Open Ended Questions

About This Episode Welcome to today’s communication solution podcast. We love talking about motivational interviewing, and about improving outcomes for individuals, organizations, and the communities that they serve. We have an interesting topic to talk about today: Open Ended Questions and the quality and complexity of what’s being talked about. About This Episode Open ended questions vs close ended questions How do you ask open-ended questions? Reflective listening and empathy Motivations and the quality of curiosity Learning curves Mindset Perspectives Connections and values Real life examples of differences in questions Skill building And so much more! To Watch Our Video Podcast – Join MI PLUS Join MI PLUS+ Transcript of Show – View Below The Communication Solution – Open Ended Question Tammy: Hello, and welcome to the communication solution podcast today. We’ve got Casey Jackson on the line, John Gilbert, and I’m Tammy here at IFIOC. We love to talk communication. We love to talk motivational interviewing, and we love talking about improving outcomes for individuals, organizations, and the communities that they serve. Welcome to the conversation. John: All right. Welcome back everyone. We have interesting topic to talk about today. At least for me, maybe not for everyone, but we’ll see how it goes. I know that Tammy, you had particularly wanted to talk about this topic and subject because you were thinking of a situation that just starting at the basics we can talk about. But then I was like, well, we can go deep into this with multiple layers. So, I’m looking to hopefully do that with you Casey and Daniel. Today and just see how far we can get in a shorter podcast we have today. So, Tammy, what was the original kind of thinking you had for this topic? What is it, you were thinking? Tammy: The original topic was open ended questions, 101. And the reason why is because I think some people get stuck into. A lack of curiosity sometimes because we don’t really know what to talk about. And then there’s a difference between open ended questions versus close ended questions. You closed ended questions are. Yes, no, you expect a certain specific answer. Open questions, allow for the person to openly share their thoughts and ideas. Opinions could go so many different ways. The more that we can create open ended questions, the more we can hear people’s thoughts, ideas, beliefs, all that type of stuff. So that’s kind of where my mind was at when I was like, let’s do open ended questions. Casey: Well, what’s so funny to me is. I feel myself having a natural bias and a natural writing reflex this topic which I shouldn’t it’s so weird. And I think because so many people I’ve heard so much more lately that people are talking about, well, yeah, I went to a motivational interviewing training and it’s like, how you ask open ended questions? It’s like, oh my gosh, we’re drifting so far away from empathy and accurate, reflective listening, but. I know it’s my bias because I know I over correct on leaning so heavy into teaching people. What is high, accurate empathy? And the reality is that smart, strategic, evocative eliciting open ended questions are critical. Skill set to master in motivational interviewing. And I know I overcorrect towards teaching reflective listen. And so, so I’m getting over my bias and listening to that, cause it’s just like, oh, I don’t want people to think that it’s open-ended questions, you can’t do motivational without really smart, strategic open-ended questions. Tammy: Yes. It’s part of the equation. And I think that’s a really good point, Casey, because reflective listening is critical to motivational interviewing, but there are those times where you need to elicit and draw out from people. Their thoughts, ideas or beliefs too. Casey: Well, it, just, when you say that, I even think of the MICA, you know, the motivation incompetency assessment. And I think when we’re writing a thing about evoking in the intentions, we, measure open ended questions. We measure, evoking and, you know, I always share this and if you’ve heard other podcasts, me talking about evocation, but it just is so profound about how important open-ended questions. when I share that example of, in the cloudy cup, there’s pearls in a cloudy cup, we tend to want to throw our pearls of wisdom when people are confused when their brains are overwhelmed and again, in. The era of COVID people are under profound stress. And when they’re under profound stress, you know, they’ve got lots of pearls of wisdom. They get covered up by the trauma and stress response. And so, we can reflect that. But part of moving people from that trauma response up into their executive functioning is how do we draw out their thoughts and their ideas? Because just reflecting in circles or reflecting what’s going on inside. Doesn’t necessarily open the pathway to get them up into their executive function in the prefrontal cortex. It is the quality of a great open-ended question that, has that curiosity that evokes or elicits their thoughts and their ideas. And you see their brain work through the cloudiness to get to those pearls of wisdom inside of themselves. So, it just, even as we’re starting this topic, it’s like it’s making my brain kind of go back around with that. What we’re really talking about with, with open ended question. John: Well, and I’d like to speak to the learning curve here, just working with so many different people and my own learning curve and still working on empathy myself, and that there’s a certain degree of. Who are we interacting with and where are they at with their degree of expression of empathy? Because there seems to be this crossover of like, if you can go deep, complex, rich reflections that are very provoking of the person to speak more. There’s something there that when you can guide that conversation, standing shoulder John: to shoulder, that someone like yourself seemingly Casey, that’s not just you. It’s about the skill I realize, but. Has this tendency, this ability to go there in ways that are worth training to, and it’s just hard to go there for various people. And so, in the learning curve of this, how do we help people transition from something that you weren’t necessarily saying at the beginning of this Tammy, but that we talked about offline before, which is out of that, fix it mode into a curious mode and just that alone is a shift. Empathy is a shift at a fix it mode, but even myself as Casey, you’re being transparent about your writing reflex. I’m having the writing reflex of what like Terry Moyers and some of these other researchers have found in recent history, which is that open verse, closing into questions matters significantly less than the quality of your curiosity. It’s less about. Do you think this, or what do you think about this? Versus I know that the quality of my curiosity is I’m asking them what they make of this situation to engage them, to get oriented to their reality, to engage and be engaged with them. I know that it doesn’t have a lot of direction to it. But I know that right now, this is going to be engaging for them. And then I can come in with the demonstration of I get you versus I don’t get you, which is the thing we’re kind of alluding to here, Casey, that you trained me in is questions, communicate. I don’t quite understand. And the person then has to, and microseconds go, what do I want to share with this authority figure usually? And then instead the empathy gets at that information maybe in a different angle. But if you are going to ask a question of, I don’t understand, I don’t get you versus demonstrating. You understand? What are you trying to understand? Are you trying to understand a sense of their reality more generally, which is a part of empathy, but it’s more demonstrating is what we focus on, but it’s seeking to understand, are you just trying to understand their reality more general? Are you trying to gather information, because that’s a part of your job and assess their situation. That’s a different curiosity. Are you focused on the problem and trying to problem solve with them? There’s a place for that. And motivational Interviewing we tend to jump to that pretty quick with the premature planning trap. but that’s different asking is different than telling. At least we got that down. That’s a different quality of curiosity. And then even different than that, that seems to come later for people. But the whole term of motivational Interviewing means to interview someone about their motivations and the quality of curiosity, to just be curious. Why do you do what you do? Or why would you even want to change to see something different? Or what does it matter if things change and why does that matter? And just the curiosity of motivation is one of those key things in motivational Interviewing that can get lost in the fray of all these acronyms and all these other things. John: And it’s so much to why I’m grateful to Casey talking about the physics of this, the mindset and the intentionality of this versus the technique components of it. Because if I’m not aware of where I am putting my curiosity. I’m not necessarily being as mindful as I could be to guide this conversation. And I am getting paid most of the time in the helper role to guide this conversation. So, it’s that quality of curiosity, spectrum that I was lit up to talk about with all this. And I have a lot of different examples we could get through, but I’m just wondering if that resonates or any thoughts that any of you have on any of that? Casey:...