Monthly Archives: October 2013

Fears In A Hat: A Facilitator’s Guide

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Fears In A Hat: A Facilitator's Guide, by Hollis Easter (c) 2013

Fears in a Hat: A Facilitator’s Guide

by Hollis Easter, (c) October 2013

Fears In A Hat is a good introductory team-building and group process exercise that gets people focused on good listening, encourages them to share vulnerability and build trust, promotes empathy for callers, and starts the process of forming groups and high-performing teams. It takes 20-60 minutes depending on group size and direction; it’s flexible enough to be taken in many directions.

I’ve been developing and adapting Fears In A Hat for a lot of years. It started as a team-building exercise that (I think) came to me from Coreen Bohl, and I’ve been shaping it into a crisis hotline facilitation activity ever since. At Reachout, we usually do Fears In A Hat at the end of our first hour of training, when new recruits are beginning to get to know each other and it’s time to encourage them to trust and open up a little more.

You can facilitate Fears In A Hat in lots of different directions; its simplicity and directness are part of its strength. It’s quick, cheap, and easy to set up. Trainees love it, too–most groups ask to do it again later in the training program.

We use it for talking about scary stuff in the past, but you could also use it in a classroom to get people talking about their fears of the subject (“What’s your biggest fear about math class?”), flip it to talk about hopes (“What are you desperately hoping to learn here?) or successes (“What are you most proud of achieving?”, “What do you wish everyone here appreciated about you?”). It’s a versatile exercise.

Structure and flow

Here’s what a typical Fears In A Hat session at Reachout’s Training Weekend might look like. I usually start it after a bunch of icebreakers, once the group has started to loosen up, and it’s the last thing we do before a break.

  • Hollis: We’ve been talking a lot about communication styles, and I’m really encouraged by how you’re all thinking carefully and paying attention. That’s great, and I hope you’ll keep it up as the weekend progresses. But I’d like you to think about feelings, too. How do you think it feels to call a crisis hotline?
  • Trainees: [usually say something like “uncomfortable” or “scary” or “worried”]
  • Hollis: Yeah! It’s hard work to call people you don’t even know and ask them for help. We’ve talked about unconditional positive regard, but the callers also deserve our respect–asking for help like this isn’t always easy. Does that make sense?
  • Trainees: [“Yes”, “yeah”, “mmhmm”]
  • Hollis: It’s really important that we respect them for asking, and I’d like you to really imagine what they’re going through when they pick up the phone. To help you do that, we’re going to do another exercise right now–it’s called Fears In A Hat. I’ll pass around some index cards–would you all take one?
  • [Hollis passes around the index cards and waits until everyone has one]
  • Hollis: Okay. I’d like you to think for a moment about your own life, and think back to something that you’d feel really ashamed to have other people know was true about you. Maybe it’s something you did, or something that happened to you, or something you thought, or whatever… but think back until you’ve got something that would be really scary to share with others.
  • Hollis: Everyone got one? Good. So here’s my challenge for you. Write it down on your card. I’m going to do it too. I want to give you a chance to feel what it’s like to open up about something personal, and I also want you to feel what it’s like to be heard and valued without judgment. I want this to be anonymous, so please don’t write your name down. Just write your scary thing on the card, fold it in half once, and put it into the hat on the floor in the middle of our circle. Once everyone does that, I’ll shuffle them and read them out loud. Before we get there, we’ll talk a bit about how you’d like me to read them and what we can do as a group to support everyone.
  • Hollis: If that feels too hard, you’re welcome to make something up instead of using something that’s true. If you do that, please try to make it something reasonable–but I really encourage you to try writing something about yourself. We’ll do our best to support you–give it a chance. Once we’re done, I’ll tear up all the cards. Any questions?
  • Trainees: [nothing]
  • Hollis: Oh, and my eyesight isn’t perfect, so please write legibly, okay? [Trainees usually laugh.] Okay. Let’s all write.
  • [Time passes. Once everyone’s done writing, Hollis gathers the cards from the hat.]
  • Hollis: Okay… [while shuffling] How’s everyone feeling?
  • Trainees: [usually someone says “I want my card back!” or “I feel scared!”. If not, I lead with something like “Probably kind of nervous, right?”]
  • Hollis: So imagine that you’re hurting enough that you’re willing to call a crisis hotline about what’s on your card. Is this how you’d feel? Nervous? What are you nervous about?”
  • Trainee A: You’re not going to respect me.
  • Trainee B: You’re going to think I’m stupid for being upset.
  • Trainee C: You’re going to laugh at me or not listen.
  • Trainee D: You’re going to tell me I have to do something about it even though I don’t want to.
  • Hollis: Yeah, exactly. You’ve got a lot of concerns about how I’m going to react–me, the hotline worker. So what do I need to do to put you at ease?
  • Trainees: [think for a while]. “Sound nice.” “Don’t rush into it.” “Let me talk, don’t push me.” “Don’t make me feel like my problems are the worst things you’ve ever heard.” “Be respectful.”
  • Hollis: Okay, good. So for this exercise, where I’m just reading your card, what do I need to do to sound respectful and nice?
  • Trainees: “Go slow but not too slow”. “Don’t use a lot of inflection”. “Yeah, but don’t talk in a monotone either.” “Try to sound kind.” “Don’t add anything except what’s on the card.”
  • Hollis: Okay, I think I can do that. What should you do, as listeners in the circle, to make sure everyone feels supported in the group?
  • Trainees: “Not make eye contact.” “Not try to figure out who goes with what card”. “We should look at the cards so we can’t see people’s handwriting.” “I don’t want people noticing when I’m blushing or crying”.
  • Hollis: Okay. How about keeping our eyes on the floor in the center of the circle. Does that work? [Trainees nod.] Can we all agree to stay in the circle until I’m done reading them all, and agree to keep the stories confidential within this group? [Trainees nod.] Okay. Remember to support your peers when you’re hearing their stories, and to notice how it feels when we’re hearing yours.
  • [I then take a card from the stack, read it slowly and without much inflection, pause after finishing, then deliberately tear the index card into pieces–at least three tears, with a slight pause between them.]
  • [Repeat this for all the cards in the stack, including my own. Small pause.]
  • Hollis: Thank you. [pause]. Thank you for doing that, and for trusting us. Before we go on, I just want to start with this: whichever story was yours, whichever thing you wrote, you’re welcome here.
  • Hollis: How are you feeling?
  • Trainees: “I’ve never told anyone that.” “Relieved.” “I forgot which one was mine.” “I feel better about it.” “I’m glad that’s over.”
  • Hollis: How did I do on reading the cards?
  • Trainees: “Great.” “I’m glad you didn’t do anything dramatic.” “It felt good.”
  • Hollis: How did we do at listening and supporting you?
  • Trainees: “Good.” “I was so aware of everyone else when it was my card!” “I got really fascinated by some of the stories.” “I never knew silence could be so helpful.”
  • Hollis: I hope you’ll remember these feelings throughout the weekend and throughout your time taking calls. Remember that the callers are taking a big risk sharing with us, and that they deserve our respect–and remember how good it feels to be heard.
  • Hollis: We’re going to take a 15 minute break now. We’ve got some snacks in the other room… everyone thumbs-up? [That’s our signal for “doing okay”. They give thumbs up.] Okay. I’ll stay in here for a bit in case anyone needs to talk. See you in 15 minutes!

