The Art of Helping

Summary

One of the ways to measure our listening skills is to test our verbatim recall of the helpees’ expressions. Simply listen to these expressions and try to repeat verbatim what you heard. We may practice in live interactions or with written or taped expressions. We may rate the accuracy of our recall as follows:

High accuracy	—  Verbatim recall of expression
Moderate accuracy	—  Recall of gist of expression
Low accuracy	—  Little or no recall of expression

In the end, the entire verbal helping process hangs on our ability to listen and to process the content and affect of the helpees’ expressions.

LEVELS OF LISTENING

Now we can begin to build our own cumulative rating scale for helping. If the helper is attending personally, ...