In this conversation with students, Ken McLeod explains how to be helpful in conversations with others who practice. He’s very clear: don’t offer advice, interpretations, insights, or theories. Forget about telling someone else what you think is really going on with them. Instead, pay attention to your own experience and from there, ask questions that help others understand their own experience more clearly and completely.
This is wonderful advice for conversations of all kinds. How easily I forget this. All too often my conversations with friends or family are mired by my own projections—especially the desire to be perceived as wise or insightful. This is a path right into the blind alley of naming patterns, offering frameworks, or saying what I think the other person needs to hear. Such efforts may sound thoughtful, but they can move the conversation away from the one thing that might actually help: fuller contact with their own experience.
From Interacting Around Practice
Ken: Now, the reason I’m going into this in such detail, Susan, [laughs] is that, in thinking about things this way, there is the key to how you interact with other people when you’re talking about practice. When you’re interacting with other people, you don’t give them theories. You don’t tell them what you think is happening to them or in them or around them, or whatever. Your role is to help them understand their experience, period. Okay? Is to help them understand their experience.
Now, when they understand their experience—and you all know this yourselves—when you understand your experience clearly, do you know what to do?
Student: Yes.
Ken: And this is one of the points about understanding. One can formulate problems in different ways, but often a formulation of a problem doesn’t give you any information about how to resolve it. And in that case, I feel that the formulation of the problem is incomplete because it doesn’t point to anything.
And some time ago I was coaching, or doing a workshop with the legal department of a corporation. And, I’d worked with these people a few times before, and so they knew me and that was fine, and I’d interviewed everybody, and they all got along very well, and they were good in their communications. And the day of the workshop was approaching, and I was beginning to panic. What do I do? Because one of the areas I work on is communications, but they didn’t have any communications problems, nothing major. And being lawyers, they knew all about conflict already, so there’s nothing to do there. "What’s this workshop going to be about?" And I was building up to a fairly decent level of panic. And I said, “There’s something I’m missing here.” And I went through my notes and in my head all of the interviews, and then I realized that everybody had said one thing over and over again: “We have too much work and not enough time.” Oh, okay, that’s what we talk about. Now, too much work and not enough time. That’s a statement of a problem, right?
Well, those of you who have worked in a corporate environment, what can you do about the work? It just keeps coming, doesn’t it? Yeah. Okay. So nothing to be done there. What can you do about time? Anybody figured out how to get more than 24 hours in a day? No. More than seven days in a week? No. Can’t do anything about that. So this is the formulation of a problem that doesn’t point anywhere. And that’s where I started the workshop, divided them up into groups and said, “Your first challenge is to come up with three formulations of this problem that doesn’t use the word work or time.” We got three very good ones, and one of them which we could work with variously, was, “We have difficulty in establishing priorities.” And that just opened up. And so we had a great day in which we discussed how to establish priorities, what were the priorities, and led to very significant reorganization of some of the workflows and things like that.
This is what I mean about a complete formulation of the problem. That’s when you understand the problem. And when you really understand the problem, then you have a direction for a solution. This is what’s contained in the four noble truths. There is the problem, which is suffering. And then you have the genesis of the problem. And you see we’re moving to a more complete understanding right at this point, which is emotional reaction, okay? And the deepest level of emotional reaction—which is that blanking out when an experience arises—that’s ignorance, not knowing. So what’s the solution? Hmm? Oh, okay. I’ll give you the Buddhist term for the solution, but then you’ve gotta translate this into English. Nirvana! That’s a solution. [Laughs] Now, you translate it. What’s the solution?
Student: No self.
Ken: [Laughs] No.
Student: Knowing?
Ken: Knowing! Exactly. Knowing your experience completely. That’s it. So, what is the intention when you interact with each other about your practice?
Student: Each one know their own practice or know it.
Ken: Well, when you’re interacting with a person, your role is to help them know their experience completely. Yes, Janneke? [Laughs]
Janneke: And how does one accomplish that? In terms of the way you interact in terms of the questions—
Ken: Yeah, yeah. I was gonna get there [laughs], because that’s the fourth noble truth, isn’t it?
Janneke: What?
Ken: The way, exactly. It pays to learn this stuff, you know, it’s really useful [laughs]. How do you do it? Now, the reason I’m making such a big deal about the setup, is that if you have this clearly in your mind to start with, you’re going to interact with each other much more productively