In most groups, depending on how much people have to say at the end, Fears In A Hat takes between 15 and 40 minutes. I’ve had it take a full 60 minutes once, because we got into a really good discussion about what it felt like to share personal stories and I didn’t want to interrupt. In years of facilitating it, I’ve never seen this exercise flop.

Purpose

Fears In A Hat can have a lot of purposes, depending on your environment, your learners, and your facilitation style. Here are some of our purposes in using it.

  • Promote group formation at the beginning of a three-day training conference.
  • Create a shared experience to use as fodder in later workshops.
  • Give trainees with heavy stories a chance to share the burden with others and, by doing so, become more open to training.
  • Gauge the group’s composition: are their Fears similar or different? Are some really involved while others are simpler, or is it more homogeneous?
  • Build trust that, while we will ask them to do scary things in training, we will also always support them.
  • Get them out of their heads and into their emotions to prevent them from intellectualizing problems too much.
  • To encourage them to respect the work callers do in asking for help.
  • To remind them that we, as a group, are no different from our callers.

Materials/environment

  •  Index cards (at least one per person)
  • Pens/pencils (one per person)
  • Hat or basket to use for collecting the index cards (optional)
  • Wastebasket for ripped cards

It’s important that all the chairs be in a circle for this exercise, including the presenter’s chair. The circle keeps people from sitting in the back or feeling like others are staring at them. If you’re using a hat, place it on the floor in the center of the circle.

It is absolutely critical that everyone in the room participate. We often have other hotline staff observing our trainings, and if there are observers in the room, I lead into the exercise by saying “I’d like everyone in the room to participate, so everyone feels safe. Would you be willing to come sit in the circle and write with us, or would you rather sit in the other room for a while?”.

The last time I did Fears In A Hat, our executive director walked in during the exercise to check on a detail for the next session. I paused the exercise, answered her question, and then explained that we were in the middle of Fears In A Hat and asked her to either take a card and write a fear or step out of the room. I think it’s important that these conversations be matter-of-fact and audible–because, in the eyes of the trainees, you’re defending their safety. Everyone in the room participates.

Key points

Most of these key points have to do with safety and challenge. We’re asking trainees to do something that’s a little frightening and perhaps a little dangerous–which is good, because it’s a challenge that will help them to grow. But we need to make sure that we assiduously guard their safety, too.

  • Confidentiality and respect. Make sure everyone understands the expectations: that this information stays within the group; that people’s responses are confidential; and that we are practicing listening respectfully, no matter what comes.
  • Everyone participates. No exceptions. I offer them the chance to make something up as a way to make sure everyone participates, although I strongly encourage people to try it with a real story. But if someone can’t even participate under those circumstances, ask them to leave the room until the exercise is over.
  • Allow escape valves. I usually invite people to sit, or stand, or sit on the floor, to make sure they’re comfortable. They need to stay with the group, but I often invite them to move around if they need to. I also try to let them know that we’ll have a break after the exercise, so they can pull themselves together if they need to.
  • Who touches the cards? I’m the only one who touches the cards once anyone has written on them. This is a safety piece.
  • No detective work. Ask for, and get, a commitment not to try to figure out which story belonged to each person. Again, this is a safety piece.
  • Guide their practice and attention. Early in training, people don’t necessarily think of listening as an activity that involves specific behaviors. Guide their attention to how they listen, and to how they feel, so they’ll have a chance to notice and then talk about them.
  • Give clear instructions. Clear handwriting, no name on the card, fold it once and put it in the hat.
  • Destroy the cards ritually. Rip them several times each, and do them right away instead of waiting until the end. Many participants have told me this is the most spiritually important moment of the entire first day of training.
  • Allow time for process. People may want to talk about their feelings. If you’re comfortable facilitating, you can leave this pretty open-ended; if not, or if you’re pressed for time, you can guide their reflections toward how it felt to listen, to be heard, to hear the cards being torn up, etc.

