How can I specify what I want a list to say at a beginning, and ensure that my index is not out of range?

Question

I'm coding a discord bot that cheers people up by recognizing keywords, and users are able to add their own motivational messages to the database too. Additionally, I've created a command that shows the list of user-added messages when the user uses '+list'. While this works to a certain extent, it always shows 'ObservedList(value=', and then shows the actual list. Is there any way to stop this?

For reference, here is the range of code where I suspect there may be an error:

if msg.startswith("+del"):
    encouragements = []
    if "encouragements" in db.keys():
      index = int(msg.split("+del",1)[1])
      delete_encouragement(index)
      encouragements = db["encouragements"]
    await message.channel.send(encouragements)
    

  if any(word in msg for word in happy_words):
    await message.channel.send(random.choice(responses))

  if msg.startswith("+list"):
    encouragements = []
    if "encouragements" in db.keys():
      encouragements = db["encouragements"]
    await message.channel.send(encouragements)

Additionally, the error shown in the following code is that the index is out of range. How can I fix that?

 if msg.startswith("+responding"):
    value = msg.split("+responding ",1)[1]

    if value.lower() == "true":
      db["responding"] = True
      await message.channel.send("Responding is on.")
    else:
      db["responding"] = False
      await message.channel.send("Responding is off.")

Thanks for your time.