07 Feb Listen to Understand

Commit to be consistently kind.  If you are hot then cold or caustic then kind people will have a hard time trusting you.  Commit to consistently making deposits into people’s Emotional bank – doing and saying kind things.  10% of our communication is by our words.  30% is by our intonation and the sounds we make.  60% is by our body language.  Remember your key influence is by your actions.

Don’t rush to try to make people understand your point of view.  Stop, listen, and try to truly understand their situation first.  I honestly have a difficult time with this.  As a physician I feel like my job is to help fix the person.  In reality my job is to first understand them.  When my wife or kids come to me with a problem, I immediately want to got to the fix mode and bypass the whole understanding mode.  Stephen Covey describes this as an autobiographical response.  We listen through our own perspective.  We listen to evaluate – to agree or disagree.  We ask questions or probe from our own frame of reference.  We advise based on our own experience and we interpret or explain their motives based on our own behaviors.  By doing these things we frustrate and alienate the people we love.  We don’t leave them feeling understood.

How do we listen to understand?  When somebody comes to you with a problem or wants to share something reflect the content and feeling of what they say.  Rephrase what they say in your own words.  This uses the logical portion of your brain, but this is not enough.  People need to know that you understand their feelings as well.  Don’t just rephrase what they say but reflect that you understand the emotion of the situation.  By doing this you are making deposits in their emotional bank.  With time and as they develop trust in you they will likely open up and ask for your personal advice.

Ancient Greeks had a Philosophy Ethos first, then Pathos, and finally Logos (Ethos, Pathos, Logos).  Develop your personal character first (Ethos).  Take time to understand how they feel, and become aligned with their emotions (Pathos).  It is not until you do the first two, that you can then present what you may see as the Logical (Logos) recommendation.

People don’t care what you know until they know that you care!

Here’s to the Journey!