Wrap up

Listening is important for good hotline work. Most of us are here because we want to help callers, but lots of hotline folks came to the work because we felt that others didn’t listen to us. We have a pretty deep need to be heard, but we often feel that we shouldn’t need it, don’t deserve it, or won’t ever have a chance to tell our stories. Like the callers, we jump at the chance to tell our stories and feel supported. That’s part of why Fears In A Hat works so well: it’s satisfying a need in the learners while teaching them and giving them a chance to practice.

You can take the exercise in lots of directions. It works as an icebreaker, as a team building exercise later in training, as group formation, etc. As long as you commit to the open, respectful process and enforce the safety rules, it’s pretty much no-fail. You can use it again later in training to get trainees to notice what’s changed since they started learning to listen.

I encourage you to try it! If you have questions, please leave a comment asking them!

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy reading:

Why Are Tweets Missing?

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Why are tweets missing?

I wanted to share some things Jasmine and I discovered about Twitter tonight. This comes from the Twitter Help Center’s page on different kinds of tweets.

The bottom line:

Twitter doesn’t show all your tweets to all of your followers.

On some level, this makes sense–the sheer volume of tweets would quickly overwhelm most feeds if they showed everything to everyone–but it was behavior that took both of us by surprise. If you’re used to expecting that all your tweets will show up for all of your followers, it’s confusing.

Basically, Twitter hides things it considers conversations–tweets that start with an @ symbol–from everyone except for users who follow both the sender AND the recipient. This means that if you’re having a public conversation but you click reply, you immediately cut out a lot of potential readers if you leave the @ at the beginning of the line.

What to do:

If you want your tweets to be visible to all your followers, don’t put an @reply at the beginning of the line.

  • hey @jaz_math I found this cool blog post about the missing tweets  [VISIBLE]
  • @jaz_math hey I found this cool blog post about the missing tweets  [INVISIBLE]

If you want an easy way to change this without getting away from clicking “reply”, just add a period or some other mark at the very beginning of the line.

  • hey @jaz_math I found this cool blog post about the missing tweets  [VISIBLE]
  • @jaz_math hey I found this cool blog post about the missing tweets  [INVISIBLE]
  • .@jaz_math hey I found this cool blog post about the missing tweets  [VISIBLE! YAY!]
  • ,@jaz_math hey I found this cool blog post about the missing tweets  [VISIBLE! YAY!]

Note that adding hashtags (#hollis, #MTBoS, etc.) doesn’t affect this; hashtags assist searching, and the @reply thing is about access control. Hashtags won’t give you access to a tweet that otherwise wouldn’t appear in your feed.

Details:

Twitter draws a distinction between “normal tweets”, “mentions”, “@replies”, and “direct messages”, and the position of the @symbol makes a big difference.

  • Normal tweets: any tweets that don’t fit the other categories.
  • Mentions: tweets that feature a reference to another @user as long as that reference isn’t at the start of the tweet.
  • @Replies: tweets that have a reference to another @user at the beginning of the tweet.
  • Direct messages: non-tweet messages sent directly to another user by clicking their name.

You can think of them as access categories that restrict the potential viewers who might see a given tweet. The farther down the ladder you go, the more restrictive the settings. The level of restriction depends on the position of the @ symbol.

Normal tweets (“blah blah blah”) appear in the feed of anyone who follows me.

Mentions (“blah blah @jaz_math”) notify @jaz_math and appear in the feed of anyone who follows me.

@Replies (“@jaz_math blah blah”) notify @jaz_math and appear in the feed of anyone who follows BOTH @jaz_math AND me. Note that this is NOT visible to my followers unless they also follow @jaz_math.

Direct messages (click DM, “blah blah blah”) appear only for the recipient and me.

A framework for thinking about it

Since I’m one of the people who mostly uses Twitter for professional things, I’ll put this into conference terms. Imagine that we’re at a conference workshop, sitting at one of several round tables in the room.

Normal tweets are like me standing up to make a comment during a conference workshop session. Anyone who’s in the room with me (my followers) can hear what I say (have it appear in their feed).

Mentions are like me standing up during a conference workshop session and saying “to respond to what Jasmine was saying, blah blah blah.” Anyone who’s in the room with me (my followers) can hear what I say (have it appear in their feed), and Jasmine also gets a notification saying that I’ve said something referencing her. This is, essentially, a public conversation.

@Replies are like table talk at a conference session: brief comments intended for a particular person but audible to those sitting right next to us. They’re not intended for a wider audience, so I only say them loud enough for Jasmine to get notified that I’m talking to her and for the people sitting at our same table (following both Jasmine and me) to hear me (have my tweet appear in their feeds).

Direct messages are like writing a message down on a piece of paper, folding it, and discreetly passing it to Jasmine. Nobody else has any idea that I’ve sent a message, nor do they know what it said.

