Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Making responding to messages easy
Dear Darren,
Last time I said I would teach you ways to make responding to messages easier for you. Because as we noticed, if you don’t respond at all, your silent message sends a negative message. So I’m going to describe three ways to respond to messages. The feeling method, the direct method, and the super-easy method.
The feeling method is to find the emotional message behind the words and respond to that. To discover that hidden emotional message, ask yourself, “How is the person feeling, that prompted him or her to contact me?”
For example, I text messaged you from Mexico. I wrote a little thing about geckos. To use the emotion method you would ask yourself “How is mom feeling that prompted her to contact me?” Maybe I was happy or excited about geckos. Or maybe I was happy or excited about Mexico or vacation. Or maybe I missed you. All of those would be good guesses. You would respond to one of those guesses. You would say, “Hey, glad you're enjoying Mexico!”
This is really just the reflection technique we talked about before. You’re reflecting my feelings and making me feel heard and understood.
The direct method is to find the topic of the message and respond to that. In this case the topic was the geckos. So you would say something about geckos. You could say that you read that geckos don’t really have sticky stuff on their feet. They can walk on ceilings because they have millions of tiny hairs that conform to the surface so closely that surface tension keeps them stuck to the ceiling. Or you could tell me that you’ve seen lizards but never a gecko. Or you could make a joke and ask if any geckos have fallen onto my head yet!
The super-easy method simply acknowledges the message with a reasonably appropriate one or two-word response.
“Great!”
“Wow!”
“OK”
“Gotcha”
And so forth. The only hard part about the super-easy method is make sure the emotion in your response is appropriate to the emotion of the message. If someone is sad, you’ll want to say, “Oh, so sorry” or “bummer” rather than, “Great!”
Mom
Last time I said I would teach you ways to make responding to messages easier for you. Because as we noticed, if you don’t respond at all, your silent message sends a negative message. So I’m going to describe three ways to respond to messages. The feeling method, the direct method, and the super-easy method.
The feeling method is to find the emotional message behind the words and respond to that. To discover that hidden emotional message, ask yourself, “How is the person feeling, that prompted him or her to contact me?”
For example, I text messaged you from Mexico. I wrote a little thing about geckos. To use the emotion method you would ask yourself “How is mom feeling that prompted her to contact me?” Maybe I was happy or excited about geckos. Or maybe I was happy or excited about Mexico or vacation. Or maybe I missed you. All of those would be good guesses. You would respond to one of those guesses. You would say, “Hey, glad you're enjoying Mexico!”
This is really just the reflection technique we talked about before. You’re reflecting my feelings and making me feel heard and understood.
The direct method is to find the topic of the message and respond to that. In this case the topic was the geckos. So you would say something about geckos. You could say that you read that geckos don’t really have sticky stuff on their feet. They can walk on ceilings because they have millions of tiny hairs that conform to the surface so closely that surface tension keeps them stuck to the ceiling. Or you could tell me that you’ve seen lizards but never a gecko. Or you could make a joke and ask if any geckos have fallen onto my head yet!
The super-easy method simply acknowledges the message with a reasonably appropriate one or two-word response.
“Great!”
“Wow!”
“OK”
“Gotcha”
And so forth. The only hard part about the super-easy method is make sure the emotion in your response is appropriate to the emotion of the message. If someone is sad, you’ll want to say, “Oh, so sorry” or “bummer” rather than, “Great!”
Mom
