Hello and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're

getting a little better at life. I'm your host Cory Muscarra 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 this

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 constructive, active destructive, and active

constructive. I'm gonna 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, I got my job a few

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