Lent a listening ear
Peer support is critical to helping people deal with stress and anxiety. Ohio State's Buckeye Peer Access Line has tips on how you can help your friends in need. Show Know someone dealing with stress or anxiety right now? There may be a simple way to help them: Listen. Not sure how to do that exactly? Ask a PAL. Ohio State students who volunteer for theBuckeye Peer Access Line (PAL), a non-emergency talk line withinStudent Lifes Student Wellness Center,learn skills that include active listening and motivational interviewing. These skills empower people struggling with everyday stresses and anxieties to find their motivation and capacity to make pivotal changes in their lives. Its all about helping the person to process what theyre feeling and feel confident in their decision moving forward, saidIvory Levert, the PAL program manager and training coordinator. Levert shared key points of PAL training that anyone canuse to help those around them. 1.Internal reflection is critical.Think about your own life experiences and interactions how you seek help or dont seek help and where that comes from. It can help you be more empathetic when a friend has a hard time expressing their feelings. 2.Active listening goes hand-in-hand with motivational interviewing.This is listening to understand rather than listening to respond. Take time to hear what the person is talking about. Pay attention to their tone and the type of language theyre using. Notice if they repeat certain things, and take note of what theyre not saying as well. 3.Motivational interviewing is a collaborative conversation.Youre strengthening a persons own motivation and commitment to change. To help them process their feelings and summarize their thoughts, use open-ended questions. One tool to try: DARN CATS. DARN stands for Desire, Ability, Reason and Need.
This helps your friend present the challenge they are facing and go through that internal reflection needed before they can take steps toward change. The next part, CATS, is about making a plan for action.
4.And for our final acronym, lets look at OARS.OARS stands for Open-ended questions; Affirmations; Reflections; and Summaries. After learning more about their desires, ability (and) reasons, we walk them through what they will need to do to make this commitment, some real action steps, and processing those steps together, Levert explained.
Sometimes just being that listening ear is all a person needs to get through the hard day. You can be that person! |