Are You Really Listening?

I believe we all believe we are good listeners, but in most cases, we are not. In my quest to be a better mother, wife and friend, I have been working on being a better listener. In studying listening, I discovered there are four levels of listening:

• We ignore the person
• We pretend to listen
• We selectively listen
• We attentively listen

Apparently, there is a fifth level. Empathic listening. When you are an empathic listener, you strive to fully understand the person’s words and feelings. You listen with ears and eyes and with your heart. Empathic listeners seek first to understand before trying to be understood. That means putting aside your own views and getting inside the other person’s thoughts and words. Here are some things you can do to improve your listening skills:

1. Be attentive. Be interested in what the other person has to say. Be alert, look at them when they are speaking. Give them 100% of your attention.
2. Be a nonjudgemental sounding board. Allow the person speaking to you to bounce ideas and feelings off you while you listen in a non-critical way.
3. Be a mirror. Reflect back what is being said to you. Are you hearing them right?
4. Acknowledge you are listening. Do this by nodding, eye contact and by having an open, relaxed body language.

Empathic listening is not listening to judge, solve, fix, replay or disagree with what the speaker wants to say. The goal is to make them feel listened to and understood. Something I believe many of us desire more of in our friends and family.