Who cares?

I do. And newbies do. If you’re using Twitter to foster an open community, it’s frustrating and confusing for new people (like me, alas) when they can’t see the conversations that are happening due to a technicality. That’s what happens when you leave @replies at the front of the line: it cuts people out unless they’re already following both participants.

The sad part is that they’ll never know what they’re missing because Twitter won’t show them anything about it.

So: if you want your conversations to be open to new people and others, stick a period before the first @ symbol or move the @references later in the line.

If you want to restrict your conversation to a smaller audience, that’s totally fine! Use @replies right up at the front of the line, confident that you’ve got a smaller audience. But if you’re wanting to have a visible, public conversation, move the @references farther back in your tweets.

Thanks! Lots of people (the #MTBoS in particular) are sharing really cool professional conversation with Twitter, and I hope this will help keep it accessible to new people as well as established contributors.

Please feel free to link to this page and share it with others, or re-tweet the tweet shown below. Thanks to Jasmine (@jaz_math) for helping me (@adkpiper) figure this out!

Start With The Feelings: A Guide for Helping People

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The phone rings, and the caller is really upset. Sometimes angry, sometimes tearful, sometimes sullen, but whatever the direction, the emotions are off the charts. Often it feels as though nothing can help them–nothing you offer has any chance of making a difference. We try to focus on facts, resolve their complaints, de-escalate the situation, find out where we can help, but often it goes nowhere. Why?

Over the years, we’ve seen that callers need us to notice and support their feelings before they can tell us much about what caused the feelings–and that attempts to resolve their problems before addressing how they feel generally don’t work. If our goal is to help our customers feel better after working with us, we need a wider view than just straight problem-solving–because people need a chance to feel that their story has been heard, not just a chance to watch their problems disappear.

How crisis happens

Mike
Mike

This is Mike. He’s a regular guy, going about his regular life.

Suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune

Sometimes, Mike’s life takes a turn for the worse. Bad things happen to him.

Actually, this is always happening. Life always shoots a few arrows at Mike, but he usually just plucks them out, sets them down, dusts himself off and keeps moving. Sort of the way most of us deal with mosquito bites: sure, they’re unpleasant, but they’re not that big a deal.

But once in a while, Life gets feisty and starts shooting lots of arrows, or maybe Mike gets accosted by a roving band of archers. It starts to feel like Life has some kind of vendetta against Mike, and he gets knocked down. Once he does, he becomes an easier target, and he’s quickly hit again and again. Mike is now in crisis because Life has overwhelmed his usual coping skills.

Mike’s on the ground, injured by Life

So Mike is lying on the ground stuck full of arrows like some horrifying porcupine from the battle of Agincourt. He’s in trouble, and the facts are bad: he’s got a whole lot of arrow wounds, he’s losing a lot of blood, and he’s vulnerable to further arrow wounds.

Because of those things (facts), Mike develops feelings. He’s in a lot of pain almost as soon as the first arrow hits him, and before long he’s scared, and he’s mistrustful because (let’s be honest) Life is shooting arrows at him!

Mike feels emotions because of the things that happened

It doesn’t take long before Mike starts feeling a lot more emotions: anger at the people shooting at him, anxiety over whether this is how Life is going to treat him from now on, worries over whether he’s going to be permanently disabled, and on and on.

Notice that the emotions take up a lot more space and bandwidth than the original injuries did. They’re huge and overwhelming. Also notice that they totally surround Mike at this point. The feelings grow out of the facts, but eventually they become somewhat independent–not just offshoots, but factors in their own right. Remember that the person’s grief closet may be overflowing.

I can help!

We show up on the scene, ready to help, like some kind of psychological EMT, a customer service black belt, a total expert in problem solving, a living tribute to the arts of brief solution-focused counseling. Mike has some problems and we are here to solve them!

Strangely, though, Mike doesn’t seem to want our help. It’s almost like he wants to stay injured, because we keep talking about the importance of getting him to a hospital, the possibility of investing in armor, maybe taking a different route to work, placating Life, whatever, but Mike keeps moaning and talking about how unfair it all is. Why can’t he just get with the program? We’ve got solutions for this stuff!

Start With The Feelings 5. The Model 2013-10-24 17.46.39

Start with the feelings

People need to feel that you’ve heard their story. They need to feel confident that you’ve understood how they’re feeling, not just that you’ve accurately assessed their problems. If there are solutions to be found, our callers need to believe not just that we’ve understood the problems and proposed correct solutions, but also that we understand how they’re feeling and care about it.

Until we’ve acknowledged their feelings, most callers aren’t ready to talk about solutions. This is true whether they’re calling a crisis hotline, talking to customer service at a big box store, asking to yell at a restaurant manager, or complaining to their Senator.

So let’s start with the feelings. Reach behind the content (as my friend Pat Morris once said) toward the person. Honor how customers feel before you start digging too deeply into what the problem is, what caused the problem, or how you might be able to solve it.

If you look at my drawing, you’ll see that it isn’t really possible to reach the arrow wounds without getting engulfed in the feelings, because the feelings surround everything. You have to start with the feelings because they’re the first thing you see. So start with the feelings!

Two examples

Here’s what that might look like in a crisis hotline context. The first call is based on standard problem-solving practice; the second call implements a start-with-the-feelings approach.

