#17 - Tools and Tactics for Providing World-Class Peer Support 🗣 (1/2)
#17 - Tools and Tactics for Providing World-Class Peer Support 🗣 (1/2)
Lessons From Three Years at the Peer Support Centre
Iiiiiiiiit's Wednesday! 👋🏽
Howdy y'all, and welcome to another edition of Long Way Home🏡, where I share an original piece of writing about an idea or experience that has helped me live a more fulfilling, meaningful life. I also throw in a couple of links to articles, podcasts, and videos that I found fascinating to send you down some of the rabbit holes I got lost in this past week. Today's topic is one dear to my heart: peer support.
Learning how to provide great support for your loved ones is like developing the foundational skill of reading, writing, and communicating—everything gets a little bit easier once you get good. It is a fundamental skill for fostering enriching relationships and unleashes us to provide tangible value when those around us inevitably approach us for help.
In this issue:
💫 - Tools and Tactics for Providing World-Class Peer Support 🗣 (1/2) by Vandan Jhaveri
🎥 - Illusions of Time by Vsauce [HIGHLY RECOMMEND]
📃 - Confessions of a Failed Self-Help Guru by Michelle Goodman (Narratively)
Putting this week's article together, I realized that it was way too long to fit into one newsletter. My solution: I've broken up the article into two sections that I will be releasing over the course of two weeks.
This week:
Building Your Peer Support Toolkit
Listen
Next week:
Affirm
Refer
The Importance of Taking Care of Yourself
Let's get started.
Building Your Peer Support Toolkit
"Watch how he opens up when he's talking about something he loves," the facilitator's voice echoed behind us, looking at me.
I could feel a dozen pair of eyes fixed on me. We were smack-dab in the middle of a role-playing exercise in which I had just finished a two-minute monologue about the tabla, a pair of classical Indian hand drums. Playing was one of my favourite ways to take study breaks in school. I had been asked to tell the new Peer Support Centre volunteer sitting in front of me what I enjoyed doing in my free time and it was the first thing I could think of under pressure.
"Look at his body language, look at his face," the facilitator chimed, referring to how I physically opened up while I spoke. "And oh, the arms! What else?"
I was certainly playing it up a bit, exaggerating the clues that I was hoping my students would pick up on. My chair was planted in the middle of the room, surrounded by eager students and across from the poor soul who volunteered to demonstrate his learnings from this morning's lecture on how to get students to feel comfortable.
The volunteer looked unsure. "And...he was also sitting back in his chair? And he was...smiling a lot more?"
"Yes, yes!" The facilitator winked at me.
When I was in my 4th year at Western University, I was employed to work on increasing foot traffic to the Peer Support Centre (PSC) and assist in training new volunteers for the Centre. The PSC, at its core, was a space carved out for students to swing by and just chat with another student. Of course, students would come by when they were stressed and overwhelmed and looking for a break, but often times, wandering students would come by and strike up a conversation with the scheduled volunteer during the 30 minutes between classes.
The PSC was a bridge between the student body and professional mental health support services on campus. Approaching an intake counsellor or an on-campus doctor is intimidating, so having a casual conversation with a fellow student who understands the tribulations of student life is a welcomed alternative to learn the options as a distressed student.
Because it was advertised broadly as a "safe space" where students could just go to talk, volunteers had to be trained on how to safely manage students that may come to the Centre in crisis. Given that I had been a volunteer for a few years, I had some good stories jam-packed with teachable moments.
The students seated in a circle around me were volunteers who would be starting in the Centre the following week. We were in a role-playing exercise where I was demonstrating how distracting a student and leveraging that mood change to talk about what’s bothering them could be a helpful tactic. It was our job to prepare them for this and the numerous other situations that could walk through the Centre doors on any given day.
Volunteers had straight-forward instructions in the PSC that I use almost daily to be a better friend, partner, and confidant:
Listen
Affirm
Refer
No advice, no shaming.
As we've all experienced, navigating the treacherous business of being human undoubtedly requires assistance. When we understand how to support those we care about, we give them permission to engage in the riskiness of authenticity—the most beautiful and rewarding part of companionship.
All of us have found ourselves in conversations where a loved one is expressing a frustration, and our reaction to that frustration makes them feel worse. Without intending to, we offer unwelcome advice, ridicule, and oversimplify their issues. Providing great peer support increases the likelihood that both parties leave the conversation feeling seen and understood. As a result, these tactics have strengthened all of my relationships, bar none.
Some tools may sound obvious, but again, their value cannot be understated. In this article, I'll take high-yield concepts from the Peer Support Centre in the Listen, Affirm, Refer format and extrapolate them with the help of my own intuition and experience.
Listen
1. Ask Probing Questions
We've all tried sharing something vulnerable with somebody and have been met with a blank stare. In some ways, that hurts more than someone who responds negatively by feeding our sense of shame, isolating us further. When the other person reacts blankly, we feel as though they aren't curious to map our emotional landscape like someone who loves us would. By asking questions, we show that we are interested in becoming connoisseurs of their internal pandemonium like we so desperately want others to be.
