Black hole

Terri Mak

 

 

When meeting with “Black Holes”, below are my possible actions:

 

Run Away

 

Find an excuse to escape, especially if I do not have enough positive energy. Sometimes they like vampires who can suck up all my positive energy. And I may become one of them.

 

“Listen” but not response

 

If I cannot escape, I just switch off my ears, pretend to be listening but I do not give response. Or I give them mismatching body language so that I do not encourage their conversation. When they feel there is no audience, they may stop.

 

Sometimes they may not aware what they talk about. They may just want to draw your attention.

 

Ask the Right Challenging Questions

 

Remembered I learnt a Meta Model from the NLP course more than 10 years ago. It uses different questions to (1) Specify Information, (2) Clarify Information and (3) Open up a person’s model of the world.

 

My key learning from it:

  1. When people sharing experience, the people has tendency in deleting, distorting and generalizing information. Ask them the Right Challenging Questions.
  2. It needs a lot of practises to ask Right questions. I am still practising on it.
  3. Before asking questions, I need to build Rapport with them. Rapport is a sense of connection that we create with others, a connection that makes both of us feel as if we understand each other well and we have a lot in common. Once ‘in Rapport’, they can easily share their inner world to me.
  4. Do not ask “Why?” as it does not help for gathering specific information.

 

Below are key Questions we can ask: (Click here for more examples)

  • When?
  • Where?
  • Who specifically? Who says? According to Whom? Compare to Whom?
  • How? How do you know?
  • What? What do you mean by that? Compare to What? What stops you? What would happen if you could? What would happen if you did? What would happened if you didn’t?
  • Everybody? Always? Never? Nobody? Nothing? All? No one?