Problem-solving call

  • Me: Hi, crisis line, can I help you?
  • Caller: Uh… I hope so.
  • M: What’s going on tonight?
  • C: Well, I just got my electricity shut off tonight.
  • M: Okay, I can help with that. When was your last payment due?
  • C: Two weeks ago.
  • M: Okay, and is this the first time your electricity has been shut off?
  • C: No, it’s happened before because I lost my job a while ago, but then I got a new one and I thought it was going to be great, but not so much as it turns out.
  • M: Okay, so you’ve had a history of non-payment. Have you been in touch with National Grid to see about setting up a payment plan?
  • C: No… I didn’t know I could do that.
  • M: Yep! If you’d like, I can get you their number–they’re still open for another two hours and you can probably reach them tonight. Often they’ll turn your power back on as long as you set up a plan where you’re paying them something each month–it’s not in their best interests to lose you as a customer.
  • C: … okay. Yeah, can I have that number?
  • M: Sure! It’s [number]. Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?
  • C: … no. Thanks, you’ve been really helpful.
  • M: Thank you! Please feel free to call back if there’s anything else you need.

This is decent work for what’s basically an information and referral (I&R) call. We hear about a problem, we ask a bunch of clarifying questions, and we provide meaningful referrals that have a genuine chance of helping with the caller’s situation. It’s straightforward and fairly quick, and the customer sounds satisfied.

My concern is that we can do better. The referral is good, but we have more to offer to this caller, to turn good service into great service.

Start-with-the-feelings call

  • Me: Hi, crisis line, can I help you?
  • Caller: Uh… I hope so.
  • M: What’s going on tonight?
  • C: Well, I just got my electricity shut off tonight.
  • M: I’m sorry to hear that–what happened?
  • C: Well, I was two weeks late on my payment again, and the same thing happened a few months ago so I guess they just gave up on me.
  • M: Sounds like you’re feeling pretty bad about that.
  • C: Yeah. I mean, I know it’s important to pay on time, I get that, it’s just that I’ve been dealing with a lot and I… I just lost track of it.
  • M: Sounds like you’re feeling pretty overwhelmed. What else is going on?
  • C: My kid’s been in the ER a lot. Nothing serious, just ear infections, but I haven’t gotten much sleep because I’ve been worrying or sitting in the ER most nights. I get home at like 3am and then I hope to God I get a little sleep before I have to be at work the next day, and it’s just like there’s no time.
  • M: I’m so sorry–that’s a lot to manage!
  • C: Yeah, so… I dunno, I know there’s probably stuff I can do about the power but I just feel so overwhelmed by it.
  • M: I’ve got some ideas about that, if you’d like them.
  • C: That would be great.
  • M: Have you been in touch with National Grid to see about setting up a payment plan?
  • C: No… What’s that?
  • M: Basically, they want to keep you as a customer, so they’ll often turn your power back on as long as you set up a plan where you’re paying them something each month. They’re usually pretty understanding about it when it’s based on things like a sick kid.
  • C: Okay, that sounds great. Can I have that number?
  • M: Yep! They’re still open for another two hours and you can probably reach them tonight. While I’m looking that up, how are you feeling right now? Any different from when you called?
  • C: Yeah… I feel like I can do this, like it’s not going to be as awful as I thought.
  • M: I’m so glad! That number is [number]. Would you like to talk more with me, or would you rather call them right away?
  • C: I think I’d like to just call them, but thank you so much for listening.
  • M: You’re so welcome! Please feel free to call back if there’s anything else you need.

In many respects, this is the same call, but I hope you’ll see that the quality of the interaction is greatly changed. It takes a little longer, yes, but it’s better in pretty much every respect except for the metrics related to call times and calls per hour per agent. In this case, we led to the same outcome as in the first call, but we also have enough information that we could offer additional referrals if the caller wanted them.

Ways to start with the feelings

Say out loud some of the things you notice about the caller:

  • “Sounds like you’re having a hard time”
  • “I hear that you’re really angry”
  • “I can tell that you’re upset”
  • “Sounds frightening”
  • “Feeling lonely?”

Connect with or repeat things you’ve heard them say:

  • “You’re really struggling, aren’t you?”
  • “That’s a lot to handle”
  • “I would be angry too”

Invite them to talk about feelings:

  • “How are you feeling about that?”
  • “What’s hardest about that?”
  • “Sounds like you have a lot on your plate. How are you managing with it?”
  • “I’d like to check in–how are you doing?”
  • “I hear that you’re struggling. How bad is it?”

Or just give people room to lead you toward feelings if they choose:

  • “Sounds like there’s a lot going on. Where would you like to start?”
  • “I want to give you room to talk, and I also have some ideas. Will you let me know if you’d like to hear them later on?”
  • “I’m glad you called today. What made you decide to pick up the phone?”

In closing

When we’re looking in from outside at the people we help, the first thing we reach is feelings. They surround the facts, shrouding and hiding them. If we skip the feelings and dive straight into the facts of the matter, at best we miss an opportunity to transform adequate service into excellence. At worst, we miss the point. If we focus on the facts, it becomes clear that the facts are the most important thing to us–sometimes more important than the caller.

Start with the feelings and you make it clear that the relationship–your rapport–is what matters most to you. Once you’ve established that, the callers will usually lead you toward what they need to talk about.

