One particular story came into my mind when I started to think about ut conversation where I applied most of my counseling skills. In that period of time, I even did not know that those kinds of skills may be described as counseling skills. The case was associated with my friend’s traumatic experience we talk much time about the issue but he insist to normal conversation. Thus, his talk on the phone or online is unreal he stated many times previously that bots called to people. The situation had the place almost one decade ago. No matter how far away in the time it was. I would like to describe how I adopt counseling skills and suit these into the interactive process. When we finally met. We sit and start to plan how our nights should look like. First I used active listening to understand that drinking alcohol is not the best option thus, my friend start to suffer from severe alcohol addiction. He did not mention it when we spoke on the phone. But he did when we finally took a place on a comfortable couch. Perversely I started to paraphrase his words. It did not miss it. He said:
-Marcin do not feed me with this psychological ^&%$&*(^$
I hang my voice on an empty peg of silence and let it grow.
And we both start to laugh. This conversation just begins but for those familiar with NLP paraphrasing becomes just an appetizer to stronger canons. Those were anchors patterns used to induce a desirable state of mind in seconds. Old friends play manipulation games in a fair match where everyone is trained enough to not get unfair advantages.
-Fair enough!
I said with mischievous satisfaction.
When he finally convince that he attend 12 step program I cheerleading him:
-Mate is the best choice ever!
Active listening and paraphrasing his own word help me to congruent good mood even we decided to not have alcohol tonight.
We start to reflect and validate feelings both of us gave each other a nice dose of empathy. We start to synchronize as metronomes do. Synergy and cooperative spirit start to arise overcoming previous competitiveness’ it leads us to the idea of conducting the examination. We decide to examine how many old friends we can download on our couch tonight.
Together we start to type telephone numbers from an old diary. We were surprised that some of those landline numbers actually exist. After the first three, we finally reach our old friend. The previously prepared tactic to convince old friends to come was quite simple we ask three closed questions in a row. Those questions had one good answer and this answer was yes. Why do we use the closed question to convince others? Quite simple if you agree with something that was in the past and become fact soften ability to say no to another question in a row. So we adopt closed questions as a tool to convince others to join us. This mechanism perfectly works when we ask about small favours in the beginning and finally we ask somebody to do for asking something huge. If we will ask about a big issue first the proposition probably will be rejected. In this case, I and my friend adopted one of social engineering techniques to persuade others.
This short story rererelease pectrum of techniques and methods implemented in in the interactive process. However it is relfection. We had a cleaa r goal to spend the interesting evening playing in old computer games. The night finished with a few old friends sitisittingether on the couch and chatting till morning came.
