The Power of Support

 

Gifts of Support

 

We all – thankfully! – have other women in our lives who we know we can count on to be there for us when we most need support: best friends, sisters, colleagues.  In turn, each of us has shown support for another woman at some point … the “Good Luck!” card for a friend writing an important exam; the small bunch of flowers for our neighbour when she’s ill; the phone-call early in the morning to see that a woman we care about has reached her destination safely.  

 

Of all the women we might turn to when we need to talk something through though, there’ll usually be one or two who stand out for us.  They’re often the women we regard as good listeners, who somehow just seem to understand us.  While some people really are just naturally good listeners, there are things that they do or don’t do that all of us can learn from.
 

Learning to Listen

 

A Chinese symbol for the verb “to listen” is made up of the symbols for the words ear, eyes, heart, and undivided attention.  So to really listen means that we listen with our full attention, instead of half to her and half to our own thoughts and judgements about what she is saying.  It also means suspending that knack so many of us have of mentally preparing our answer while the other person is still speaking!

 

So many conversations that end in disagreement or frustration come down, very simply, to two people who haven’t really heard each other because either or both of them are responding to what they’re thinking instead of what they’re hearing.

 

The Problem with Rescuing …

 

We don’t necessarily have to agree with what we’re hearing in order to really listen, and nor does it mean we have to act on it.  For so many women, our way of supporting someone else is to “problem-solve” and tell her what we believe she should do in her situation, or to “rescue” her and try to find a way to resolve her difficulty ourselves.  

 

Both of these approaches will frequently backfire:  Firstly: As flattering as it is to be regarded as the expert, giving advice to anyone other than ourselves can be costly – it’s very often hard enough to decide exactly what action to take in our own lives, let alone telling someone else what to do about theirs!

 

Secondly, the woman who constantly tries to resolve everyone else’s problems or to protect them from being hurt will eventually exhaust herself and be unable even to take care of herself, let alone others.

 

 

When we try to protect another adult from having their own unique experiences because we somehow believe that we know better, we also inadvertently rob them of the very opportunity they may need most in order to grow and to learn.

 

Ripples of Listening

Leonardo da Vinci wrote, more than 500 years ago, of how easy it is to “listen without hearing …, and talk without thinking”.  Learning to truly hear what another woman is saying creates a delicate chain of womanly support stretching through time to bring courage and strength to the women we care about; and through them, to women we may never even know personally.