Start With The Feelings full1 2013-10-24 17.46.39

This is part of a series of posts musing on what goes into good customer service and support in a crisis hotline, good caller care, and the underpinnings of excellence in call centers. I like to think about stuff, and I hope you’ll join in. I also enjoy drawing pictures on index cards–try it! Thanks to Shye Louis for reminding me overtly that crisis center work is customer service (“Give ’em the pickle!”) and to Pat Morris for the idea of reaching behind the content. And thanks to you for not laughing too hard at my drawings.

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How do you integrate starting with the feelings in your work? Leave a comment or a question, please! I’d especially love to hear from people who don’t work in crisis hotlines. Where else does this apply? Leave a comment!

Hotline Directors’ Reading List

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Hotline Directors’ Reading List

(last updated 2014 August 27)

At NASCOD 2013, lots of us shared our recommendations for reading/watching/ruminating. It occurred to me that we could use an ongoing public resource that collects and curates things hotline directors find valuable; here’s my effort in that direction.

I will update this page as people send in more ideas; please leave a comment if you have suggestions! It’s my intention for this to become a “greatest hits” kind of document, not merely a collection of titles having something to do with a topic. Think of the books you’d say “you’ve GOT to read this!” to a colleague at a conference. Let’s make this a collection of really great resources!

I encourage you to buy these books from your local independent bookstore–let’s help keep them alive! For those without good local stores, I’ve included links to Amazon. If you buy books after clicking my link, I’ll get paid a little bit.

Avoiding Burnout and Learning to Thrive

  • Daring Greatly (book) by Brené Brown. Learning to welcome vulnerability and dare great things. (from Jennifer Battle).
  • The Four Agreements (book) by Don Miguel Ruiz. Presents a framework for changing how we live in the world for greater happiness, success, and trust. (from Hollis Easter).
  • Madly Chasing Peace: How I Went From Hell to Happy in Nine Minutes a Day
     (book) by Dina Proctor. A journey through depression and addiction using mindfulness and meditation. Includes a three-minute guideline for practice. (from Meryl Cassidy).
  • Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (book) by Carol Dweck. Cultivating a growth mindset vs. sticking with a fixed mindset can make a big difference. (from Jasmine Walker).
  • Positivity (book) by Barbara Fredrickson. Research on the effect of positive psychology, with many tools for integrating it into daily life. (from Hollis Easter).
  • Ten Zen Seconds (book) by Eric Maisel. Short mindfulness exercises (< 1 minute) to relieve stress and recover equilibrium. (from Hollis Easter).
  • Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others (book) by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky with Connie Burk. Wise thoughts about taking care of ourselves and each other while helping hotline callers. (from Karen Butler Easter).
  • Why Good Things Happen to Good People (book) by Stephen Post. Neuroscience that backs up the simple idea that doing good and being good is good for your health: physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual health. (from Meryl Cassidy).

Management

Non-Profit Organizations

Training and Performance Improvement

Want to help? Please leave a comment on this post saying what you’d like to add, and why. You’ll make my life even easier if you write it this way:

Title Words (format) by Author’s Name. One or two sentences describing the resource and why it’s valuable. Include a second sentence if you need it. (from Your Name).

Thanks!
Hollis

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Getting Their Best: Performance Improvement at Crisis Centers (NASCOD 2013)

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Getting Their Best

Performance improvement at crisis centers
Workshop by Hollis Easter
National Association of Crisis Center Directors annual conference
Rochester NY, 2013 October 19

PowerPoint slides

PDF of PowerPoint slides: NASCOD2013-GettingTheirBest

Links

Workshop objectives

Participants will learn:

  • How to look at performance problems, assess gaps, find causes, and propose solutions.
  • When to choose training and when to omit it.
  • Some principles of instructional design, performance improvement, and adult learning.

Workshop description

“Why are they still doing that?” Ever asked that question? Training is essential for good performance at crisis centers, but we often rely on training or re-training to fix all kinds of performance problems—and are surprised when the problems persist.

In this workshop, we’ll look at why training often fails and talk about how to build it toward success. More broadly, though, we’ll use the performance improvement model to examine a host of crisis center issues (including those shared by participants) and look at the wide variety of performance interventions that go beyond training. You’ll leave with a new framework for looking at hotline performance and a sharpened sense of what training can accomplish, what it can’t, and how to tell the difference.

Presenter biography

Hollis Easter has worked in crisis centers for the last 20 years. He recruits, trains, and supervises the volunteer corps at Reachout in northern NY, and he’s also active in teaching suicide intervention. He served for four years on Contact USA’s national board and was a founding member of New York’s Suicide Intervention Skills Training Consortium.

He holds a Master’s degree in instructional design and technology with certification in training and performance improvement, and he has developed or consulted on many training programs, conferences, and workshops around the country.

In 2011, the professional organization for instructional designers honored him with its award for Outstanding Practice by a Graduate Student in Instructional Design, and he received New York State Office of Mental Health’s Excellence in Suicide Prevention Award in 2012.

Humble, humility, humiliated… a meditation on words

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(I’m in Rochester, NY for the annual conference of the National Association of Crisis Center Directors and Contact USA, and I often draw or make lists during workshops, which often helps me dispense with the distraction of whatever thought has arisen, letting me get back to the workshop’s content.)

This thought came to me today:

Humble, humility, humiliated (c) Hollis Easter 2013
Humble, humility, humiliated (c) Hollis Easter 2013

What’s going on with these words? Something weird.

