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Hello everyone! Welcome to By My Side. Firstly, I greatly appreciate your time and your willingness to learn more about how to support others. It’s brave of you to take this step. Without further ado, let’s introduce the listener training now. In this training, you will learn more about yourself and how to become a good listener because the better understanding of yourself you have, the greater your abilities to support others. Your support is extremely important to us because lots of people feel vulnerable at some points, especially at unpredictable times. Having a compassionate person like you by their side can make a real difference for them. Your support also allows our mission of compassion to expand in more areas so that more people can receive mental health care. Our ultimate goal is to have compassion reach everyone in the world. The training includes 4 chapters. Chapter 1 is about self-awareness. I’ll introduce stress, emotions, and trauma. Those are some of the most common things you face in your lives. Also, I’ll provide some self-awareness skills to help you explore yourself. Chapter 2 is about active listening. I’ll introduce types of active listening, active listening skills, and how to improve your active listening. I will also provide a mock chat example to demonstrate how it works. Chapter 3 is about self-care. I’ll introduce the idea of triggers and burnout which are things many listeners experience at some point. I’ll also provide some tips for self-care. Chapter 4 is about compassion. I’ll talk about the so-called SAC model which our team has created for supporting people online. As you complete each chapter of the training, you’ll need to complete a quiz and a few exercises to evaluate your learning. After completing chapter 2, you’ll also need to complete a mock chat with a mentor before moving forward to chapter 3, and so on. When you complete chapter 4 and the mock chat, you can choose to have more mock chat practices or go to the mock chat exam. You can try the mock chat exams multiple times, so don’t worry too much if you don’t pass the first time. If you succeed in passing the exam, you’ll be able to accept chat requests on our platform as a trainee volunteer. After one month, a mentor will reach out to you to discuss if you’re ready to become a formal volunteer. Hello everyone! This is chapter 1, self-awareness! It’s the most important session in the volunteer training because you can only understand others as well as you understand yourself. In this chapter, there are 5 parts including introduction to self-awareness, emotions, stress, trauma and self-awareness skills. Let’s go ahead and first talk about what self-awareness is! The definition of self-awareness is learning to be aware of one’s own thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and urges in one’s internal world. It is a form of stepping back and neutrally observing the thoughts and feelings. Let me cite an example: Alex is a 20 years old man and was having difficulties rejecting others. He usually said yes to others even though he didn’t think he really wanted to do that. He got frustrated very soon and didn’t handle all the works he promised to others. One day, he realized he was actually wary of being judged by others because he was having some previous experiences of being judged or rejected when he was young, so he was trying to be nice to everyone. It was his way to be with his family so that he won’t get hurt. Once he knew this, he thinks he no longer needs this method to protect himself anymore in some situations. He starts considering his abilities and decides what he can do. If he doesn't think he has to or wants to do that, he gradually learns how to reject others' requests. Therefore, simplified, self-awareness is shining a light on the parts of the internal world, to help us clarify our thoughts, feelings and body sensations. Otherwise, they get buried down, pushed aside, or go unnoticed. Sometimes you may tell yourself “I’ll have to do this and that” or blame yourself why your body doesn’t listen to you, maybe even getting sick during an important moment. If you recognize some situations which I just mentioned, I believe {that the following sentence may be a good one for you: “there’s nothing more important to true growth than realizing you’re not the voice of your mind – you’re the one who hears it.” Self-awareness is about learning to listen to our thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and urges in our internal world. We believe awareness of those aspects of ourselves is the first step to change and growth because we can’t change what we don’t know about. So, how important is self-awareness? How can self-awareness help us? It can help us understand ourselves such as our own needs, desires, failings, habits and everything else that makes us the unique individual that we are. Once we are able to understand ourselves, we will know why we have those triggers coming up and why we have those thoughts and feelings. After identifying the triggers or stressors, we can build up our coping mechanisms. The more we know about ourselves, the better we are able to adapt to life’s challenges. After that, we can find out what we would like to be and experience ourselves as unique and separate individual. We will know more about our strengths and weaknesses due to this exploring process. It can help us make changes to meet the goals of what we want to be and even develop our own areas of strength. With the plans we are working on, it leads us go on the right track. Research also shows that self-awareness is directly related to both emotional intelligence and success. Self-awareness is also considered an important value as a supporter. Especially on By My Side, we will connect with people around the world, and they’re from various cultures, religions, languages, lifestyles, and value systems. In order to provide better support, we should understand ourselves first so that we are able to respect and understand different people with different backgrounds. What would happen if we were not self-aware? It’s very easy to project our own problems onto our users because we identify with their problems and imagine that they’re similar to, even the same as our own, or vice versa. Self-awareness empowers us to set the “ego boundaries” and be able to differentiate between what belongs to us and what belongs to the users. That’s why we consider self-awareness the most important part in our volunteer training. Hello everyone! This is chapter 2, active listening! Here you will learn about active listening so you can then apply these skills in both your volunteer journey, in real life and even in your everyday conversations. In this chapter, there are 4 parts including introduction to active listening, the types, the skills sets and how to improve your active listening skills. After that, we will provide a mock chat example to demonstrate how to apply those skills. Let’s go ahead to talk about what active listening is! The definition of active listening is that it is a communication technique requiring the listener to understand, interpret, recount and evaluate what they hear. Let me cite an example: Sally was expressing her problems to her friend Liz. Sally had gone through much in her move to a new office. She was feeling stressed about it and it took a toll on her. Liz was quietly listening to her friend, focusing her attention entirely on Sally and was not distracted by her own thoughts. After Sally was done speaking, Liz recounted back what Sally said in a summarized manner and asked back another question to help Sally elaborate more, making Sally felt heard. Therefore, to simplify, active listening is the act of fully hearing and comprehending the meaning of what someone else is saying. However, an important fact is that active listening itself is not therapy. One reason that many listeners may initially find it difficult to do active listening or doubt whether active listening could possibly be effective is because their pre-existing intuitions about how to help people tend to match the values and strategies of cognitive-behavioral therapy more closely. A bit on the historical roots of active listening. Active listening are skills in a psychotherapy approach called person-centered therapy from Carl Rogers. The core conditions of the therapy relationship are congruence and genuine, unconditional positive regard, and accurate empathic understanding. There are some recommendations in the resources list if you would like to know more. Even in the real world, active listening is used when we don’t even realize it. Some examples can be in the marketing business, coaching and mentoring, human resource department even in the design and construction industry. So, how important is active listening? How can active listening help us? It can help us create meaningful connections with people making them feel more comfortable sharing information. Once they are comfortable sharing information with you, it allows them to speak freely without interruption or judgement. Instead, they are more likely to confide in you with heartfelt responses. You would also find it easier to detect difficulties and challenges. By using active listening, we are more likely to remember the information they are telling us and less likely to forget or miss any important information. It also helps you to retain information and improves our knowledge about a large range of topics, as well as what we learned so we can apply this future conversations. What would happen if we were not using active listening? It would make us seem as if we weren’t listening to them when they express their heartfelt emotions and would make us seem self-centered, not paying attention to them. We would lose the trust they have in us.