"Oh no, could you tell me more about what that felt like?"
"Where do you think that reaction of yours came from? What made you say that?"
The best follow-up questions are of course context-dependent and require us to show curiosity about the topic at hand. We must be aware of the implicit assumptions we are making in a given conversation and ask questions that clarify those assumptions in real-time. A friend is talking about losing a tennis match? Ask them how they trained for the game. A friend is expressing frustration about doing poorly on an exam? Ask them about what made the exam so difficult.
Asking follow up questions may be one of the most powerful tools in encouraging vulnerability and welcoming authenticity. We say "I'm not sure I have the answer, but I want to understand what all this feels like for you," whenever we ask thoughtful, specific, open-ended questions.
Questions show that we are not assuming that we fully and immediately understand their experience, which is likely to trigger a defensive reaction. Inherently, we all believe that our complex emotional experiences are unique and unfathomable to others, so to hear someone imply that they have quickly grasped our entire emotional experience without sharing experiences with us implies that we are made up of simplicity and immaturity that's insulting.
Merely expressing curiosity for others' internal climates can miraculously act as a salve in and of itself, but a word of caution: asking too many questions can make it feel like an interrogation, not a conversation. There's a balance that must be struck between asking thoughtful, specific questions and taking what is said at face-value without more to uncover. This is a difficult to get right since we all have different tolerance levels for questions in conversations. The better we know our friends, the better we can curtail our approach to our specific audience.
2. Vocally Affirmation Understanding
Sharing authentically is inherently challenging. Most of us are looking for any excuse to stop once we are persuaded to start. We need persistent, high-quality encouragement in the form of vocal affirmations.
However irrational, we are constantly on the verge of feeling as though we are somehow disgusting the other person with our pettiness, sensitivity, and fragmented thought patterns when we are being vulnerable. We must recognize that while generally, most of us need an active reason to feel as though we are being ridiculous, when we're sharing something vulnerable, we require an active reason to feel as though we are not being ridiculous. This is a core tenet for why it is such a challenge to be vulnerable in conversation—a conducive environment wasn't sufficiently created.
This includes "mmhm, mmhm." and "oh, what?" and "yeah, yeah, yeah." It may sound awkward when you try it alone right now, but in the context of a conversation, the other person will subconsciously begin leaving small gaps between sentences to receive these encouraging affirmations.
While vocal affirmations can be encouraging for our friend, we can also go overboard. We all know somebody in our lives that seems to make so many tiny vocalizations that it's distracting and disruptive. While we are listening, we should experiment with staying silent for extended periods of time too, to add gravitas to our cooes of encouragement.
The objective, we must not forget, is to remind the speaker that we are present, listening, and engaged. We want to ensure that we are creating as much space as possible for our loved one to say whatever they wish, however they wish with our gentle nudging.
These noises don't validate feelings, but rather demonstrate that we are engaged and processing what is being said through ongoing, subtle, non-disruptive reactions. Affirming requires a bit more originality and skill, and will be the first topic of next week's article.
Next week, I will be expanding on affirmation, how we should refer others to valuable resources, and the importance of taking care of ourselves as we engage in the valuable but strenuous work of supporting those for whom we care.
Please respond back to this article with your best experiences of being supported by your friends and what made it so helpful for you. I'm always fascinated by others' experiences with the murkiness of vulnerability and am always trying to find commonalities between what works and what doesn't.
Ears wide open,
Vandan🏡
@vandan_jhaveri
🎥 - A Master of Weaving Facts
Vsauce is one of my favourite YouTube creator. His unique, captivating style has inspired a generation of science and math educators on the platform. In this 30-minute monologue, Michael outlines a few ways our psychology distorts time in his quirky and massively engaging style. Learn about Michael's thought-provoking concept of chronosonder and other helpful ways of thinking about time.
📃 - Self-Help Needs Help
The internet is teeming with holier-than-thou types trying to sell you a framework, mentality, or 12-step program that will miraculously grant you success beyond your wildest dreams. Some big names have seen enormous success following a predictable template. Read about how Michelle Goodman attempts to amass an audience in the self-help space. She crashes and burns in the process—but rises from the ashes stronger than ever.
🎙 - Refreshingly Dedicated
Michael Kirban, founder of Vita Coco, never set out to build an internationally successful coconut water brand. It kind of just happened, after a spontaneous conversation with a few girls at a bar. I love unpredictable origin stories, and if you do too, you'll love this origin story of Vita Coco. Listen here for one of the most cutthroat business rivalries you've ever heard of.
🎙 - The Visualizer Himself
Jack Butcher is a man of few words on Twitter, so to hear him say many words on a podcast feels slightly out of character for him. Jack's casual, laid-back attitude makes it easy to underestimate his meteoric rise these past 6 months. His uncanny ability to communicate complex philosophical and psychological concepts through hyper-simple black and white graphics has attracted the attention of hundreds of thousands of people across all social media platforms. Listen here for how Jack thinks about exploring discomfort to find what will resonate with others.