Empathic Listening

"Seek first to understand" involves a very deep shift in paradigm. We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to

reply. They're either speaking or preparing to speak. They're filtering everything through their own

paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people's lives.

"Oh, I know exactly how you feel!"

"I went through the very same thing. Let me tell you about my experience."

They're constantly projecting their own home movies onto other people's behavior. They prescribe

their own glasses for everyone with whom they interact.

If they have a problem with someone -- a son, a daughter, a spouse, an employee -- their attitude is,

"That person just doesn't understand."

A father once told me, "I can't understand my kid. He just won't listen to me at all."

"Let me restate what you just said," I replied. "You don't understand your son because he won't listen to you?"

"That's right," he replied.

"Let me try again," I said. "You don't understand your son because he won't listen to you?"

"That's what I said," he impatiently replied.

"I thought that to understand another person, you needed to listen to him," I suggested.

"OH!" he said. There was a long pause. "Oh!" he said again, as the light began to dawn. "Oh, yeah! But I do understand him. I know what he's going through. I went through the same thing

myself. I guess what I don't understand is why he won't listen to me."

This man didn't have the vaguest idea of what was really going on inside his boy's head. He

looked into his own head and thought he saw the world, including his boy.

That's the case with so many of us. We're filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography.

We want to be understood. Our conversations become collective monologues, and we never really

understand what's going on inside another human being.

When another person speaks, we're usually "listening" at one of four levels. We may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all. We may practice pretending. "Yeah. Uh-huh. Right."

We may practice selective listening, hearing only certain parts of the constant chatter of a preschool

child. Or we may even practice attentive listening, paying attention and focusing energy on the words

that are being said. But very few of us ever practice the fifth level, the highest form of listening,

empathic listening.

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart When I say empathic listening, I am not referring to the techniques of "active" listening or "reflective"

listening, which basically involve mimicking what another person says. That kind of listening is

skill-based, truncated from character and relationship, and often insults those "listened" to in such a way. It is also essentially autobiographical. If you practice those techniques, you may not project

your autobiography in the actual interaction, but your motive in listening is autobiographical. You

listen with reflective skills, but you listen with intent to reply, to control, to manipulate.

When I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to

understand, to really understand. It's an entirely different paradigm.

Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out

through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you

understand how they feel.

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement, a form of judgment. And it is

sometimes the more appropriate emotion and response. But people often feed on sympathy. It

makes them dependent. The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone; it's that

you fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.

Empathic listening involves much more than registering, reflecting, or even understanding the

words that are said. Communications experts estimate, in fact, that only 10 percent of our

communication is represented by the words we say. Another 30 percent is represented by our sounds,

and 60 percent by our body language. In empathic listening, you listen with your ears, but you also,

and more importantly, listen with your eyes and with your heart. You listen for feeling, for meaning.

You listen for behavior. You use your right brain as well as your left. You sense, you intuit, you feel.

Empathic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with. Instead of

projecting your own autobiography and assuming thought, feelings, motives, and interpretation, you're

dealing with the reality inside another person's head and heart. You're listening to understand.

You're focused on receiving the deep communication of another human soul.

In addition, empathic listening is the key to making deposits in Emotional Bank Accounts, because

nothing you do is a deposit unless the other person perceives it as such. You can work your fingers to the bone to make a deposit, only to have it turn into a withdrawal when a person regards your efforts as

manipulative, self-serving, intimidating, or condescending because you don't understand what really

matters to him.

Empathic listening is, in and of itself, a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account. It's

deeply therapeutic and healing because it gives a person "psychological air.

If all the air were suddenly sucked out of the room you're in right now, what would happen to your

interest in this book? You wouldn't care about the book; you wouldn't care about anything except

getting air. Survival would be your only motivation.

But now that you have air, it doesn't motivate you. This is one of the greatest insights in the field of human motivations: Satisfied needs do not motivate. It's only the unsatisfied need that motivates.

Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival -- to be

understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.

When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And

after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving.

This need for psychological air impacts communication in every area of life.

I taught this concept at a seminar in Chicago one time, and I instructed the participants to practice

empathic listening during the evening. The next morning, a man came up to me almost bursting with

news.

"Let me tell you what happened last night," he said. "I was trying to close a big commercial real estate deal while I was here in Chicago. I met with the principals, their attorneys, and another real

estate agent who had just been brought in with an alternative proposal.

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart

"It looked as if I were going to lose the deal. I had been working on this deal for over six months and, in a very real sense, all my eggs were in this one basket. All of them. I panicked. I did

everything I could -- I pulled out all the stops -- I used every sales technique I could. The final stop was to say, 'Could we delay this decision just a little longer?' But the momentum was so strong and

they were so disgusted by having this thing go on so long, it was obvious they were going to close.

"So I said to myself, 'Well, why not try it? Why not practice what I learned today and seek first to understand, then to be understood? I've got nothing to lose.'

"I just said to the man, 'Let me see if I really understand what your position is and what your concerns about my recommendations really are. When you feel I understand them, then we'll see

whether my proposal has any relevance or not.'

"I really tried to put myself in his shoes. I tried to verbalize his needs and concerns, and he began to open up.

"The more I sensed and expressed the things he was worried about, the results he anticipated, the

more he opened up.

"Finally, in the middle of our conversation, he stood up, walked over to the phone, and dialed his

wife. Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, he said, 'You've got the deal.'

"I was totally dumbfounded," he told me. "I still am this morning.

He had made a huge deposit in the Emotional Bank Account by giving the man psychological air.

When it comes right down to it, other things being relatively equal, the human dynamic is more

important than the technical dimensions of the deal.

Seeking first to understand, diagnosing before you prescribe, is hard. It's so much easier in the

short run to hand someone a pair of glasses that have fit you so well these many years.

But in the long run, it severely depletes both P and PC. You can't achieve maximum

interdependent production from an inaccurate understanding of where other people are coming from.

And you can't have interpersonal PC -- high Emotional Bank Accounts -- if the people you relate with

don't really feel understood.

Empathic listening is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening

experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. You become vulnerable. It's a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced. That means you have to really

understand.

That's why Habits 1, 2, and 3 are so foundational. They give you the changeless inner core, the

principle center, from which you can handle the more outward vulnerability with peace and strength.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 869