topic. I’m paying particular attention to my commands to my daughter and my upset at cleaning up after people. Something has been unearthed here that needs to be addressed on my part.
So I’m left wondering, has reading the posts and comments given you a different perspective on this topic?
Have you seen something about yourself that you hadn’t quite seen before when making requests or accepting anothers right of refusal? And if so, what have you done with this new realization and have you taken any action as a result?

Finally a request from me (which you are free to decline) to all our readers who have yet to summon up the courage to comment, I’d love to hear from you on how you are handling requests in your life.

Ann-Marie, George mentioned in last week's post as the master of requests, guide dog Georgie and Wilma.

Writing about making requests has proven hard and really shows me I am severely lacking in this skill.

Last week’s post took me several attempts and this one has taken a long time too.

To be honest, I wish I had kept my mouth shut about making requests. All they do is confuse me and just writing about them makes me cranky.
I know that solving this request issue is valuable as I do see that I need this skill if I want to spread my wings and yet my aversion to tackle this issue is huge.

Requests for me are big scary beasts.

After all my aborted attempts to write sensibly about this topic, I have now decided to let all my emotional stuff around requests simmer for a while to see if I can unravel this issue one small step at the time. So this time I am going for a semantic approach.  To remain clear about what it takes to make requests I will repeat what WomenLikeMe has to say on the subject;

“Before anything happens there is a conversation that precedes the action that sets up, two or more people to effectively act together.
A request is therefore one of the first steps in the coordination of action.”
(WomenLikeMe on How We Create Our World through Conversation)

Without effectively making requests there will be little effective action by base camp, right!

Okay, I get that making requests has to do with action and in order for me to do the actions that are too big for me, I need to acquire sponsorship by asking for it.  
So far all this is making sense.

The next step is where it gets interesting for me.

To quote again from WomenLikeMe;

“There are three possible in-integrity ways to respond to a request. 
1. Accept
2. Respond with a counter offer
3. You can choose to DECLINE”

Aha.
I can choose to decline, I can choose to respond with a counter offer, can I?
I have a CHOICE; I have freewill around requests?
I have a ‘right of refusal’?

AND that is the first thing I have to untangle. 
For me it’s where making requests has gone awry. 
For me ’right of refusal’ does not exist.
My mind won’t allow me to say ’No’, actually nothing in me will allow a ‘No’ and I never ever considered that a ‘right of refusal’ existed.

I cannot say ’No’ without excuses, fear of the consequences or without feelings of guilt.
On the other side of the coin I also do not know how to accept ’No’ from someone else without feeling rejected. I even make myself wrong for asking in the first place.

Making requests is hampered by out-of-integrity issues and that is what is confusing me.

When you look at it this way it is no wonder that I am feeling as I do and that I am not alone in this.
There is actually very little integrity around requests in the world full stop.
Not that we are deliberately dishonest but having lost sight of our right of refusal, we often -instead of saying a clear ‘No’-  wriggle our way out of a clear response.
We make vague promises, we mumble a ‘Yes’ with no intention to do anything or we say nothing at all and hope it all will go away.

Let’s have a look at a simple scenario to illustrate this.

“Can you put all your dirty cups on the kitchen bench, please? I have asked nicely for the umpteenth time so please can you listen for once? I have requested over and over again that you gather up all your used cups so why on earth are you not doing it?”
This is a simple, yet often recurring problem around requests that has never failed to stump me.
I often had no idea what was going on here and who had the right of way?
This request to coordinate action obviously did not have the desired action of putting those dirty cups in the kitchen, so now what?

When looking at the possible responses to requests, the action shows that the response is obviously a clear ‘No’ and . . .
that the person who is requesting the action is clearly not aware of nor accepting the other party’s right of refusal.
Thus this is not a request at all but a command.
Oh!?
So to get back into-integrity, the person who makes the request needs to accept a ‘No’ response as part of honoring the right of refusal,
or . . .
they need to determine if they’re actually in a position of authority to be commanding and then if their command is not being followed, they need to decide what to do about it.

Either way, they need to deal with this lack of action in an in-integrity way.

They either accept the ‘right of refusal’ and stop nagging about the cups or . . .
they can check if they have any authority to make commands and if they do, then take their right to command clearly what they want to have happen with those dirty cups and then enforce it.
Oh!?
And if they do not choose to enforce the command, they then have a choice to change their command into a request and then they have to accept and honor the other person’s ‘right of refusal’!
THAT is what being in-integrity around making requests is all about.
Oh!
Well, talk about simple! 
I cannot tell you how much this ’simple’ unraveling took me.

I can see that commanding around kids to get them to do things is quite acceptable AND clear.
We all know that clean your room is NOT a request with right of refusal but a command of do as you are told or else.  
As a parent you know that requests are NOT the way to coordinate action around the house, homework or other things that have to be done and it is clear to all involved when someone is in- or out-of-integrity.

When they are teenagers it becomes more complicated as the right of refusal for certain things is okay but for others it is not.
Making requests and giving commands can easily get mixed up and confuse things.
This is probably where the confusion starts for most of us.
One minute we coordinate action via requests and the next minute we are commanded to do things.
What the heck . . . where has my ‘right of refusal’ gone? 
Then we enter the world of work and again the boundaries around requests and commands become blurred big time.
We are told we have a right to decline however when we assert them all is not well.
So when asked by the manager at work to do them a favor and finish off their task or do a task outside your job description, did you feel at that moment that you had a right to refuse?
Then when we live with a partner or flat-mates this whole matter of requests and commands becomes really interesting!
Well by then most of us are constantly getting into trouble as a result of having lost this distinction between requests to which you can say ‘No’ and commands that expect you to do as you’re told.

The collapse of these distinctions has been a real issue.
Many commands disguised as requests had me wonder what the heck was going on.
It certainly hasn’t helped to get clarity around refusals, let alone help us to understand that there was something like ‘a right of refusal’ at all.
No wonder we were all sliding in-and out-of-integrity around requests.
How was I to know when I had the right to openly refuse a request or when I was trying to fight off a request, that wasn’t a request at all but an unauthorized command by someone who was just as confused as I was?
And how was I to know if my ‘No’ was received by someone who honored and accepted it or if it was met with nasty threads or passive aggressiveness by a confused operator?

I now can see how I have gotten into a muddle around requests; all this unravelling has certainly been an interesting and very worthwhile. It lifted a lot of fog. Now all is left is practice, eeek.

P.S. The photo is of blind George who is a master at making requests. I wrote about him in my last post.