The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

EMPATHIC LISTENING

“Seek first to understand” involves a very deep shift in paradigm. 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’re filtering everything through their

own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives.

“Oh, I know exactly how you feel!”

“I went through the very 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.

If they have a problem with someone—a son, a daughter, a spouse, an employee—their

attitude is, “That person just doesn’t understand.”

***

A father once told me, “I can’t understand my kid. He just won’t listen to me at all.”

“Let me restate what you just said,” I replied. “You don’t understand your son because he

won’t listen to you?”

“That’s right,” he replied.

“Let me try again,” I said. “You don’t understand your son because he won’t listen to you?”

“That’s what I said,” he impatiently replied.

“I thought that to understand another person, you needed to listen to him,” I suggested.

“Oh!” he said. There was a long pause. “Oh!” he said again, as the light began to dawn. “Oh,

yeah! But I do understand him. I know what he’s going through. I went through the same thing

myself. I guess what I don’t understand is why he won’t listen to me.”

This man didn’t have the vaguest idea of what was really going on inside his boy’s head. He

looked into his own head and thought he saw the world, including his boy.

***

That’s the case with so many of us. We’re filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography.

We want to be understood. Our conversations become collective monologues, and we never

really understand what’s going on inside another human being.

When another person speaks, we’re usually “listening” at one of four levels. We may be

ignoring another person, not really listening at all. We may practice pretending. “Yeah. Uh-huh.

Right.” We may practice selective listening, hearing only certain parts of the conversation. We

often do this when we’re listening to the constant chatter of a preschool child. Or we may even

practice attentive listening, paying 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.

When I say empathic 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 is skill-based, truncated from character and relationships, and often insults those

“listened” to in such a way. 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 intent to reply,

to control, to manipulate.

When I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first

to understand, to really understand. It’s an entirely different paradigm.

Empathic (from empathy) listening 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 their paradigm, you

understand how they feel.

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement, a form of judgment. And it is

sometimes the more appropriate emotion and response. But people often feed on sympathy. It

makes them dependent. The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone;

it’s that you fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.

Empathic listening involves much more than registering, reflecting, or even understanding the

words that are said. Communications experts estimate, in fact, that only 10 percent of our

communication is represented by the words we say. Another 30 percent is represented by our

sounds, and 60 percent by our body language. In empathic 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.

Empathic 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 interpretation,

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 another human soul.

In addition, empathic 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 him.

Empathic listening is, in and of itself, a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account.

It’s deeply therapeutic and healing because it gives a person “psychological air.”

If all the air were suddenly sucked out of the room you’re in right now, what would happen to

your interest in this book? You wouldn’t care about the book; you wouldn’t care about anything

except getting air. Survival would be your only motivation.

But now that you have 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 the unsatisfied need that

motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological

survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, 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 then focus on influencing or problem solving.

This need for psychological air impacts communication in every area of life.

***

I taught this concept at a seminar in Chicago one time, and I instructed the participants to

practice empathic listening during the evening. The next morning, a man came up to me almost

bursting with news.

“Let me tell you what happened last night,” he said. “I was trying to close a big commercial

real estate deal while I was here in Chicago. I met with the principals, their attorneys, and

another real estate agent who had just been brought in with an alternative proposal.

“It looked as if I were going to lose the deal. I had been working on this deal for over six

months and, in a very real sense, all my eggs were in this one basket. All of them. I panicked. I

did everything I could—I pulled out all the stops—I used every sales technique I could. The final

stop was to say, ‘Could we delay this decision just a little longer?’ But the momentum was so

strong and they were so disgusted by having this thing go on so long, it was obvious they were

going to close.

“So I said to myself, ‘Well, why not try it? Why not practice what I learned today and seek

first to understand, then to be understood? I’ve got nothing to lose.’

“I just said to the man, ‘Let me see if I really understand what your position is and what your

concerns about my recommendations really are. When you feel I understand them, then we’ll see

whether my proposal has any relevance or not.’

“I really tried to put myself in his shoes. I tried to verbalize his needs and concerns, and he

began to open up.

“The more I sensed and expressed the things he was worried about, the results he anticipated,

the more he opened up.

“Finally, in the middle of our conversation, he stood up, walked over to the phone, and dialed

his wife. Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, he said, ‘You’ve got the deal.’

“I was totally dumbfounded,” he told me. “I still am this morning.”

He had made a huge deposit in the Emotional Bank Account by giving the man psychological

air. When it comes right down to it, other things being relatively equal, the human dynamic is

more important than the technical dimensions of the deal.

***

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 these many years.

But in the long run, it severely depletes both P and PC. You can’t achieve maximum

interdependent production from an inaccurate understanding of where other people are coming

from. And you can’t have interpersonal PC—high Emotional Bank Accounts—if the people you

relate with don’t really feel understood.

Empathic 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, in a sense, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced. That means

you have to really understand.

That’s why Habits 1, 2, and 3 are so foundational. They give you the changeless inner core,

the principle center, from which you can handle the more outward vulnerability with peace and

strength.