Listening is not sexy. When one compares it to its more alluring counterpart—speaking—it seems insignificant.

In society, we spend considerable time emphasizing the importance of persuasive writing, speaking, and communicating. For many people, developing listening skills only comes up after relationships begin to break down (e.g., marriage counseling).

As a prosecutor, I am constantly looking for ways to create a more persuasive presentation and hone my oral advocacy skills. But listening skills are what we desperately need as a society right now. We need to re-brand listening as attractive in society, teach it to our children, and model it in our public and private discourse.

5 Levels of Listening

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen R. Covey discusses five different levels of “listening” in his chapter on the 5th Habit of Highly Effective People: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.

The first level is ignoring. This one is pretty obvious. It is when we are not really listening at all.

The second is pretending. I have been caught doing this with my wife. This is when your mind is focused on something else, but you still say words—yeah, uh-huh, right—that give the impression you are mentally engaged.

The third level is selective listening. This is when we are not completely absent mentally, but we only hear certain parts of the conversation. Dr. Covey gives the example of listening to the constant chatter of a preschool child.

The fourth level is attentive listening. This level is the farthest most of us climb. This is when we pay attention and focus energy on the words that are being said, but our motive is autobiographical. You may not project your autobiography or experience into the actual interaction, but you are listening with the intent to reply, control, or manipulate.

The fifth level is empathetic listening. Very few of us listen in this manner. This is listening with the intent to truly understand. Empathetic listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. It means using all your mental and emotional energy to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. It means seeing their world, feeling what they feel, and experiencing their paradigm.

The Power of Empathetic Listening

Dr. Covey points out that empathy is different than sympathy. Sympathy is the older of the two terms, entering the English language in the mid-1500s. Although today we often use sympathy to convey pity or feelings of sorrow, it originally referred to a form of agreement or judgement. But people often feed on sympathy. It can make them dependent.

“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.”

— Dr. Stephen R. Covey

Empathetic listening involves more than just your ears and it requires one to focus on more than just the other person’s words. You listen for feeling, meaning, and behavior. You use your right brain as well as our left. You sense, you intuit, you feel. 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 focused on receiving the deep communication of another person’s soul.

Doug Crandall (listen to his interview on my podcast here) has a great story about empathetic listening from his days teaching at West Point. It was his second year of teaching and a cadet stopped by his office to talk about a grade. A few minutes into the conversation, she stops, thinks for a second, and then asks out of nowhere: “Sir, why don’t you love your daughter?”

Instead of getting defensive or putting the cadet in their place (after all he was an officer and she was a cadet), Doug responded: “Why do you ask that?” He sought to understand not just the words that came out of her mouth, but the underlying motivation, emotions, and feelings behind her question.

She continued, “Well, sir, you tell stories about your sons all the time, but you never talk about your daughter.” She explained and with each follow up question, he put himself in her shoes and began to understand what she was really communicating.

Doug explained it this way: “It wasn’t so much my daughter she was concerned about. That cadet didn’t feel like I loved HER. In a world where there were fourteen men and two women in every classroom . . . where the statues were of men . . . and the history was about men . . . and until 1976 only men could attend . . . in that world, I had made her feel like she didn’t matter. I’d done so with no malicious intent, but that was beside the point. My job as a leader, a teacher, and a person committed to loving other people was to make sure every single cadet knew that he or she mattered immensely. I’d failed.”

By practicing empathetic listening and truly seeking first to understand, Doug could now see with fresh eyes the world from her vantage point.

Psychological Air

After the need for physical survival, the next greatest need of a human being is psychological survival. The need to be understood, affirmed, validated, and appreciated. Empathetic listening meets this deep need in people.

As Dr. Covey puts it, empathetic listening gives people “psychological air.”

Imagine being in a room where the oxygen is immediately sucked out of the room. You would immediately stop thinking about whatever task you were trying to accomplish at the moment and focus on getting air. Nothing else would matter other than survival.

When we fail to listen to people in an empathetic manner, we suffocate them and fail to meet that human need to be heard. But when we listen with empathy and truly seek to understand, we give them air to breath.

Only after that vital need is met can we focus on influencing, practical solutions, and problem solving.

In America, many people are desperate to be heard. They are suffocating from our inability to listen to one another with empathy. It’s time we prioritize listening at the highest level and give our brothers and sisters air to breath. Then, perhaps, we can come up with solutions together.

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