Habit 5 tackles how to have an effective interaction with someone: First work on understanding the other person’s perspective, then help her to understand your perspective. Only then can you determine the kind of mutually beneficial solution that a Win/Win paradigm strives to achieve.
Generally, many aspects of interdependent situations are out of your control and in your Circle of Concern, including certain problems, circumstances, and other people’s actions. Habit 5 focuses on acting within your Circle of Influence — understanding the other person and expressing yourself. Those actions, in turn, can help you effectively influence other people, which can influence situations that impact you, which expands your Circle of Influence.
Communication is a critical aspect of productive interpersonal relationships. When truly effective interdependent people communicate, they first try to understand the other person’s perspective before expressing their own.
On a larger scale, this principle holds true in many professions.
There are four forms of communication: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Despite all the training and education we get to learn how to speak, read, and write well, we receive very little instruction on effective listening. The listening techniques we do learn tend to fall in the Personality Ethic, without setting up the paradigms for the necessary character-based foundation. Techniques provide the skills, but you also need the genuine desire to understand other people, work together, and develop Win/Win solutions; in order to have productive relationship in which you can work with and influence another person, you must first understand her.
We discussed in Habit 4 that an essential step in reaching a Win/Win solution is to try to understand the other person’s perspective and concerns. The key to truly understanding people is empathic listening, which is listening with the intent to see their perspective.
When a friend comes to you with an issue he’s having, how often do you respond with a story about your own similar experience and what you did to resolve it? Or how commonly are you met with this kind of response when you are venting to someone else?
Although well-intended, this response offers a solution without really trying to understand the problem or that individual’s perspective. It can cause the first person to be reluctant to share more because she doesn’t feel understood, and she may be even more reluctant to take any advice offered: How can she trust your advice if it’s not coming from a place of actually understanding the problem?
We do this all the time in communication — prescribing a solution before diagnosing the problem — but think of how ridiculous this response would be in another context.
Imagine you go to the eye doctor because you’re having trouble with your vision. You start to explain your problem to the optometrist, and she quickly takes her own glasses off her face and tells you to try them on. The glasses do nothing to help your vision, but when you tell the doctor this, she insists that the glasses work perfectly for her, so they should work for you too; she tells you to try harder. As hard as you try, the glasses still don’t help your vision.
Empathic listening requires a paradigm shift for most people, because often people listen in order to reply, and their responses are based more on their own experience and interpretation than what the other person is saying. People typically listen in one of four ways:
None of these is sufficient for truly understanding.
Empathic listening is the fifth form of listening; empathic listening goes beyond attentive listening, because you’re not only hearing every word but also listening with an effort to understand the other person’s paradigm. You don’t need to agree with that person, but simply to understand the way she sees things. You must open your mind to do this, and accept the possibility that this level of understanding could also influence the way you see things.
Empathic listening takes in information from all forms of communication, both verbal and nonverbal. Experts estimate that the words we use constitute only 10 percent of our message, the sounds of the way we speak (e.g. tone, cadence, and volume) make up another 30 percent, and our body language represents 60 percent of our communication. When you listen empathically, you pick up on all these communication cues to understand what the person is really trying to express.
When we fail to listen empathically — from the other person’s perspective — we listen autobiographically, interpreting everything through our own lens and experiences. Autobiographical listening tends to yield one of four responses.
Empathic listening makes your interactions more productive in multiple ways.
First, it gives you the most useful information to work with as you interact with the other person because you’re getting an accurate picture of how this person views and feels about a situation, as opposed to your own skewed interpretation of it. Just as with any problem, you need accurate data to reach an effective solution.
Second, when people recognize that you’re genuinely trying to understand them, they’ll be more inclined to trust you and open up further, and your effort will make a big deposit in your Emotional Bank Account.
Third, empathic listening gives a person “psychological air,” the figurative space she needs to process a problem. To understand this, imagine all the air was sucked out of the room and you couldn’t breathe; you wouldn’t be able to focus on anything but your ability to breathe and survive. Similarly, if you don’t have air for your psychological survival — which includes being understood, affirmed, validated, and appreciated — you can’t focus on any other efforts like problem solving. Just like in a survival situation, you might begin acting frantically and illogically, trying anything you can to gasp for air.
Understanding and validating someone gives her psychological air to be able to move forward and work through a problem. Once she feels heard and understood, she’s more inclined to hear your perspective, and then you two have the groundwork from which you can reach a solution.
As you gain a deeper understanding of other people’s perceptions and perspectives, you’ll also begin to see how different perspectives influence people’s interactions. This insight will help as you interact and negotiate with people, because you won’t be confounded trying to understand their behavior through your own lens, and instead you’ll appreciate that they have different paradigms that are shaping their behavior.
True empathic listening stems from a paradigm that includes a genuine desire to understand other people; from that foundation, there are skills you can practice to master empathic listening.
If you’re new to empathic listening, you can progress through four stages of listening, each one becoming more understanding of what the person is feeling.
1) The first stage is mimicking, often called “active” or “reflective” listening, which involves repeating a person’s words back to her. Mimicry gets you into the practice of attentive listening, and avoiding any autobiographical responses. But it’s not very effective beyond that because you’re only repeating — not processing — what she’s saying. Additionally, if you don’t have a solid relationship with the other person or show a genuine interest in what she’s saying, mimicry can come off as insulting.
For example, your son says, “I’m so over school, it’s pointless!”
You respond, “You’re over school. You feel like it’s pointless.”
2) The second stage is rephrasing the content, which at least requires you to process what you’re hearing, but still limits your listening to verbal communication. Rephrasing requires you to think about what the person said, but you’re doing so through a left-brained, logical lens rather than an emotional one.
In this case, your response is, “You’re tired of school and you don’t think it will help you in life.”
3) In the third stage, reflect the feelings the person is expressing. This brings the right brain into play, and begins to understand the other person’s perspective. You’re focusing on more than the person’s words — you also include her emotions.
In this stage, you’d respond by saying, “You’re feeling frustrated and exasperated.”
4) The fourth stage integrates both the second and third stages, so that you’re rephrasing the content of what the person is saying and reflecting her feelings. This brings together the left and right sides of the brain to understand not just the words she’s saying but also the emotions she’s communicating.
In this case, you’d respond, “School is making you feel frustrated and exasperated.” The content you’re extracting is school, and the emotion is frustration and exasperation.
When you practice empathic listening at the fourth stage, you show your desire to understand and give the person psychological air to further process what she’s feeling. Sometimes people just need to talk through their problems, and when they feel heard and understood, they have the psychological air to reach solutions on their own. Other times, people do want your help working through a problem, but you must give them the time and space to walk you through the issue at their own pace, gradually working through to the root of the problem.
Empathic listening requires a bigger initial investment of time and energy to really try to understand the person’s perspective, but in the long run it saves more time and effort by avoiding assumptions and misunderstandings.
In an interpersonal relationship, it’s just as important that you’re understood as it is that you understand the other person. To help the other person understand your perspective, you need to effectively express it.
The keys to effective communication are in the early Greek philosophy of ethos, pathos, and logos.
Ethos, pathos, and logos represent not only the different aspects of expressing your perspective, but also the order in which to carry them out. Many people start with logos, trying to make the logical argument for their case, but you’re more likely to get the other person to understand if you start from a foundation of principled character and a trusting, open relationship.
The best way to get better at understanding and being understood is by practicing empathic listening, spending one-on-one time with people, and building your Emotional Bank Accounts. Use these steps to practice empathic listening and effective communication.