Stop telling, start listening.

Do you find yourself continually prompting your loved one to take care of their responsibilities around the house?!

It gets exhausting.

I’ve got a different approach for you to try this week…

To start, take a moment to mindfully slow down and breathe and listen to the different ways that your family member is communicating…

Click below to watch the video, or scroll down for the article.

Written Article:

Do you like being told what to do? No, neither do I. Neither does your loved one. So we don’t like it maybe when our partner tells us what to do, or our boss or neighbour or our parents. There’s often some sort of resistance that comes up within us. So, in this video/article, I will talk about stopping telling or prompting your loved one to do so and start asking questions and listening. I know you’re frustrated by telling your loved one what to do or prompting your loved one continuously. That prompting becomes very repetitive. And your loved one doesn’t like it either. And there’s often maybe built-up resistance that happens. And then perhaps we try and incentivize and provide rewards to our loved one to do those things. Rewards have mixed results, and they wear off over time. So in this video, I want to talk about how to help you break that cycle.

Okay, so, as I mentioned, start asking, start listening, right? Or do more, do more asking, do more listening. And when we’re asking, it isn’t asking our loved one to do the thing. It’s asking our loved one more open-ended questions on how they might want to contribute. What are those things that they can help out with? And then collaborating on ideas to find some Win-Win ideas that your loved one is interested in. And, again, instead of telling or prompting, we’re asking questions. And we’re listening. And we’re listening not only to words but also body language or expression or feeling energy. I know that you are really in tune with your loved one. So it’s listening to the way that your loved one communicates.

Sometimes we need to slow down and breathe and listen to the different ways that our family member is communicating. And then it’s providing the opportunity. It’s empowering them to take that step forward, to try out that opportunity. Maybe we need to provide a little bit of support in that opportunity. Shifting to this type of process, which is more of a coach approach, is super powerful because it gives our loved one agency. It shows that we’re listening to our loved one; it shows that we’re allowing our loved one to make a choice. And then, within that, we want to make sure that our loved one is experiencing the natural consequences of the choice they are experiencing right now to help our loved one learn through those natural consequences. So again, this is the coach approach. So it’s shifting from a caregiver method of prompting and trying to incentivize our loved one to change into more of a coach approach, which is collaborating, giving a level of choice, control, and agency. This helps to develop that intrinsic motivation within our loved one to do more of those every day.

So if you’re interested in learning how to support your loved one to increase their motivation and ability to do more of those everyday things, then I’ve got an upcoming workshop called the Growing Independence Workshop, which is happening on January 25at 7 pm ET.

Click the link to register: https://www.empoweringability.org/independenceworkshop/

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Together, let’s take a small step forward this week.