Meeting You Where You Are
What does it mean to meet someone where they are?
At Reboot, we say this from time to time, often when we catch ourselves not meeting someone where they are. One of the tensions of being a coach, or a leader for that matter, is that we are charged with guiding those around us to an answer or next step, yet ultimately it is up to them to find the answers for themselves. When we tell them what to do, we are no longer leading them, we are commanding them. We’ve taken away their ability to learn for themselves while creating a dependency that requires the commander (us) to be a part of every decision. We are in effect losing out on an opportunity to create deeper thinkers who take ownership over their own roles and responsibilities, all because we’ve neglected to meet them where they are.
Meeting someone where they are means putting aside our wants for them, whether those wants are in service to them or not, and endeavoring to understand where they are in their journey. It begins by listening without judgment, asking questions openly and honestly, and above all recognizing that they are human.
One of the first steps on this quest is to understand that we have different choices in how and what we listen for.
When we react to external stimuli quickly, or sometimes even instantaneously it is normally because we are listening reflexively. A fire alarm goes off in the building and we become alert, looking for danger and planning our escape route. We hear that a new feature we are planning to launch is going to be late and immediately our heart rate increases, along with our anxiety.
We also listen for problems. In fact, this may be the most common way that we listen, especially in businesses where we are constantly solving problems. When we listen for problems and how to solve them we are pattern matching, comparing what’s happening now to what we have experienced in the past. We are looking for established patterns we have seen come before that have worked in order to deal with what’s in front of us now.
What these two listening choices have in common is a goal of fixing or solving a problem. A problem is a concept. It exists outside of ourselves. It can be debated, discussed, and logic can be brought to bear on how to think about it or resolve it to get to a particular outcome. It’s important to understand what a problem is, and what it is not. A problem is not a person, and we can limit ourselves when we confuse the two as interchangeable.
As soon as you are interacting with another person, complete with thoughts, feelings and their own particular idiosyncrasies, the rules change. What becomes paramount is the ability to empathetically connect with them. To see the world through their eyes, to understand their experience, often by asking questions with no goal other than to see and hear how they see and hear the world. This often means suspending our own assumptions and conclusions in order to discover another’s, oftentimes gaining a new perspective, different from your own.
With these listening choices, we can go a long way to meeting someone where they are and understanding what they are struggling with, helping to build connection, trust, and empathy.
Yet the journey is not complete.
Where they are may not be where they want to be. It’s vital to surface what they want for themselves, and we can be a partner in mining the potential outcomes. We can get curious and turn to inquiry, asking questions like, “What’s possible here?” or “What are we not seeing?” Speaking to them not as a problem, but as a person who we believe will find the answer if only they are given the opportunity.
In “A Hidden Wholeness,” Parker Palmer captures perfectly the importance of making a conscious choice to listen to the person wherever they are.
The shadow behind our “fixes” we offer for issues that we cannot fix is, ironically, the desire to hold each other at bay. It is a strategy for abandoning each other while appearing to be concerned. Perhaps this explains why one of the most common laments of our time is that “no one really sees me, hears me, or understands me.” How can we understand another when instead of listening deeply, we rush to repair that person in order to escape further involvement? The sense of isolation and invisibility that marks so many lives — not least the lives of young people, whom we constantly try to fix — is due in part to a mode of “helping” that allows us to dismiss each other.
When you speak to me about your deepest questions, you do not want to be fixed or saved: you want to be seen and heard, to have your truth acknowledged and honored. If your problem is soul-deep, your soul alone knows what you need to do about it, and my presumptuous advice will only drive your soul back into the woods. So the best advice I can render when you speak to me about such a struggle is to hold you faithfully in a space where you can listen to your inner teacher.
But holding you that way takes time, energy, and patience. As the minutes tick by, with no outward sign that anything is happening for you, I start feeling anxious, useless, and foolish, and I start thinking about all the other things I have to do. Instead of keeping the space between us open for you to hear your soul, I fill it up with advice, not so much to meet your needs as to assuage my anxiety and get on with my life. Then I can disengage from you, a person with a troublesome problem, while saying to myself, “I tried to help.” I walk away feeling virtuous. You are left feeling unseen and unheard.
