Listening With Your Answer Running

How often do you really listen? Really listening means understanding not only what the person is saying in terms of the sense of the words, but really caring about the person and what they mean and intend by their communication. Most of the time we operate in a "surface listening" mode ("I hear you" -- is a phrase a lot of us have been taught to say ... supposedly confirmatory but noncommital. It makes a lot of people see "red" because it really says that you don't have any commitment to the communication ... or at least that's how many people see it.) I'm not sure what the answer is here, or even if there really is one ... perhaps paraphrasing what you are hearing and going beyond the words to the person, so that the paraphrase includes empathetic statements about how you are hearing what is being said and how it resonates with your own lived experience.

I think the hardest thing in the world is for two people to truly and deeply communicate. In the modern world we have built up more and more barriers so that today people mostly don't ... that's a shame. --RaySchneider

See FightFair