And, from that human connection that is made, comes trust and influence. Stage 4 is the greatest form of empathetic listening where you sincerely seek to understand, ultimately giving the person the psychological air they need. Stage 4 – Rephrase the Content & Reflect Feeling: A combination of stages 2 and 3 is considered most effective. Put the content in your own words AND reflect back the feelings you sensed.Stage 3 – Reflect Feeling: Listen (and sense) for feelings and reflect them back.Stage 2 – Rephrase the Content: Put what you heard into your own words. This is slightly more effective but still limited.Stage 1 – Mimic Content: Simply listen and repeat the words back. It’s the first step towards empathetic listening, however, the least effective alone.Toward providing psychological air, Covey offers four developmental stages of empathetic listening: So, what gets in the way of us giving someone psychological air? While this seems simple enough, we often rush to fix the problem. We tend to respond from our own perspective by evaluating, probing, advising, or interpreting rather than seeking to deeply understand. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing and problem solving.” “When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. Allowing For Basic Human NeedsĬovey introduces the concept of “psychological air” pointing out that, after physical survival, our greatest human need is psychological survival or the need to be understood, affirmed, validated, and appreciated. We’d all agree that communication is probably one of the most important life skills, however, you can’t be an effective communicator with technique alone. You must develop the skills of empathetic listening. As Covey points out, while we all learned to read and write over many years of school, there was little to no focus on empathetic listening or listening with the intent to deeply understand.

With empathic listening, you are listening with your whole self it’s not just your ears hearing the words. Your eyes see their body language and behavior and your heart senses the meaning and feelings behind their words. We listen through our own paradigms with the intent to reply and are either speaking or preparing to speak. When we listen, we may pretend to listen, do selective listening, attempt to be attentive, or even all together ignore. Furthermore, keep in mind that empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement. Empathy is understanding. You don’t have to agree with someone to understand them. A Paradigm ShiftĮmpathetic listening involves a significant paradigm shift. For most, we seek first to be understood and not to understand. Habit 5 centers around the highest form of listening, what is referred to as “empathic listening.” With this Habit, Covey challenges us to develop the powerful skill of empathetic listening to first diagnose, seek to deeply understand, before prescribing a fix to the problem. Quite frankly, Habit 5 is the answer to Habit 4 – Think Win/Win or rather, seeking first to understand makes Win/Win possible. Our focus this time is Habit 5 – Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, with regard to effective Agile Transformation. We are 4 down and 3 to go in our exploration of Stephen R. Habit 5 : Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood

Empathetic listening inside out