Counterintuitive idea: learn to not be "curious about the person situation, while not really caring about the person". Basically focus on listening and asking

Counterintuitive idea: learn to not be "curious about the person situation, while not really caring about the person". Basically focus on listening and asking details while not really giving deep solutions but rather general advices. This has 2 advantages: - by not caring you will focus less on actual solutions and more on listening. You will learn a lot of funny stories if you do that with funny people - people will still feel you care about them, while if you speak they will think you make it about you. - your solutions would be useless anyway because What people REALLY want is ranting / blowing steam off / talking out loud to clarify their thinking, basically turning you into a "duck" (the bathing plastic duck you explain your problem which in turns makes it more clear to you and makes you fins the solution). Its actually a good thing for them. The bottom line is that they dont NEED your solutions. If you do that, most people will say you are a "great person to talk" to. And they actually solve their problems faster that if you gave any solution ^^