Do You Want To Know A Secret?

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Communication is the most important skill in life.

We spend most of our working hours communicating. But consider this… you spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak….

But what about listening?

What training or education have you had to enable you to listen so that you really, deeply understand another human being from that individual’s own frame of reference?

If you want to interact effectively and influence anyone, you first need to understand them. And you can’t do that with technique alone. If you’re using some technique, people will sense manipulation. They will wonder why you’re doing it, what your motives are, and they won’t feel safe enough to open themselves up to you.

Personal Integrity

The real key to your influence with anyone is your example, your actual conduct. Your example naturally arises out of your character, the kind of person you truly are - how people actually experience you.

Your character is constantly radiating and communicating. From it, in the long run, people will come to deeply trust or distrust you and your efforts.

How can I open myself up to you when you don’t even understand me?

Unless I open up to you, unless you understand me and my unique situation and feelings, you won’t know how to advise or counsel me.

As much as I may want and even need to receive your loving influence, I don’t feel safe enough to expose my opinions, experiences, and tender feelings. Who knows what will happen? 

You may say you care about me. I desperately want to believe that. 

But… all I have are your words, and I can’t trust words.

So if you want to be really effective in the habit of interpersonal communication, you cannot do it with technique alone. You have to build the skills of empathetic listening on a character that inspires openness and trust. And you have to build the emotional bank accounts that create a commerce between hearts.

Empathetic Listening

Seek first to understand.

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 filter everything through their own perspective, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives.

“Oh, I know exactly how you feel! I went through the 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.

They say things like, “I do understand them. I know what they’re going through. I went through the same thing myself.” The reality is you don’t have the vaguest idea of what’s going on in someone else’s head. You’re looking into your own head and thinking that they see the world through the same lens.

We write our own autobiography in the lives of others.

We want to be understood. Our conversations become collective monologues, and we never really understand what’s going on inside another human being.

What is empathetic listening?

When I say empathetic 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 (active listening or reflective listening) is skill-based. 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 the intent to reply, to control, to manipulate.

When I say empathetic, I mean with the intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand.

Empathy 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 how they feel.

The essence of empathetic listening is not that you agree with someone; it’s that you fully, deeply understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.

How are you listening?

Communication experts estimate that only 10% of our communication is represented by the words we say. Another 30% is represented by our sounds, and 60% by our body language.

In empathetic 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.

Empathetic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives, and interpretations, 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 the human soul.

Do you understand what actually matters to that person?

In addition, empathetic 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 them.

Empathetic listening is a tremendous deposit. It’s deeply therapeutic and healing because it gives a person psychological air.

You don’t notice empathic listening until you no longer have it.

If all the air were suddenly sucked out of the room you’re in right now, you wouldn’t care about anything except getting air. Survival would be your only motivation.

Now that you have that air, it doesn’t motivate you.

This is one of the greatest insights in the field of human motivation: satisfied needs do not motivate. It’s only unsatisfied needs that motivate.

Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is to be understood, 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 focus on influencing or problem-solving. This psychological dynamic impacts communication in every area of life.

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 for so many years. But you won’t be able to achieve deep connection and effective communication from an inaccurate understanding of where other people are coming from. 

Empathetic 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, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced. That means you have to really understand. This is why having your own personal fundamental principles and values to lead you is so foundational. They provide you with a principled center from which you can then handle the outward vulnerability of giving others psychological air.

Transforming transactional to transformational.

By seeking first to understand, you take every transactional opportunity and turn it into a transformational opportunity. Instead of interacting on a surface, get-the-job-done level of communication, you’re creating a situation in which you can now have a transforming impact, not only on yourself but on the individual’s personal life.

What you’ll come to find is that often transformational conversations require no outside counsel. Often when people are really given a chance to open up, they unravel their own problems, and the solutions become clear to them in the process.

Other times, they really do need additional perspective and help. The key is to genuinely seek the welfare of the individual, to listen with empathy, to let the person get to the problem and a solution at their own pace and time. Layer upon layer, it’s like peeling an onion until you get to the soft inner core.

I need to emphasize that this requires a sincere desire to understand, with the protection of the human soul as the underlying outcome. People resent any attempt to manipulate them. This is why you’re only able to get to this level of understanding with a massive base of character underneath you.

The more deeply you understand other people, the more you will appreciate them, the more reverent you will feel about them. To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.