Are you quick to offer advice without fully understanding the underlying issue? Do you feel people don’t listen to you? Do you empathetically listen to others and seek to understand, or do you only want to be understood? Seeking to understand is an empathetic way of communicating that many people don’t know how to do.
I have been writing about mental health issues this year. Learning to understand others and practicing empathetic listening can be challenging if you are consumed by your own problems, which I was at one time. Or if you are a problem solver like me. I am quick to offer advice without fully understanding the situation first. Stephen Covey explains how to empathetically listen to people in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”
How Do You Communicate?
- Listen with the intent to reply.
- Speaking or preparing to speak.
- Filtering everything through your paradigms or perspective.
- Reading your autobiography into other people’s lives, thinking what worked for you will work for them.
Four Autobiographical Responses (Stephen Covey)
Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways.
- We evaluate by either agreeing or disagreeing;
- We probe by asking questions from our own frame of reference;
- We advise and give counsel based on our own experience; or
- We interpret and try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on our own motives and behavior.
What is Empathetic Listening?
- 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 from their perspective.
- You understand how they feel.
- The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone; it’s that you fully and deeply understand that person, both emotionally and intellectually.
Stephen Covey explains, “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 itself, a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account. It’s deeply therapeutic and healing because it gives a person ‘psychological air.’” To learn more about how to build a person’s emotional bank account, see my previous post, 10 Ways to Build an Emotional Bank Account.
Empathetic listening is essential for creating win-win agreements. Because if you don’t understand the thoughts and feelings of another person, it will be impossible for it to be win/win. To learn more about creating win/win agreements, read How to Build Trust with Win/Win Agreements. Empathetic listening lets the other person know you value them, which is a psychological need every person has. Once they feel you understand and value them, you can focus on influencing or problem-solving.
Most people are taught to either repeat or rephrase what someone says to show you heard them. That is not understanding them. The key is to understand how the other person feels. For example, a child says, “I hate my teacher, she is mean.” Empathetic listening will want to know why; “You sound frustrated, tell me why you think she is being mean?” “Do you feel she is being unfair?” By rephrasing and reflecting the feelings, you get the other person to open up about why they believe something is true. Then you can lead them to think with their prefrontal cortex, where logic is. Next, you can help them develop a healthier way of thinking or come up with a solution to the problem.
Eight Actions to Be an Empathetic Listener.
1. I will listen with the intent to understand and not reply.
2. I will try not to read my autobiography into other people’s lives.
3. I will get into the other person’s frame of reference, to see the world the way they see it, understand how they feel, and thus give them “psychological air.”
4. I will not evaluate by either agreeing or disagreeing.
5. I will not probe with questions from my frame of reference or perspective.
6. I will not advise or give counsel based on my own experience.
7. I will not interpret by trying to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on my motives and behavior.
8. I will rephrase the content and reflect the feeling.
Conclusion: Then Seek to Be Understood
In the post discussing win/win agreements, Stephen Covey defined maturity as the balance between courage and consideration. Seeking to understand requires consideration; seeking to be understood takes courage. Win/Win requires a high degree of both. So it becomes important in interdependent situations for us to be understood. Being interdependent fosters rich, enduring, and highly productive relationships with others. When you can present your own ideas clearly, specifically, visually, and most importantly, contextually, in the context of a deep understanding of their paradigms and concerns, you significantly increase the credibility of your ideas.
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