This post is part of
habits
Tuesdays.

People understand me so poorly that they even don’t understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
        - Soren Kierkegaard

People
want to be understood. You want to be understood, don’t you? You know
how frustrating it can be when people don’t understand you, no matter
how hard you try, over and over again.

Habit 5 is about this
phenomenon: Seek first to understand and then to be understood. And as with
all of the habits, this one not about learning a new trick or a set of
techniques. The habits are about changing paradigms, about changing the
beliefs you have about the topics of the habits. This habit is about
communication, effective interaction between people.

What’s your intention?
Why do you listen to people? If you’re like most people in most conversations, you primarily listen to give a response! And
while your listening, you’re preparing for a response already. Now how
can you listen effectively, when you’re thinking how to formulate the
sentence that’s about to leave you lips? Covey sums up four typical
listening responses:

• Ignoring
  not listening at all
• Pretending
  not listening at all, but with mindless responses ("Uh-hum", "Yeah, that’s really interesting")
• Selective listening
  not listening to everything, but hearing what you want to hear
• Attentive listening
  really listening to the words

Effective
listening is about really wanting to listen, wanting to understand the
other. To achieve this you have to go beyond the words.

Full scale listening
To really understand people you have to use empathic listening.
It’s not just hearing what they’re saying. Empathic listening is a full
body activity. In communication the words are only a small part of the
total communication. It’s what we refer to as verbal communication. But
there’s also a non-verbal part to communicating. It’s even an essential
part for effective communication.

In real life people do this by expressing emotion by gestures, frowns, smiles etc. On the internet
this wasn’t possible, so emoticons were created to substitute for the
lack of non-verbal language. In real life we also use the tone of our
voice, the loudness of it, the pitch etc. This is already harder on the
internet, but a lot of people seem to know HOW TO SCREAM, don’t they? Add some colors, and you get the picture of the mood they’re in.

Empathic
listening is about all these aspects of communication at the same time.
Does the body language show the same thing as the words that are being
spoken, do they express the same feeling? If not, what does that mean,
how can you respond?

Logic versus emotion
In conversation not all parts are filled with emotions. There are two
parts of a conversation, the logical part and the emotional part. Some
parts of a conversation are simply logical, and you can respond to that
part by asking questions and giving advice and so on. However, when the
responses become emotional, empathic listening is the better option.

The empathic listening responses are:

• mimic content
  just repeat what was just said
• rephrase content
  repeat, but in your own words
• reflect feeling
  express what you think the other feels
• rephrase content and reflect feeling
  combine the latter two

Empathic listening is effective when you have the best interest of
the other in mind, if you genuinely seek the welfare of the other.

Now to be understood
That
was a rather long part about how to understand the other. How about
being understood? That’s important as well of course. However, it’s the
understanding part where most people have to train their skills. That’s
why that part of this chapter is so elaborate. In this article, I’m not
going into being understood anymore, I’ll save that one for another
post.

Previous posts in this series:
Habit 1    Be proactive
Habit 2    Being with the end in mind
Habit 3    First things first
Habit 4    Think Win Win

Next week habit 6: Synergize

Can’t wait? You can buy Covey’s book
The
7 habits of highly effective people at Amazon, or as an
audiobook
here. There’s also an
audiobook
on this habit alone.

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Thanks!