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Many years ago, while working with veterans who were experiencing post Traumatic stress disorder and alcohol dependence, I noticed something that confused me. The more determined I became to help, the less effective I often seemed to be. Whenever I started pushing too hard towards solutions, I would encounter resistance. Sometimes subtle resistance, sometimes four letter word resistance. Over time I realised that the problem wasn't a lack of motivation on their part. The problem was that I was moving towards fixing before I had fully understood. And that insight eventually changed the way I thought about Listening Therapy and Compassion Most of us have experienced the other side of this. We tell someone about a problem and before we've even finished explaining it, they're already offering advice. They tell us what we should do, what worked for them, what their neighbour did, or what they read somewhere online. Usually it's well intentioned, usually it comes from a genuine care. Yet somehow we can walk away from those conversations feeling less understood rather than more this episode is about listening without fixing. It's the first of the seven listening skills I discussed in in my previous video, and it's an important one. Not because advice is always bad and not because solutions are never useful, but because our urge to fix often gets in the way of understanding. And understanding is usually where compassionate listening begins. The interesting thing is that the urge to fix is often compassionate in intention. We see somebody struggling and we want to help. We don't like seeing people we care about in pain. We want things to get better. We want to relieve suffering. In many ways, the impulse itself is a caring impulse. The trouble is that suffering doesn't just affect the person who's experiencing it, it affects the people around them too. When someone we care about is distressed, confused, overwhelmed or hurting, something often gets activated in us. We can feel concern, sadness, uncertainty, helplessness, frustration, or anxiety. We don't simply witness suffering, we experience something ourselves. From a compassion focused therapy perspective, we might say that our threat system has become activated. Someone we care about is struggling and our brain immediately starts searching for solutions. We want certainty, we want. We want movement. We want the discomfort to go away. Sometimes that discomfort belongs to the other person. Sometimes part of it belongs to us. In other words, the urge to fix may sometimes be less about the other person's suffering and more about our discomfort in the face of their suffering. Compassion asks something slightly different. Compassion is not simply the desire to relieve suffering. Compassion is also the willingness to understand suffering before deciding what to do about asks us to stay present with another person's experience rather than rushing too quickly towards solutions. That sounds straightforward, but it can be surprisingly difficult. One of the problems with unsolicited advice is that it often arrives before understanding. Imagine I tell you that I'm struggling to exercise regularly. You immediately suggest that I join a gym. Now, that might be perfectly sensible advice. The problem is that you've assumed you know what the issue is before you've really understood it. What if the problem isn't access to a gym? What if it's exhaustion? What if it's grief? What if it's shame? What if every attempt to exercise reminds me of previous failures? What if I already know exactly what I should do, but can't seem to do it? Solutions only make sense once we understand the problem. And understanding takes listening. Listening can be powerful because talking helps people think. Have you ever started explaining something to a friend and halfway through realised what the issue actually was? Nobody gave you advice, nobody solved the problem, yet somehow you walked away with a greater clarity than when you started. One explanation comes from social psychologist Darrell Bem and his Self Perception Theory. The basic idea is that we often learn about our own attitudes and beliefs by observing ourselves. Sometimes we don't fully know what we think until we hear ourselves saying it. Speaking helps us organise our thoughts, clarify our feelings and make sense of our experience. When we jump in too quickly with advice, we can accidentally interrupt that process. We can move the conversation away from exploration and towards solutions. We shift the focus from helping people understand themselves to helping them implement our understanding of them. In doing so, we sometimes miss the very thing that would have been most helpful. There's another fascinating piece of psychology that helps explain why fixing can backfire. Back in the 1960s, psychologist Jack Brehm developed what he called psychological reactance theory. The idea is that human beings value freedom and autonomy. When we feel that someone is trying to pressure, control or direct us, part of us often pushes back. You can probably see this in children and teenagers, but adults do it too. Tell someone they absolutely must do something and they often become less inclined to do it. It doesn't necessarily matter whether the advice is good or bad. The experience of being pushed can activate the desire to resist. We want to feel that our choices belong to us. Many years later, psychologists studying behaviour change noticed something very similar. The harder they argued for change, the more people argued against it. And the more people argued against change, the less likely they were to go away and make it. This insight became one of the motivations for motivational interviewing, an approach that has had profound influence on my own work. Rather than persuading people to change, motivational