Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

One great thing about doing a collaborative training is that it gives me food for blogging....One of the fishbowls we do in our training is to demonstrate effective and ineffective listening.  What we chose to do was demonstrate a conversation between two spouses.  One spouse has a hurt shoulder; the other spouse plays "can you top this," by complaining how much worse they feel. Of course, in the second part of the vignette, the other spouse really listens to the complaint of the hurt shoulder and focuses on the speaker.  Why am I telling you this?  Because both the person playing the spouse and I realized that sometimes we really don't have a lot of empathy for our significant others. The funny thing is, we both realized it at the same time while we were doing the fishbowl.  It's not that our partners don't deserve empathy, as much as it is that in the day to day motions of life, sometimes the qualities that made you fall in love with your partner take a back seat to getting through the day.  That's when you lose your empathy; it's also when you know you need to work to regain it.  My colleague and I were lucky;  we realized it at a time in which we weren't in crisis, so we had the ability to refocus on what we like and love about our partners, as opposed to the things about them that annoy us.  Unfortunately, a lot of our clients here in the Trenches never realize what's happening until it's too late, and that's too bad.