Empathic Listening is an invaluable skill to enable understanding. Understanding others followed by being understood is the 5th habit of highly effective people.
I am on the 5th of the 7 habits of highly effective people (7HHEP). If you missed the first four habits, you can read them here, here and here. Equally, you can read the book but I think My blog will give you a quick summary🤟.
My focus on leadership materials/books is to develop effectiveness at work. Blogging is my way of summarising pertinent information for those of us too busy to read a book. I am able to return to my blogs for a refresher as well.
Quick links
Understanding Character and Communication
There are 4 main forms of communication
- Reading
- Writing
- Speaking
- Listening
Most of us have spent our entire lives learning three out of the four skills: reading, writing and speaking. All levels of education lay emphasis on the importance of these three skills.
However, the skill of Listening is a difficult one to teach.
Think about it: How much education have you had to improve your listening skills?
Surface listening is not enough to engage in a meaningful conversation. To understand the feelings of another, we must Listen deeply (Empathic listening). Deep Listening needs to happen every time someone speaks to us. The topic of discussion is irrelevant. If you are in a conversation, it means that you have accepted to listen.
Listening is a two-way street. To be heard or listened to, you too must listen to the speaking individual whilst in a conversation. You must pay specific attention to their frame of reference, an explanation of the situation and their feelings included. This is empathic listening. Otherwise, your reply will not be appropriate to that specific situation in question.
Having an emotional bank account with deposits that add value is immensely advantageous in character, communication and empathic listening.
Empathic listening
The worse thing to do in a conversation is to reply with an autobiography of your life !!❗️Phrases like ‘ Let me tell you a similar story that happened to me’ are conversation killers and has a negative impact 😱. It means you are not seeking to understand the situation or the context of the speaker.
A TEDx talk by Celeste Headlee explains it better. Watch is here
In Empathic Listening, you
- Get inside another person frame of reference.
- See the world the way they see it.
- Understand how they feel.
- Understand their perspective.
- Listen with your eyes, heart and of course, your ears
Empathic listening, gives the speaker (not the listener) validation, appreciation, affirmation and confirmation that they have been understood. It is after empathic listening that you can plan on influencing or solving a problem. Listening to words alone is a limited way of listening.
4 stages of empathic listening
- Mimic Content: This is the least effective form of listening. You listen to the words from the speaker and repeat. Sadly, this was thought to be a good skill in the past. The listener is not engaging the brain in this form of listening. No evaluation, probing or understanding is taking place. A waste of time
- Rephrase content: The listener puts the meaning in their own words
- Reflect feeling: The listener pays more attention to the feelings of the speaker.
- Empathic listening: combines the 2nd and 3rd stages of listening. This also assist the speaker in processing their own thoughts and feelings.
With empathic listening, we can understand what the real issue/problem is and begin to solve it. Patience is the key as it takes time to listen emphatically. I have not yet met anyone who did not want to be understood. Taking time to understand, yields much greater benefits in the long term and as a result reduces all the heartache.
Finally, the other half of the 5th habit is ‘To be understood’. Looking forward to explaining this in my next blog.
Book title reviewed in this blog: 7 Habits of Highly effective people by Stephen R Covey
