EMPATHIC LISTENING
In my last post I was talking about developing HABITS. In the same post I discussed about the listening habits. How do we develop listening habits? Have you heard about “empathic listening”?
Most people do not listen with the indent to understand, they listen with indent to reply. When another person speaks, they are either speaking or preparing to speak. We are filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography. Our conversation become collective monologues, and we never really understand what is going on with another person’s mind.
Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways.
1. We evaluate – either agree or disagree
2. We probe – we ask questions from our own frame of reference
3. We advise – we give counsel based on our experience.
4. We interpret
When another person speaks, we are usually listening at one of our four levels.
1. Ignoring – we may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all.
2. Pretending – “yeah. Uh-huh. Right” these are the key words
3. Selective – hearing only certain parts of the conversation
4. Attentive – pay 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.
It means listening with intent to understand. Empathic listening gets into another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it and you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their feeling. You listen with eyes, ears and also with hearts for feeling and also for meaning. You don’t respond with your autobiography, you always dealing with the reality of another person’s mind.
Let us together try to put an effort to do a role-play of empathic listening from today onwards, you can see the drastic change in communications.
“Inability to communicate is a result of failure to listen effectively”
Keep Winning
~Madoo
In my last post I was talking about developing HABITS. In the same post I discussed about the listening habits. How do we develop listening habits? Have you heard about “empathic listening”?
Most people do not listen with the indent to understand, they listen with indent to reply. When another person speaks, they are either speaking or preparing to speak. We are filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography. Our conversation become collective monologues, and we never really understand what is going on with another person’s mind.
Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways.
1. We evaluate – either agree or disagree
2. We probe – we ask questions from our own frame of reference
3. We advise – we give counsel based on our experience.
4. We interpret
When another person speaks, we are usually listening at one of our four levels.
1. Ignoring – we may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all.
2. Pretending – “yeah. Uh-huh. Right” these are the key words
3. Selective – hearing only certain parts of the conversation
4. Attentive – pay 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.
It means listening with intent to understand. Empathic listening gets into another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it and you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their feeling. You listen with eyes, ears and also with hearts for feeling and also for meaning. You don’t respond with your autobiography, you always dealing with the reality of another person’s mind.
Let us together try to put an effort to do a role-play of empathic listening from today onwards, you can see the drastic change in communications.
“Inability to communicate is a result of failure to listen effectively”
~Madoo
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