4 Basic Tips On The Art Of Paying Attention To Troubled People

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1. Learn to listen deeply. The art of paying attention involves stretching out your mind and heart and focusing on the other person with all the intensity and awareness that you can command. It was only when we urged the husband to pay deep attention to his wife, to stretch out his mind and imagination in listening to her, that he understood the real motivation for her behavior. It was fear that he might find their friends more attractive than he found her. Once the husband was able to grasp this, the solution was obvious: more understanding, more demonstrative affection, more reassurance. But without deep listening, such awareness would have been impossible.

2. Teach your ego to hold its breath. All of us are self centered much of the time. Each of us is an actor trying to impress an audience, to take the center of the stage. But if you want to pay close attention to another human being, you must train your own attention hungry ego to stop striving for the spotlight and let on

the other person. We have a name for people who fail consistently to do this; we call them bores. On the other hand, there are people whose self effacement is almost heroic. A well balanced person is much more likely to have this capacity for self effacement than an insecure one. This means that before you can learn to pay deep attention to another person, you must first pay attention to yourself, unravel your own emotional tangles. This, surely, is what the Bible means by its commandments to "love thy neighbor as thyself." It is saying that we can't love our neighbor unless we are at peace with ourselves. Few of us can achieve total selflessness. But each of us can try, and the closer we come, the more we will be able to pay healing attention to those who need it.

3. Practice patience. Paying close attention is not a matter of offering snap judgments. Often it requires waiting, listening, standing by until the person you are paying attention to works out his own salvation.

4. Be concerned. There's no use paying attention or pretending to pay attention to a person unless you honestly care about him, unless you are willing to share his pains and problems. Professional counselors must maintain an air of detachment and impersonality, but must also care. The troubled person must sense that care otherwise nothing can be accomplished. This capacity to project concern lies at the heart of all deep and lasting human relationships. And the marvelous thing about it is that once the unhappy person feels that somebody cares about him, he is often able to begin caring more about others. Love liberates love: it's as direct and as miraculous as that. Attention can take any forms as there are human needs. It can even be enforcement of discipline' where discipline is lacking. The golden coin of attention — learn to pay it graciously and gladly, and the dividends will come pouring back to you.

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