When I was six I won a game of ‘guess how many sweets are in the jar’ at my dad’s office party, by cheating. Somewhat pathetically, rather than guess my own number, I copied the number that before mine on the sheet. Only I copied it down wrong. I’ve always felt slightly guilty about that incident, but I’ve managed to turn that sort of guessing into a job. Very often, in the course of a session, I will make a stab at guessing what my client is feeling. I don’t [...]
U is for unpick. Yes, on one level following on from the Sewing Bee theme, it's about the ready-and-willingness to unpick a seam, a hem, a wonky line of top stitching, important if you want to make anything of quality. Unpicking in life, though, is what I’m thinking about. The willingness to go back to a situation, consider the motivations, the intentions; what did you feel, what needs did you have, met and unmet; what went on for the other person? The willingness, sometimes, to return to the person affected and say, when you [...]
N is for needs, and in particular Maslow’s hierarchy of them. Depicted as a pyramid, broadly it’s based on the idea that every human being must have physical needs, such as warmth, food and shelter satisfied before you can start to worry about whether you’re in the right career. It’s a useful starting point for a getting ourselves to think and talk in the language of universal human needs rather than how we’d like everyone else to behave differently. The awareness of our and others’ needs is the starting point [...]
