Active listening is non-judgmental listening with full attention.
Active listening is about not only listening but also about acceptance and reception of the speaker’s whole self. Active listening requires the listener to be empathetic, non-judgmental and congruent. It requires the listener to be open to whatever the client says. It does not mean that a listener cannot have an opinion or own emotions. If we feel it necessary to express our feelings that arise during the speech of the client it is very important to express them as solely personal, never in a judgmental way.
There are certain communication techniques that help active listening such as repeating or paraphrasing certain words or sentences of the client, highlighting a couple of topics that seem to be important. Summarizing the topic, articulating emotions that the speaker mentions, and the use of symbols and images.
Easy songs can be used in a very wide range of ways for almost any facilitation need:
opening or closing a ceremony
forming bonds amongst a group
soothing hearts after conflict, tender sharing, or grief
empower participants, put them in touch with their power & energy
meditation or contemplation
and more!
Guided Abundance Meditation
Guided abundance meditation is great for starting the day, opening our minds to other ways of thinking, and using the imagination to significantly shift our internal outlook.
The purpose of Setting Your Intention is to clarify, both within oneself and within the group, what each person’s aim is.
Connection meditation is great for starting the day, opening our minds to other ways of thinking, and using the imagination to shift our internal outlook.
The purpose of the Round of Gratefulness is to practise the attitude of gratefulness. This brings deeper peace, greater well-being and an enhanced capacity for joy and self-empowerment.
There are five guiding principles that can serve as touchstones to support the practice:
- Life is a gift
- Everything is a surprise
- The ordinary is extraordinary
- Appreciation is generative
- Love is transformative
“’Kindly let me help you or you will drown,’ said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.” –Alan Watts
In this short example you see that a good intention for helping is often not enough. Real solutions require clarity about what exactly is the core of the problem, how the problem is interwoven with other stakeholders and what the real needs or already lived best practice are. So a big part of innovating is about understanding the situation and asking the right questions to find good solutions that bring real benefit.
Empathic interviews help find out about that in an easy way, supporting connection and trust towards the people you design for and with. Empathic interviews are not meant to be used for statistics or scientific studies, therefore they don’t need to be precise or representative. They are led with curiosity and the wish to get to know your interviewee, to understand their lives and very subjective perspectives.
Empathic interviews are
- a great start for a social innovation challenge;
- a wonderful source of inspiration for new ideas;
- a way to build up trust and connections; and
- open up your social innovation project for participation of the beneficiaries, which is highly empowering for them.
Thanks to IDEO for this graph and helpful tips
Incomplete sentences trigger the wish to finish them. Just like questions, open sentences can be used in many different ways, for all kind of topics. We present to you Open Sentences, an exercise we had especially good experiences with, introduced by Joanna Macy. This exercise is embedded in a setting of pairwork with a deep listener as a support to explore thoughts, feelings and ideas around a topic. This method helps people listen with rare receptivity as well as speak their thoughts and feelings frankly. It helps dive right into things that matter, creates trust, and vitalizes the group.