  • Positive connotation: humble, humility
  • Negative connotation: humiliated, humiliation, humiliate

That’s odd. We typically see something praiseworthy about people who refrain from exaggerating their achievements or throwing them in others’ faces (although this often leads to people being unwilling or unable to accept any credit for their good works, for fear of seeming arrogant). We talk about being humble (as Indiana Jones tells us, “the penitent man is humble before God”).

But people say it feels horrible to be humiliated, it’s rude to humiliate others, and we work really hard to avoid humiliation.

Are these words referring to the same thing? Does being humiliated lead to the same end state as choosing to be humble? Or are they different?

I guess it makes a big difference whether you’ve chosen humility for yourself or been forced into it by others. Actually, that’s true of a lot of things.

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The Grief Closet

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The Grief Closet

Langston Hughes asked, in “Harlem”, what happened to a dream deferred. Whether it would fester or grow or change or harden, or sag, or even explode after a while. We can ask the same question about grief.

I learned the concept of the Grief Closet in a training session by Maureen Underwood, a social worker who’s done a lot of work designing suicide prevention programs for schools to use. It was one of those metaphors that perfectly explained its concepts, and I loved it instantly.

The Grief Closet comes up when we’re trying to understand why people are so unpredictable in their relation to crises. We’ve long observed that a given person can go through major trauma one week and seem fine, and then a seemingly minor thing happens later and the person breaks. What is it that’s so much more poisonous about the minor thing?

What’s the Grief Closet?

Imagine a person, Alice, who’s pretty much normal. (Whatever that means). Alice goes about her daily life, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, just like most of us. On the day in question, something bad happens to her–something that causes her grief. Maybe she gets some bad news, maybe someone close to her dies, maybe she loses something important, whatever–something causes her grief.

In an ideal world, Alice does her grieving right away. She participates in normal stages of grieving: maybe she pretends the grief hasn’t happened, maybe she tries to bargain with it, maybe she accepts that the bad thing has happened but suddenly feels really angry about the whole thing… normal grieving. Eventually, the grief recedes and takes its place within the larger context of her life.

But what about those times when Alice has to just get through the present moment, knowing that she doesn’t have time to fall apart right now. Maybe she has young kids and has to get them fed and put to bed, or maybe she’s on a business trip and needs to represent her employer well. Whatever the reason, now isn’t a good time for grieving. But now Alice has a problem, because she has all this grief and she needs to stash it somewhere.

She stashes it in the Grief Closet.

The Grief Closet (intro), (c) 2013
The Grief Closet (intro), (c) 2013

What’s wrong with that?

Nothing. It’s normal. Everybody does this. We’ve got to keep our game face on, deliver good performance, and pay the cost later. It’s totally normal. Shove those problems into the Grief Closet, baby!

For a while, this poses no problems at all. An empty closet, especially if it’s a really big one, has plenty of room for some excess grief. No problems. (See my Pillar Metaphor article for some additional thoughts–think of ‘lots of pillars’ as ‘having a spacious Grief Closet’.)

After a while, though, what happens to closets?

Unless you consciously go clean them out, closets fill up with crap. They’re natural collecting places for piles of stuff that doesn’t really belong anywhere, and they tend to perpetuate that state because closets have doors that shut. Out of sight, out of mind! So we forget about what’s in the Grief Closet.

And why do we get those huge crises that come seemingly out of nowhere?

Because sometimes when Alice tries to shove more stuff into the Grief Closet, the whole disorganized mess collapses, flooding out the door in an overpowering rush of pain, loss, grief, and negativity. When that happens, is it any wonder people struggle?

The Grief Closet (full), (c) 2013 by Hollis Easter
The Grief Closet (full), (c) 2013 by Hollis Easter

Thanks to Maureen for the idea.

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You’re So Talented!

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(Originally published 2013 October 11. Updated 2013 November 21.)

You’re so talented!

Sistine Chapel ceiling
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, photo by Patrick Landy

… please stop saying this to people.

We have some peculiar ways of recognizing excellent performance in this country. We claim to be driven by a desire to excel, and we’re proud of people who do, but there’s this whole set of cultural expectations built up around how we talk about excellence, what we say, how we say it, and who we say it to. We say things are wonderful when they aren’t, and we leave unacknowledged the marvels that surround us.

Sometimes we do it by exaggerating the quality of things. How many times have you heard someone say “you’re so special!” or “that’s amazing!”? Older folks often talk about how millennials are the “you get a trophy just for showing up” generation, but what they’ve taught us is that all performance is noteworthy and that none is really more noteworthy than others. So words like “special” and “amazing” lose their meaning because, on some level, all they denote is that you did something–no assessment of quality.

Yet we still notice quality, and we still talk about it.

Failure and the Need to Do

We’re uncomfortable saying that something failed to meet our standards; most of us won’t return products that break, we put up with legislators who disappoint, we tell kids who’ve failed a test that if they try harder next time they’re sure to succeed…

Hold onto that last statement and unpack it a little with me. When people fail at something–even though we’re pretending not to use the language of failure–we usually tell them that if they worked harder, they would succeed. More work = more success. We see this in all kinds of venues, from school (“Just study harder, honey!”) to weight loss (“Yeah, she didn’t have enough willpower so she’s still fat”) to job searches (“You just gotta be disciplined and keep looking”), ad nauseam.

