When it comes to understanding a challenging social situation it can be helpful to slow down and break down what happened. I sometimes use this visual to help facilitate debriefing those moments. When I’m using this tool I often ask people to come up with one challenging situation and one situation that they handled well so we have the opportunity to recognize their strengths and skills in addition to the challenging moments. Use a visual like this:
- Slows the situation down.
- Acknowledges how you felt.
- Gives you the opportunity to make a guess about how it impacted the other person.
- Gives us an opportunity to explore situations that are inherently ‘grey’. It’s not about being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but more about understanding where each person came form.
Making a prediction about the future is also a really useful skill! I sometimes use this visual when making a guess about how a future situation could be handled. You can see that there are multiple potential solutions. It can sometimes be helpful to talk through all types of solutions (“good” or “bad”) and imagine how the situation might play out if those solutions.
When ever you’re doing this kind of work it can be helpful to have the double empathy problem as a frame of reference. Frontiers has an article explaining the double empathy problem.