Empathy-Driven Mentorship
How Does a SSEAT Mentor Listen?
Learning to be an empathetic listener requires practice, self-monitoring, and ongoing adjustments to one's own actions, but it's worth all the effort in order to create a safe space for mentoring and positive connections with someone who stutters.
At SSEAT, we're dedicated to offering empathy-driven support through our mentoring relationships, always striving to create empathetic connections.
When mentoring, we're intentional listeners with specific goals of empathy and compassion that steer how we engage with stuttering teens. As we interact, we adjust our expectations and responses to complement the present needs of the teen, and we use our ears, eyes, hearts, and instincts to do so.
Learning to be an empathetic listener requires practice, self-monitoring, and ongoing adjustments to one's own actions, but it's worth all the effort in order to create a safe space for mentoring and positive connections with someone who stutters.
How do we listen with empathy?
- We listen with our ears. We focus on the content of the speaker's message, not the fluency. It's not always about achieving fluency and practicing our speech targets. Oftentimes, it's about just listening to casual stories from the week and making connections with someone with shared experience. Other times, it's about listening to a fluency obstacle a friend faced, such as navigating dialogue in group settings, which can be particularly challenging for people who stutter. Regardless of what is shared, a mentor focuses on what is said, not how fluently it's spoken.
- We listen with our eyes. We focus on the body language and the visible comfort level of the speaker. Body language and hand gestures often play key roles in the communication of stutterers, especially when they experience episodes of high disfluency and cannot easily access their words. A mentor pays close attention to these non-verbal cues, offering patience, understanding, and the gift of time to allow the speaker to communicate at their own pace.
- We listen with our hearts. We focus on how the speaker is feeling and the emotions shared. Again, striving to create an empathic connection, a mentor observes and values the feelings of the speaker. A mentor will listen quietly and offer supportive feedback and reflective comments, such as, "Thank you for sharing that with me," and "I know how you feel. I've been through a similar experience."
- We listen with our instincts. We focus on what we're sensing from the speaker, using our own experience to relate and connect. Mentors will use their instincts to shape interactions with a stutterer, trusting that their instincts won't deliver all the answers but will often be a reliable guide when deciding how much to problem-solve, how much to talk, or how much to just sit quietly and listen.
Learning to be an empathetic listener requires practice, self-monitoring, and ongoing adjustments to one's own actions, but it's worth all the effort in order to create a safe space for mentoring and positive connections with someone who stutters.
Interested in Learning More about Mentoring?
If you're a teen who stutters or you know a teen who stutters, please reach out to us about small group and one-on-one mentoring. We offer sessions via Zoom and in-person (Metro Richmond, VA area). We'd love to hear from you.