When someone isn’t meeting our standards, we often translate their scenario into what they do. In this case, our perception is usually that they need to do more.

Success and the State of Being

Excellence means different things in different contexts: a high school cellist may be a star performer even though she’d never even get noticed in a professional audition. On some level, excellence is a slippery concept, but I think we can nail it down by saying that excellence involves exceeding expectations for performance, whatever those expectations were. The excellent high school cellist can play several major works; the excellent professional cellist has a large current repertoire of major works and also teaches well; the excellent world-class cellist can groove like Rushad Eggleston while laying down archetypal performances of the Bach cello suites like Pablo Casals. The standards are different, but ‘excellent’ often means that we’ve exceeded them.

We seem to be similarly uncomfortable talking about excellent performance. Most of the time, people say something like “Chris Thile is so talented” or “Man, Steve Jobs was so smart” or “Tim Thomas is so good!”. When people are successful, we talk about what they are, not what they do. We use these labels as compliments, acknowledging excellence in a subtle, tacit way but almost misdirecting attention away from it. If Chris Thile is “so talented”, of course he’s going to play Fisher’s Hornpipe literally 100 beats per minute faster than I can, and better to boot. It’s expected. He’s Chris Thile. He’s so talented!

(Did you notice that I wrote “when people are successful” instead of “when people succeed“? And that in the previous section, I framed it as “when someone isn’t meeting our standards“? That’s what I’m talking about.)

The thing is, being told you’re so talented doesn’t always feel that good.

Michelangelo allegedly said that if people knew how hard he to had to work to achieve mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all. I’ve had the privilege of knowing a lot of people who are genuinely world-class performers in their fields, and very few of them got there on talent. They work, hard, to achieve what they do.

Talent has a role, certainly… but talent doesn’t get you anywhere without work. Talent speeds up your learning process, improves your chances of success, helps you make better choices, and perhaps gives you a head start sometimes. But again, talent without effort is worthless.

“Work is love made visible.” — Kahlil Gibran

When we compliment excellent performance by focusing on the performer’s talent, intelligence, strength, aptitude, whatever, we’re implicitly devaluing the effort the person put in. In Scotland, I had students who achieved more in three years of lessons than I had in six years, and I spent a lot of time wishing I could have been talented like they were. Then I started talking to their parents and learned that these kids were practicing 6-8 hours a day, every day. They had talent, for sure, but they were also working their fingers to the bone with practice. Carefully-guided practice, aided by talent, but practice nonetheless. If we spent 60 hours a week practicing, we’d get better in a hurry, too.

We mostly don’t see that stuff from the outside. We see the talent. When you see a major league pitcher throwing strike after strike, we see the strikes–the talent–not the 20 years of practicing every day to prepare for that event.

The Taoist calligrapher

There’s a story I learned in studying Taoism that relates to a man who commissions a work of art from a noted calligrapher. The artist names a large price, explains that it will take a year to produce the work, and bids him return in a year to collect his painting.

In a year, the man returns, they have tea, they talk about worldly affairs, they agree on the price, and the man asks to see the promised work of art. The calligrapher goes to his desk, selects a blank sheet of paper, returns, grinds some ink, mixes it, chooses a brush, and then proceeds to do the painting. The customer gets angry, although the art is gorgeous, and says “why should I pay you for a whole year of work when all it took was 15 minutes?”

Talent is like that. The customer sees that the artist only needed 15 minutes to produce an outstanding work, because he was so talented, and in this case he thinks he shouldn’t pay as much because, well, it only took 15 minutes!

The artist leads the man to a closet, which he opens. Inside are hundreds of nearly-identical pieces of work, all clearly working from the same model, but with more imperfections. The paintings on top have only minor flaws, but the farther down they go in the stack, the more problems we see. Early on, the work lacks cohesion and, though the strokes are beautiful, they don’t seem to go anywhere.

The artist says “You’re paying me for a year because a year is what it took. I had to make all those paintings before I could learn to produce the one you wanted.”

Edison’s lightbulb

Thomas Edison wrote, in the January 1921 edition of American Magazine, “After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.” This is often re-quoted as something like “When I was designing a lightbulb, people said I failed 1000 times before succeeding. I did not fail. I found 1000 ways not to build a lightbulb.” Edison was brilliant, but it took years of effort before his brilliance could shed any light for the rest of us.

Brilliance, excellence, and great performance do rely on some innate characteristics like intelligence, drive, passion, and talent. But they never go anywhere without work.

So what should I say?

If you’re talking about excellent performance, say so. Thank them. It’s fine to say that people are talented, but also honor the work they’ve put in. That talented dance caller may just be naturally good–or she may have spent 400 hours working on that dance, seeing how it’s put together, trying out words to help the dancers know what to do, thinking about problem areas, ruminating on what kind of music is needed, thinking about how to support the dancers, considering where in a program that dance should go, and preparing to handle it if things go wrong. Talent, to start with… but then work. Work, making visible the love the caller feels for the dance.

If your daughter aces her chemistry test, don’t just say “you’re so smart!”. Find out what she did to prepare, and compliment her preparation, or say that you’re proud of her and of what she achieved. Honor the work.

And honor what people do, not just what they are.

(It probably goes without saying that I don’t always succeed at this, either. Most of us aren’t naturally talented at what I’m asking for here, but I hope that with some work, we can improve.)

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