Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Mascara, and in today's episode, I'm going to talk about a powerful listening strategy to use when somebody is sharing good news with you.

More to come on that in a moment first let's settle in

together with the sound of the bells so a lot of the time when we think of effective communication and learning communication

strategies, especially in relationship, I think our mind tends to go toward thinking about how do we mitigate arguments or discomfort

or navigate the complexity of two humans or more than two humans coming together in a group,

trying to just make sense of their own feelings, desires, and needs.

And so there's often an emphasis on taking care of what can go wrong.

And less emphasis on how do we work with what can go right?

And when somebody is sharing something positive, how do we navigate that?

And some of the psychological research shows that there are four ways to respond to

someone when they're sharing good news to you, but only one of those ways is correct. That is,

only one of those ways leads to greater well-being for both of you and enhances the experience. So let's imagine a scenario.

Someone is telling you good news. They just, they got a new job. There are four ways you could

respond. Passive destructive, passive destructive, active destructive, and active active constructive i'm going to walk you through

what four of those would sound like let's start with passive destructive someone tells you they got a new

job and you go huh yeah okay well about time i mean i got a got my job a few months ago, and you go into your own story.

So in this, in passive destructive, you turn the focus inward to yourself.

You're kind of ignoring the speaker.

It's low energy.

Passive constructive would be, oh, that's cool, good for you.

Not much energy, a bit of a delayed response.

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