A
t various points in Brilliant Stress Management, I have
given you the advice to seek out help and support. This
final chapter offers you some advice for when some-
body comes to you for help and support. Having got this far in
the book, you will already have a lot of resources, so this chapter
is not about what advice to offer. Instead, it is about how to give
your help and support effectively.
There are three sections in this chapter, which take you through
advancing understanding of how to help, starting with listening
well, then helping someone to regain control, and thirdly looking
at one psychological model that will help you understand their
need to apportion blame and how you can introduce reason into
their thinking. Finally, because there is a limit to what you can
achieve with goodwill and a few hours of reading, there is a list
of resources at the end of the chapter, which sets out some of the
places you can point them to for professional or highly experi-
enced help, some of which specialise in particular life problems
that result in stress.
Listening
The most valuable gift you can give someone who is strug-
gling with stress is your total attention. There are three reasons:
because we all want to be listened to, because it is important to
let someone whose mind is in turmoil talk, and because you will
186 brilliant stress management
be modelling the very opposite of what they are feeling – the
ability to make a choice to do nothing but give your time to one
very important thing. This can have a powerfully calming effect.
Making time
When somebody comes to you for help, it is a hard and uncom-
fortable thing they have done, so the most important response
you can give is to be wholly respectful of this, and take it seri-
ously. Even if you think that all is well, if, in their mind it is not,
then it is not.
Look for an opportunity to listen to them, in a suitable place.
The sooner the better; but it needs to be at a time when you can
give them all of your attention. If they have caught you at a bad
time then it is better to agree another time than to take time out
and be stressed about this yourself. They will sense your stress
and it will enhance theirs.
First response
It is tempting to say that your rst response when you settle
down to listen should be nothing. It is certainly true that you
will need to work hard to suppress most of your reactions to
what you hear: the temptation to probe, to judge, to give advice,
to offer opinions, challenge or criticise, or even to tell your own
story. None of these will help. Instead, your rst response must
be to show that you hear them and understand them.
Empathy is an understanding of another person’s feelings, and
maybe starting to ‘feel for them’. We can do this because of a
set of brain cells called ‘mirror neurons’ whose role is to spot
movement, gesture and expression in the people around us and
to mirror these. You can think of them as sending signals to your
body to copy what you see, and the feedback from your body
tells other parts of your brain about what those movements and
expressions feel like. In this way, you can almost literally read a
Help others to manage their stress 187
person’s mind and feel what they are feeling. You can empathise.
This is a deep form of understanding, and just what someone
in distress needs.
Listening
When we listen, we do so at different levels at different times.
These levels range from shallow and supercial to deep and
intense.
Pretending
Have you ever just pretended to be listening, because you knew
it was expected of you, but you didn’t really care about what
was being said? Of course you have – how recently? This is just a
form of deceit and downright rude. It is no use to anyone.
Selecting
You will also certainly be familiar with your ability to take part
in one conversation while subtly eavesdropping on a conversa-
tion nearby; perhaps a relative calls in the middle of a radio
programme you were listening to. You are more than pretending
to listen to them on the phone; your brain is paying some atten-
tion so that, when they say something important, you can phase
out from the radio and into the phone conversation. You are
selecting.
This is perhaps our default mode: we are selecting all the time.
Even when we are only part of one conversation, we are selecting
between it and that voice in our head that makes a running
commentary on what we see and hear; it criticises and judges,
it prepares our next statement or response. Consequently, we
don’t always hear what the other person really says: we were
listening to ourselves instead.
This is not good in many ways when listening to someone in
distress. First, they will be able to tell that you are not paying
full attention and, second, you will inevitably miss something
188 brilliant stress management
important. But most essential, remember what we said about
your rst response: don’t judge or criticise, don’t offer advice,
don’t probe. These are exactly what that voice in your head will
do, instinctively, if you let it. We’ll examine how to shut that
voice off soon.
Attending
At the next level of listening, you pay full attention to the other
person. You focus on them and hear everything they say, giving
appropriate and supportive feedback like eye contact, nods or an
‘aha’ at the right moment. When they nish what they are saying,
you may ask another question, and sometimes you will make
notes to help you remember things that are important. This is
high-quality listening, it is good for gathering information, and
is entirely appropriate to most workplace and business meetings
and discussions. So what else could there be?
Empathising
When we listen to empathise, we don’t just hear what is said; we
hear what is not said: we ‘listen between the lines’. Empathising is
whole-body listening, where you pay
total attention to the other person
and start to feel a sense of what
they are feeling. You will understand
what they are saying in a way that
goes far beyond the meaning of their words. This is particularly
important for someone in distress, because that very emotional
state means that they are unlikely to express themselves espe-
cially well in language: they may muddle and confuse words,
and you need to follow what they are feeling rather than what
they are saying.
How to listen deeply
Listening is a skill and, like all skills, if you follow a good process
and practise it, you can get better. Try these six steps out with
empathising is whole-
body listening
Help others to manage their stress 189
friends and family and notice what difference your better-quality
listening makes to the way they regard you.
Open questions, supportive responses
Listening starts with good questions. These are questions that
encourage people to talk about what is important to them, so
make your questions open and avoid phrasing them in such a
way that they imply the answer you want to hear. Examples of
open questions are: ‘How do you feel?’ or ‘What would you like to
talk about?’
There is one open question to avoid when you are listening to
someone who is stressed: ‘W hy. . . ? ’ Whether you intend it to
or not, a ‘why’ question will usually come across as critical or
judgemental. If it is important for you to understand why I did
something, for example, then nd a way to ask your question
without the provocative ‘why’ word; for example: ‘When you . . .
what were your reasons?’ or ‘How did you make the decision to. . . ?’
Having asked a good question, listen to the answer and offer
supportive responses. Keep eye contact, lean in appropriately,
nod your head, and make small comments like ‘I understand,’
‘Yes, I see’ or ‘Thank you.’
Avoid trying to tell the other person how they should feel: ‘Oh,
that must have been awful.’ It seems like an empathetic way to
respond, but you risk misreading their feelings. If your presump-
tion is wrong, even slightly, you risk breaking your rapport or,
worse, alienating them. It is far better to ask them how they feel
or felt: ‘Oh, how did you feel about that?’
Put yourself out of the way
You are an independent thinker; you have your own ideas,
beliefs, opinions, values, and even prejudices. If you want
to listen respectfully, then none of these has a place in your
listening. If you lter what you hear through your own values
and beliefs, you will inevitably nd yourself placing a value on
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