Think Again Day 102

تکمیل این اپیزود

اگر مهمان یا اسپانسری جا افتاده، از فهرست موجود انتخاب کن یا نام تازه‌ای پیشنهاد بده. پیشنهادها بعد از بررسی مدیر عمومی می‌شوند.

متن منتشرشده توسط پادکستر

توضیحات اپیزود

When Betty finally made contact with the rebels after months of effort, they were insulted at the prospect of negotiating with a woman. Yet Betty negotiated her way into getting permission to meet Kony himself. Soon he was referring to her as Mummy, and he even agreed to leave the jungle to start peace talks. Although the peace effort didn’t succeed, opening Kony’s mind to conversation was a remarkable accomplishment in itself.* For her efforts to end the violence, Betty was named Uganda’s Woman of the Year. When I spoke to her recently, I asked how she had succeeded in getting through to Kony and his people. The key, she explained, was not persuading or even coaxing, but listening. Listening well is more than a matter of talking less. It’s a set of skills in asking and responding. It starts with showing more interest in other people’s interests rather than trying to judge their status or prove our own. We can all get better at asking “truly curious questions that don’t have the hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, convincing or correcting,” journalist Kate Murphy writes, and helping to “facilitate the clear expression of another person’s thoughts.”* When we’re trying to get people to change, that can be a difficult task. Even if we have the best intentions, we can easily slip into the mode of a preacher perched on a pulpit, a prosecutor making a closing argument, or a politician giving a stump speech. We’re all vulnerable to the “righting reflex,” as Miller and Rollnick describe it —the desire to fix problems and offer answers. A skilled motivational interviewer resists the righting reflex—although people want a doctor to fix their broken bones, when it comes to the problems in their heads, they often want sympathy rather than solutions. That’s what Betty Bigombe set out to provide in Uganda. She started traveling through rural areas to visit camps for internally displaced people. She figured some might have relatives in Joseph Kony’s army and might know something of his whereabouts. Although she hadn’t been trained in motivational interviewing, she intuitively understood the philosophy. At each camp, she announced to people that she wasn’t there to lecture them, but to listen to them. Her curiosity and confident humility caught the Ugandans by surprise. Other peacemakers had come in ordering them to stop fighting. They had preached about their own plans for conflict resolution and prosecuted the past efforts that failed. Now Betty, a politician by profession, wasn’t telling them what to do. She just sat patiently for hours in front of a bonfire, taking notes and chiming in from time to time to ask questions. “If you want to call me names, feel free to do so,” she said. “If you want me to leave, I will.” To demonstrate her commitment to peace, Betty stayed in the camps even though they lacked sufficient food and proper sanitation. She invited people to air their grievances and suggest remedial measures to be taken. They told her that it was rare and refreshing for an outsider to give them the opportunity to share their views. She empowered them to generate their own solutions, which gave them a sense of ownership. They ended up calling her Megu, which translates literally to “mother” and is also a term of endearment for elders. Bestowing this honorific was particularly striking since Betty was representing the government—which was seen as the oppressor in many of the camps. It wasn’t long before people were offering to introduce her to coordinators and commanders in Joseph Kony’s guerrilla army. As Betty muses, “Even the devil appreciates being listened to.”

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