The Power of Vocal Exploring - Talk 1 of 25

Topic: The Power of Vocal Exploring

Theme: Creative Problem Solving

Author: Barry Sweet

Date: January 7, 2018

Music: Dances of the Wind by Sierra Brooke Sweet

Video Production by Tim & Karen Morse. Morsephotography.com

Life will pitch you problems, challenges, opportunities (you can change how you phrase it to look at it). And you've got to find ways to manage those and do well with them. And one of the most powerful tools I found is the tool of Vocal Exploring. I learned it when Uncle Peter came to visit and he had reached that point in life that in his forties, he was finished with dating and was ready now to find “the one” and look for her. So, as he said it to me…  “You know when I try too hard I look too eager and too interested and that repels women. If I back it down to the other side, then I don't look interested enough. I looked disinterested, but I just wish I could find that balance point in the middle…” 

And I said “Great. Einstein says if you define your problem you've got 51% of the solution”. 

Because until we define our problems in life they remain this fuzzy, hazy thing that drifts around out in the mist. And when we finally define them, we bring the problem right here in front of us and we can see it. And then you begin to work on it. 

That's why it's 51% of the solution”. And he had done that. He had defined his problem. So I said “Fantastic. Now that you've defined it I'm going to go out and get “some beer” and then I'll come back out and you think about it while I'm gone”. So I went and took an inordinate amount of time getting “the beers…” I'd peek out on him every once in a while just to see how he was doing. And he was doing fine. So I stayed in there longer…  Finally, I went back out and I said: “OK how'd it go?” He said “I thought about it for about a minute, and then I realized that my car that I got fixed before I left, had the same problem back and not only that… it had another problem on top of it. So when I go back to the auto repair shop I've got to fix two things now… and then I started thinking about the graduate course that I had to teach that night when I got back (because he's a professor at USC) and he said after that, I was gone and never thought about it again”. 

I said “OK great I'm going to ask you to rephrase your question one more time and then I'm going to only do one thing different… and that is I'm just going to sit here in front of you. So I said “What's your problem? “ He said “Well, I just don't want to look too eager and I don't want to look too Disinterested. I wish I could find the balance point in the middle…”  And for the next 45 minutes, he vocally explored and he would go into an alley and say “Yeah, that's close… but that's not quite it….”

And then he'd back out of the alley, go into the next alley and he'd say “That's closer but that's not quite it either…” Back out of the alley… and so in and out of these alleys, going in and backing out of the alley and being given the permission to back out of the alley, I stumbled onto the concept of BOTA which is “Back Outta The Alley” when you let someone vocally explore and they have permission to go into an alley and say “Nah… that's not right… now that I’ve, put words on it…

Those words are wrong and I don't really believe that… or really feel that…” That permission liberated him to totally vocally explore and in those 45 minutes, he had some mini- breakthroughs. 

He had some “Aha’s”… little epiphanies… and I suddenly understood the nature and power of Vocal Exploring. When you can stop doing it all silently and in your mind with a trusted person… and be able to just wander around trying to figure out what you really think or believe… It helps to make things concrete for you so that you can see them.

So then I quickly thereafter discovered the power of the Vocal Exploring Guide… a Vocal Exploring Guide will simply help a person formulate their problem in words so that it's concrete right in front of them. And then once they have formulated their problem the Vocal Exploring Guide just simply sits back and listens. It's 95% listening, 5% talking.  Here are a couple of tools in the tool belt of a Vocal Exploring Guide: “Huh…” “Wow…” “Yeah…” There's three of them… but you don't have to be… you know…you don't have a master's degree to do this. You just help a person identify their problem put words on it and then just sit back and listen and then they do their own work as they try to figure out their solutions to that problem. And it's really sort of a freelance job, it's an appointed job but it's freelance and people don't even know you're doing it for them and so one of the greatest gifts we can give in the world to other people is to let them Vocally Explore and have a place to test the ideas out and see what they really do think and what they really do believe and how they can find their own solutions. 

The discouraging piece is that you'd think that it would have this great acronym, but it doesn't. The acronym is VEG. It's not something powerful that you can get filled with pride over (which is probably a good thing anyway). But it's this really wonderful gift that we, in a freelance, free agent sort of way, do for the people around us to help them make progress where they are stuck.

It's harder for some people to do Vocal Exploring because they are internal processors, but even internal processors need a safe place where they can actually Vocally Explore. So it's one of the stages of trying to find solutions. And there are vocal processors. There are mental, quiet in the mind processors, and it’s not that one is right or wrong. 

It's just there's a time for each of those…

Is it based on life experience or education…?  No… that internal processing and external processing thing is a very individualized thing. 

And what the Vocal Exploring Guide does is just try to the best of their ability, through intuition and zeroing in… what I call it is “Bat Sonar…” You sort of “Bat  Sonar” with them and find out what is “their way” and then you adjust yourself as a Vocal Exploring  Guide to their way of processing and then help them do that. The most important piece to know is that we all… we all get stuck in life. And I was disappointed to find out that at my age I thought I was going to have this wonderful home and this beautiful bride and this small group that I'd be a part of, where I could have a safe place to be with people that I could talk with… and at my age, I did have this wonderful home and I have this beautiful bride but I didn't have the small group though… and I thought “I'm missing this component of my life…”. 

So I looked around town and I chose the deepest people that I knew… the people that knew the deep end of the pool and that were not afraid of the deep end of the pool.  Because I'm a spiritual person, I looked for people that had a spirituality that was like mine. And so I looked for other Christians that weren't weird, but that had been in the faith for a long time (and I meant decades…) And they had experienced the Loving Arms and also experienced the meat grinder, but hadn't given up their faith. I didn't want any newbies to the faith as part of the group. 

I wanted it to be people that we could sit across the circle from each other and say “Here is where I'm stuck in life. I've been stuck for a long time, just like being in an eddy going around and around and around and never being able to break out…” But yet being with a group of people that we could find a way to have somebody across the group say “I've been in that Eddy before… I have been stuck like that before… and here's how I got out”. And then break through the berm and get back out into running water, moving water again. And so we asked this group of people to come together and they agreed, and we then started meeting, never really quite regularly… it wasn't once a week, it wasn't every two weeks, sometimes it wasn't every month…  and we never quite knew when we'd get together again… Someone would just say “It's time…”  and then we'd all get together and through those times of being vulnerable with each other with people that you trust, that won't betray you in any way, but you've got a safe place with… (and we'll talk about the “Safe Place” later). You can actually become unstuck… and part of becoming unstuck is having a safe place where you can Vocally Explore and be free to back outta the alley and that's all we did together… and that's all we still do together and it's become this rich and enriching life with each other. 

I know there's a danger in using the word Christianity because it's a loaded word. It's become loaded through history in the same way that the word “dog” is a loaded word. You can't walk into a room and say the word “dog” because that will mean a different thing to everybody in the room. To one person, it will mean soft, cuddly, fluffy puppy, to another person it will mean stepping in dog poo, to another person it will mean dog hair on the couch, to another person it will mean smelly dog breath or smelly dog hair, to another person it will mean sharp, tearing, nasty, biting teeth, to another person it will mean “a person's best friend”.  So you can't just walk into a room and use the word “dog”... It's really much smarter to be specific what you mean… 

And Christianity...

That word is so loaded because through history people have cut off people's heads in Jesus’ name and mistreated each other and tried to shove their spirituality down other people's throats. That's not the kind of Christianity that I'm talking about.