You full understand their motivations and where they’re coming from and this is key to building up your emotional bank account with this person. * Although not using that exact phrase maybe!Įmpathic listening isn’t about agreeing with the other person, it’s about understanding them emotionally, behaviourally, physically (i.e. Empathic – The “And how does that make you feel*?” school of listening.Attentive – The “I know exactly how you feel, when that happened to me…” school of listening.Selective Hearing – The “But I’m sure I heard you say…” school of listening.Pretending – The “Uh huh, Oh really? That’s nice” school of listening.Ignoring – The “La La La, I can’t hear you” fingers in the ears school of listening.Generally, we only use one of the first four however the 5th is the one that we should be using: I guess that old saying of “In order to understand someone you have to walk 100 miles in their shoes” (or something like that) should be rephrased slightly!Ĭovey goes on to describe 5 different types of listening styles. Unless we understand them, we can’t help or influence the situation as we can’t see the world through their eyes. Therefore when people have a problem, or ask for advice, we see it from our point of view not theirs we’ve failed to understand completely. Usually, when we listen everything is “understood” within our own frame of reference, a sort of “been there, done that, bought the tee-shirt” mentality. We may think we do, but we don’t – as Covey points out. Generally when we listen we don’t understand at all. These habits need to be in place and understood for you to be truly able to understand and then be understood. It’s essentially the culmination of the techniques in the first 4 habits. Habit 5 isn’t just about purely learning to listen to the other person though. When you think about it, she was a rubbish listener! Stock phrases such as “How does that make you feel?” seem hollow and automatic they don’t really show that you feel empathy for the individual at all. Just think of Counsellor Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation. When we want to control or guide a situation into a mutually beneficial outcome, you can’t just use technique as this will seem cold, unfeeling and manipulative. To me it has sort of nasty, Machiavellian connotations I think he really should have discussed a mutually beneficial outcome here (which he gets on to much later in the chapter) rather than jump right into the “benefits” of influencing people. I have to admit I was a bit surprised that Covey uses the term “Influence”. In order to reach a Win/Win situation (See Habit 4) and be able to influence people and the outcome we need to understand the other person first. We need need to be non-judgemental and not make assumptions (assume makes an ASS of of U and ME remember!). This chapter centres around the understanding of the other person – what they want, need and aspire to as well as what their motivations and mindset are.Ĭovey sets out in Habit 5 to change the way we interact with people by changing the way that we listen to them. Now we move on to Habit 5 – “Seek first to understand then to be understood” So, if you’re new to the principles of 7 Habits, the above should give you a nice round-up of what it’s all about. Habit 4 – Think Win/Win – We need to reach mutually beneficial outcomes to become more personally effective and build up our “Emotional Bank Account”.The Public Victory Phase – We begin to move from our own private area of influence into the public arena.Habit 3 – Put First Things First – How to become “personally effective”.Habit 2 – Start with the end in mind – We need to know where we’re going in order to get there.Habit 1 – Be Proactive – Here we learn to take charge of situations and work towards our desired outcomes.To recap what we’ve covered before, we’ve looked at: It was meant to be a weekly series but I’m having trouble getting through a chapter a week, not very effective is it? It’s been a while since we looked at Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. All posts in the new series are listed here or you can read my all of my 2008 take on the 7 habits here. I’ve recently revisited the “ 7 Habits of Highly Effective people” (affiliate link) 6 years after writing this post.
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