interviewing seeks to help People discover and articulate their own reasons for change. Think about what happens when someone tells you that you really should do something. You really should exercise more, you really should leave that job, you really should stop worrying so much. Almost immediately, your mind starts generating reasons why that won't work. You explain your circumstances. You describe the obstacles. You defend your position. You tell the story of why things aren't that simple. The more you hear yourself making those arguments, the more convincing they become. The conversation that was intended to motivate change can end up strengthening the reasons for staying exactly the same. We often assume that people change because they've heard good arguments. In reality, people are frequently more persuaded by their own arguments than by ours. This brings us to a third idea that I find particularly helpful. Self determination theory. Developed by psychologists Edward Deitchey and Richard Ryan, self determination theory suggests that human beings are more motivated when they experience a sense of autonomy. We like feeling that our actions are chosen rather than imposed. We want to be the authors of our own lives. When people arrive at a conclusion themselves, they're often much more committed to it. When they identify their own reasons for change, their own values, their own goals, and their own motivations for follow through becomes more likely. Ownership matters. Autonomy matters. People are generally far more committed to conclusions they reach themselves than conclusions imposed from outside. If we step back for a moment, these three theories seem to point in a similar direction. Self perception theory suggests that people often discover what they think by hearing themselves speak. Psychological reactance theory suggests that people resist when they feel pushed or controlled. Self determination theory suggests that people are more motivated when their actions are freely chosen. Taken together, listening starts to look very different. Listening is not simply being polite while waiting to offer advice. Listening creates the conditions in which people can hear themselves, retain their sense of autonomy, and discover their own reasons for actions. In other words, listening is not the absence of helping. It may actually be one of the most effective forms of helping we have. Of course, listening without fixing doesn't mean doing nothing. It doesn't mean sitting silently while somebody struggles. Good listening is active, engaged, and responsive. It simply shifts the focus from providing answers to to fostering understanding. One of the simplest things we can do is become curious. Instead of immediately searching for solutions, we can try to understand the person's experience more fully. Questions like what's the hardest part of this? Or what do you think is getting in the way? Or Tell me more about that? Can open up a conversation in ways that advice often cannot. Another powerful skill is reflection. Sometimes the most helpful thing we can do is reflect back what we're hearing. It sounds like you're exhausted. It sounds like you're torn. Part of you wants to leave, but another part is frightened of what might happen next. Reflections help people hear themselves more clearly and communicate that we're genuinely trying to understand. And sometimes we can simply ask permission before offering advice. Would you like me to just listen or would you like me to help you think through some options? It's such a small question, but it communicates respect. It recognises that the other person gets to decide what kind of support they need. There are certainly times when advice is useful. Sometimes people genuinely need information. Sometimes expertise matters. Sometimes practical guidance is exactly what's required. Listening without fixing doesn't mean we never offer suggestions. It simply means that understanding comes first. We earn the right to advise by listening well. The deeper lesson here is that listening is not a lesser form of helping. Many of us secretly believe that listening is what you do before the real help begins, as though understanding is merely the warm up act and advice is the main event. But I think that's often the wrong way around. Some of the most important moments in our lives are not moments when someone gave us the perfect solution. They're moments when someone truly understood us. Moments when we felt seen, heard, accepted and accompanied. Moments when another person stayed with us long enough for us to make sense of our own experience. Perhaps that's why listening is such a profound act of compassion. It asks us to resist the urge to take over. It asks us to tolerate uncertainty. It asks us to manage our own discomfort rather than immediately acting on it. And it asks us to trust that the other person may already possess more wisdom capacity and insight than we initially assume. So this week you might try a simple experiment. Notice how quickly you move into fixing mode. When someone tells you about a problem, notice the urge to advise, reassure, explain, or solve. Then see if you can pause for a moment and become curious instead. Try replacing one piece of advice with one thoughtful question. Try replacing one solution with one reflection. And before offering your wisdom, perhaps ask whether wisdom is actually what the other person is looking for. You may discover that some of the most helpful conversations you'll ever have are the ones where you say a little less, listen a little more, and create enough space for someone to find their own way forward. People rarely change because they've been told what to do. More often, they change because someone gave them the space to hear themselves trust themselves and choose their own next step. That, to me, is one of the most compassionate things we can offer.