Sorting out and appreciating process

‘Appreciating’ is giving someone recognition for something they have done or validation for being themselves. Most of us are motivated and nourished by appreciation - we may not need a lot of it but it is difficult to get by with none.

‘Sorting Out’ is clearing up an interchange which resulted in negative feelings. Negative feelings result in pain, inefficiency and dullness, and we don’t have to live with those.

Appreciating - Process

1. Clarify and make specific your information about what someone did, or what they are like.
2. Check your own feelings about this. If you congruently appreciate or value what they did or what they are like -- even though you may not appreciate or value other things they do and other characteristics:
3. Give them appreciation: ‘You did (are) so and so and I really like...’
4. Notice the effect.

Sorting Out - Process

Usually there is a specific interchange and one person or maybe both come away feeling bad. Sometimes neither knows, one knows, both know or even one or both don’t know at the time but the bad feelings arise later. The bad feelings can be: anger; resentment; feeling put down, worthless, ignored, isolated, vengeful, unappreciated and anxious. The consequences are bad gossip, power struggles, ganging up, leaving, totally inefficient, bad atmosphere, students wondering what’s wrong or just not feeling good about the College.

What To Do

1. Go over the issue to be clear, factually, what happened. It may be useful to try a different perceptual position (my own, the other person’s, an observer’s point of view), like how did the other person experience me and what would someone else, with no axe to grind, have observed.
2. Assume good will. Remember the benefits that come from good co-operation and remember the relief and good feeling that you experienced last time you ‘got through something with someone’. Commit yourself to come from a place of good will and assume you can both win.
3. Ask the other person if they are willing to hear something/discuss what happened - if not now, when?
4. Give your information and separate your information into ‘video talk’ (what you think the video recorder would have seen or heard) and how you felt or what you ended up thinking. Don’t read minds, that is, don’t refer to the other person’s intentions, what was behind it for them, their character traits, etc. And don’t blame them, e.g. ‘You made me feel bad”.
5. Ask for any change you want and be as specific (about different behavior) as you can. Allow the other person to respond however they like.
6. If you don’t get what you hoped for, stay neutral and ask what you might learn from this attempt.

GUIDELINES FOR MEDIATING A SORTING OUT PROCESS

Sometimes two people can use the sorting out process themselves without mediation by a third party. This particularly works well once people have some experience of previous use of the process.

However, at first it can help to involve a third party as mediator.

The mediator needs to feel confident that there is plenty of good will on all sides and that everyone can achieve a satisfactory resolution, and probably all learn something useful in the process, and the mediator should state this. The mediator should then begin by proposing just a couple of simple ground rules for both parties – no blaming of the other person, and avoiding “reading minds” (i.e. telling the other person what they thought or felt).

Then the mediator asks each person in turn to first describe the situations that occurred as they would seem to someone watching a video of them, and then separately to describe how they were feeling / what they were thinking. Once both people have done this, either or both of them can be invited to ask for any specific change of behaviour that they want to ask for (allowing the other person to respond as they like).

Based on the process devised by John Hicks, Joint Principal of the College of Integrated Medicine in Reading, and generously shared by him with the NCA.