RE: Gossip vs. venting | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Rob Sandelin (floriferousmsn.com) | |
Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2002 13:33:01 -0700 (MST) |
In my experience with community, gossip AND venting are normal, common occurrences in communities of all kinds. Since people come to community, and especially cohousing, with a wide variety of communication skills and experiences and life and cultural histories, trying to manage gossip and venting is a large task that requires some thought and usually considerable energy. It is not at all uncommon for cohousing groups to not have energy in dealing with the artifacts of gossip and venting, and thus people just live with these annoyances and uncomfortable feelings. Many groups have no format at all to bring up stuff which is bugging people. Without any group format, these things don't go away, they just don't get out to the group except perhaps as "explosions". One very simple and highly effective way to do this is to set up an annual meeting where you review your community. My advice is to spend 75% of this meeting patting yourself on the back for the miracles you have created. Give awards, recognitions, prizes, adulations, etc. Then spend some time looking at things people would like to improve in the coming year. If you Facilitate this well you can get very constructive venting without damaging the group morale at all. Another simple structure that I have used in workshops with communities and other organizations is what I call a comfort cluster. I have participants spend time by themselves thinking over what are the events, who are the people, what are the actions, which give them some level of discomfort. I have them rate discomfort levels by an arbitrary scale of 1-3. I also have them write these discomforts down privately with their rankings, from most to least. This then becomes fodder for small group sharing activities. In the large group, participants list their high discomforts on individual cards they hand in to me. I "filter" these as appropriate and use them as small group discussion topics with a set of questions built into the process so people focus on certain aspects, such as what values (beliefs) might be underneath the discomfort, is there a way to turn the discomfort into a neutral or even comfortable place, etc. The primary thing I do in filtering the cards is removing names. Depending on the nature of the work I am hired to do, I might feedback to individuals privately things that came up about them, although usually I use other formats for this. You can do this fairly quickly as an agenda item for a meeting, and get a lot of intense but usually quite cathartic conversations happening in only 30 minutes time. Rob Sandelin Sky Valley Environments <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm> Field skills training for student naturalists Floriferous [at] msn.com -----Original Message----- From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org [mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of Sharon Villines Sent: Wednesday, December 25, 2002 11:36 AM To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org Subject: Re: [C-L]_Gossip vs. venting On 12/25/2002 12:54 PM, "Jayne Kulikauskas" <cml [at] mmalt.guild.org> wrote: > One issue that has come up is determining when > and how it is helpful for people to discuss negative feelings. People do > not always immediately want to talk to a person they are upset with. > Sometimes they want a sounding board or a second opinion on the validity of > their complaint. Sometimes they just want to vent. Sometimes they just > don't want to confront even though they should. Talking to someone else about the problem, in my experience, is not only normal and natural but helpful. It is not always helpful to talk to the person with whom one had a conflict and is often impossible. More often than not if you could talk to the person, there wouldn't have been a conflict in the first place. Expecting the upset person to talk to the person directly is rarely a good idea. "If they coulda, they woulda." > We have seen cases in which the person being complained to has felt the > problem required action and proceeded to tell others. This is the problem. First actions by anyone should be to clarify the situation, this of necessity means including all the parties. I can't count the number of times someone has been deeply and audaciously hurt by something I never did or even intended to do. Since many people are intimidated by me (I am told) they do not approach me when they feel offended, ignored, or excluded. Since one of my major faults is believing what people say, this is a deadly combination. They say "I hate parties with no dancing, don¹t invite me" so I don't. Then they go ballistic. Since they won't call and say "Why didn't you invite me when you invited all my friends" it helps a lot that a third party does. But it does not help if instead the third party starts a campaign to defend the "injured" party without clarifying what happened. Sharon -- Sharon Villines Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC Where we are having a rare white Christmas, the nice kind where all the roads are melting while everything else is white. My son, however lives in Upstate New York where they are getting 18-26 inches. _______________________________________________ Cohousing-L mailing list Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org Unsubscribe and other info: http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L --- Incoming mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.332 / Virus Database: 186 - Release Date: 3/6/02 --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). 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- Re: Unsupervised Kids in the commonhouse, (continued)
- Re: Unsupervised Kids in the commonhouse Kate Nichols, December 11 2002
- Gossip vs. venting Jayne Kulikauskas, December 25 2002
- Re: Gossip vs. venting Sharon Villines, December 25 2002
- Re: Gossip vs. venting Jayne Kulikauskas, December 26 2002
- RE: Gossip vs. venting Rob Sandelin, December 26 2002
- Re: Gossip vs. venting Kay Argyle, December 30 2002
- Re: Gossip vs. venting Tree Bressen, December 30 2002
- Re: Gossip vs. venting Sharon Villines, December 31 2002
- Re: Gossip vs. venting S. Kashdan, January 1 2003
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