At six minutes past one on Wednesday morning, the year tipped.
The autumn equinox. Light and dark almost level. I slept through it, and I imagine you did too.
It looks like the stillest moment of the year. Everything level, everything in balance.
It isn’t. This is the week the light goes fastest. In London we’re losing nearly four minutes of it a day, quicker than at any other time of year. The equinox is where the change runs at full speed, not where it pauses.
You would never know that from inside a single day. Tuesday feels exactly like Monday. You only see it from outside: a clock, a calendar, the evening you suddenly need the lamp on.
The questions we carry work the same way.
Before I went away, someone I’ve known for a long time rang me. She had been carrying a decision since the spring. Every option had something wrong with it, and she had walked round it so often the path was worn.
For the first quarter of an hour she told me all of it, fluently. She’d had six months’ practice.
When she stopped, I asked: Is there anything else?
Not a clever question. Four words, and then I waited.
A long pause. Then she said oh, and said the thing she had rung to say without knowing she had it.
Twenty-five minutes, start to finish.
I didn’t give her information she lacked. I asked a question and gave her room to hear her own answer. It’s much harder to make that room for yourself when you’re the one living with the question. I have circled questions of my own for months.
That’s why the people everyone brings their hard problems to can carry their own for years, get no clearer, and quietly decide the fault is theirs. It isn’t. It’s the equinox again: you can’t see the movement from where you’re standing.
You can borrow some of the distance, though. Researchers have found that people reason more wisely about someone else’s problem than about their own, until they’re asked to think about their own in the third person, as if it belonged to somebody else. In those experiments, the gap disappeared.
So when the question is yours, ask it at one remove. Not What do I want? but What would << Test First Name >> like to have happen? Then wait, as you would for a friend, and when the answer comes, ask: Is there anything else? I do this with my own name. It isn’t the same as someone else asking, but it’s a long way from circling.
And then there is the next difficulty. It’s one thing to find out what you think. It’s another to say it to somebody who has a stake in your answer.
The partner. The business partner. The person you report to. The family, all round one table at Christmas.
That’s where we rehearse the thing on the drive home, arrive, and say something smaller, or nothing at all.
Being clearer and braver matters, and so does saying it without it turning into a drama. But much of the difficulty starts earlier. We think we already know what the other person is going to say, so we stop listening properly and start composing our reply. With the people closest to us, we’re surest of all. In one set of experiments, people expected their husband or wife to understand their meaning far better than a stranger would. In those tests, spouses were no more accurate.
In the early 1980s a New Zealand counselling psychologist called David Grove noticed something similar in the transcripts of Carl Rogers and Virginia Satir, two of the finest listeners of their century. Again and again, kindly and skilfully, they reworded what their clients said, and a little of their own view of the world slipped in with it.
So Grove made questions with nothing of his in them. Only the other person’s words, and a handful of plain questions, the two above among them. That is Clean Language. It’s what we used in Bulgaria, on phrases like I want to connect with myself. What kind of connection? What kind of self is that self? We stayed with people’s own words long enough to discover what they meant by them.
In an ordinary conversation it gives you something unusual. You are in it, you care how it goes, and at the same time you are a step back from it: curious rather than certain. You stop guessing what they mean and find out. You don’t need the answer, only the next question. And people who feel properly heard tend to become more willing to hear you.
It changes how the difficult conversation can begin, too. You don’t have to open with the announcement you’ve rehearsed. You can open with a question, What would you like to have happen?, and find out where the other person stands before you say where you do.
Which conversation came to mind while you were reading this? It’s usually the one worth having.
On Tuesday I’ll write briefly about a small group I’m starting in October, for exactly that conversation.
Best,
Rosaleen
P.S. The next time somebody tells you about something they’re stuck on, listen and try asking, Is there anything else? Then say nothing for a little longer than feels polite. If you try it, tell me what happened.