“One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say,” wrote Bryant McGill, thought leader and international bestselling author.
How true this is. Listening plays a crucial role in building and maintaining healthy relationships, especially in families, which often include multiple kinds of relationships. For example, one person in a family might maintain relationships with parents, grandparents, siblings, children, step-children, and extended family.
When we think of communication, we probably first think of speaking. But listening plays an equally—if not more important—role in our efforts to communicate well with others.
At its most basic, communication simply involves a sender, a message, a channel, and a receiver.
Sometimes you are the sender, and sometimes you are the receiver. In other words, sometimes you’re talking, and sometimes you’re listening. We spend years teaching our children how to talk, and then they go to school and learn how to write and deliver speeches. When was the last time you heard of someone taking a class on listening? We spend just as much time listening as we spend talking—or, at least, this should be how it is, so why don’t we spend more time learning how to do it right?
Listening is so important that it is even in the Bible. James 1:19 mentions both aspects of communication: the sender and the receiver. It says, “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” What if we all sought to listen first and speak second? Wouldn’t that be a more peaceful world to live in?
Before we talk about how to listen better, let’s talk about some of the benefits of focusing on the listening aspect of communication in your family.
If you do a simple Internet search, you’re going to find thousands of articles describing the difference between passive and active listening. There is actually another even more advanced form of listening that most people do not know about. However, let’s start by defining passive and active listening just in case you’re among the few who haven’t read about them.
In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey calls active listening “attentive listening.” Most people believe active or attentive listening is the highest form of listening, but he describes another level: empathetic listening.
Empathetic listening involves listening with the intent to understand both the message being conveyed and the emotion behind it. “Empathetic (from empathy) listening gets instead another person’s frame of reference,” Covey writes in his book. “You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel.”
Covey writes that there are three levels of empathetic listening. He uses a conversation between a father and a son to demonstrate the three levels. The dialogues below are taken from his book.
1. The first level of empathetic listening is mimicking, which essentially involves repeating full or partial phrases back to the listener to indicate he or she is being heard and at least partially understood.
Son: “Boy, Dad, I’ve had it! School is for the birds.”
Father: “You’ve had it. School is for the birds.”
2. The second level of empathetic listening is rephrasing. This means repeating the information back using different words. This indicates understanding of the message.
Son: “Boy, Dad, I’ve had it! School is for the birds.”
Dad: “You don’t want to go to school anymore.”
3. The third level of empathetic listening is reflecting feeling. This involves rephrasing the content and reflecting the feeling.
Son: “Boy, Dad, I’ve had it! School is for the birds.”
Dad: “You’re feeling really frustrated with school.”
In summary, empathetic listeners show that they not only understand what that the speaker means but also understand how he feels. This is a very simple example, but the concept of empathetic listening can be applied in more complex situations and conversations. When your children, spouse, sibling, or parent speaks to you, try listening with the intent to understand the meaning and of the words and the feeling behind them. Then watch how your relationships grow.