training for mental health advocates
I recently designed a training course for a customer's network of 'mental health advocates'. I loved their idea: because the pandemic was impacting employee wellbeing and remote work was withdrawing part of the peer support people would normally access in an office setting, they trained a number of employees to be equipped to identify and tackle issues related to mental wellbeing.
The customer required a substantial part of the course to address details about some of the most common mental health issues in our societies. In a way, I thought it was beneficial for learners to know which 'warning signs' to watch out for. I did, however, see the risk of a course with too much information around potential disorders: you are a lot more likely to be 'diagnosing' people around you when you have been overwhelmed with information of this sort (my very own first-hand experience as a Psychology college student).
What DOES IT TAKE TO HELP OTHERS?
So—what is it really that I would want a support network to be able to do in order to support others? Knowing when to raise a red flag for support is key, but this could potentially be achieved without reviewing all the diagnostic criteria for every mental disorder. Besides, most of these won't surface or become evident to anyone unless there is someone around helping people let the steam out. If it were up to me, I'd much rather have a network of good listeners than a group of experts in anxiety and depression.
But what is good listening? I found a piece on HBR which I think covers most relevant aspects when it comes to describing the behaviour. Still, I wanted to address the issue from a learning perspective: how would you go about creating a training intervention that helps people develop their listening skills? And for that matter: what is it exactly that you would want learners to do in the training intervention to enhance their skill?
I decided to take a stab at it by building an eLearning prototype. I structured my learning design around the following assumption:
Good listeners focus on understanding more about what the person is experiencing. They refrain from judging or jumping to conclusions; all their effort goes to understanding by listening, asking, and validating. To put it simply: good listeners are interested and show it.
active listening: a game
There were some learning considerations I factored in when designing this learning intervention/game.
We often intend to convey a sense of 'choice of paths' by giving learners three options to choose from. These options are often: optimal, recoverable, and non-recoverable. I like the concept overall, but my problem is that reality is often way more complex than 'just the three choices'. Most often, you need to decide considering a larger number of factors, and consequences might be dependent on various answers. I thought this example worked well in that sense: a common argument against offering more than three choices is that creating a UI to support it might be complex or involve a learning curve in usage; but everybody is familiar with the options you've got when chatting to someone: remain silent, nod, or say something (the number of options is increased by offering different possible answers). We also know that, unless we are in front of a fluent person, we are unlikely to get away with just nodding all the time: the person might be offended or assume we are not interested. I used hidden variables to count the number of times the user nodded or interrupted the other person (even if the interruptions were theoretically correct answers) to add more possible 'sources of failure'. For example: if you keep interrupting the other person with 'correct' statements, you will receive a 'negative' (but recoverable) feedback. The 'three-option' approach has another inconvenient: at times, all answers might be correct or incorrect. This is another reason to add more variables to make matters more realistic, as long as the user is able to handle the UI.
I decided not to state the learning objective upfront: the game is designed to encourage understanding the other person. I like courses that encourage self-reflection at the end, making the learner reflect on how they have done things and giving them a chance to try again. Which is why I added a 'debrief' section at the very end.
You can review and play the course/game in the link below.
other considerations
One might argue: is active listening always the best choice? Should I stop and listen to people who will never stop talking?
No—at least in my opinion. Not everyone has a problem expressing their feelings: some are lucky enough to be very fluid in their emotional expression. When you run into such a person on the street and you are in a wild rush, the best choice might be to apply assertiveness. Active listening is to be used with people you suspect have something they'd like to share but might have trouble finding the right place.
Real listening isn't a trade-off: you shouldn't be thinking of what you might be able to get in return from the other person, or serve your personal interest in any other manner. In my view, good listening should be given away for the sheer pleasure of helping someone else. Which is probably the best joy I've known of yet.
If you have thoughts on how active listening could be learned more effectively, I'd be delighted to hear from you.
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