Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

3. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that we are all reasonable even when we disagree, until proven otherwise.

I find that when you begin a meeting with these assumptions, there is a greater sense of trust in the room. I recommend this simple practice as a way to foster trust within your team. Do this at every meeting, and you may find your team members gradually gravitating toward mutual trust.

Empathic Listening

If you have been practicing Mindful Conversation (the looping and dipping thing from Chapter 3), you may by now be skilled at listening mindfully and enjoying admiration from your peers for your listening prowess. It is time to go one up from here, Grasshopper. Let us now up-skill ourselves from mindful listening to empathic listening, and become able to listen for feelings.

Empathic listening is a very powerful skill. During one empathic listening exercise in Search Inside Yourself, I played the role of a participant to fill a vacancy. As part of the exercise, I listened for my exercise partner’s feelings as she spoke, and then I told her what I thought she felt. After I was done, she started to cry. I asked her what happened, and she said she had not felt this understood in a very long time. That was when I realized the power of empathic listening. People thirst for others to understand their feelings, and when somebody does, it touches them so deeply that they sometimes cry. Imagine how much good you can do for people if you are skillful at listening empathically.

In Search Inside Yourself, we practice empathic listening as a formal Mindful Conversation exercise (from Chapter 3) with one important change. In Mindful Conversation, the listener doing the looping begins her feedback with “What I hear you say is…” In this exercise, the listener doing the looping will begin her feedback with “What I hear you feel is…” This requires the listener to listen for feelings and then to give feedback about feelings.

FORMAL PRACTICE OF EMPATHIC LISTENING

This is a Mindful Conversation exercise (see Chapter 3), but instead of listening for content, you listen for feelings.

Get in pairs and take turns being the speaker and the listener. As usual, the speaker begins with a monologue. If you are the listener, after the speaker’s monologue, you loop about what you heard the speaker was feeling. In other words, instead of starting your looping with, “What I hear you say is…” start with, “What I hear you feel is…”

Suggested topics for monologue:

• A difficult work situation or a conflict you are having with a boss, co-worker, or person who reports to you

• A time when you could feel someone else’s pain, or when you wanted to but were unable to

• Any other topic with emotional “juice”

Meta-Conversation

After each of you has taken your turn being the speaker and listener, have a meta-conversation about how the conversations went.

In class, after we complete this exercise, we deliver the punch line: We never explain to the class how to do empathic listening. We assume people already know how.

And it works. Usually, after we deliver the punch line, folks in the class become pleasantly surprised by how well they listened empathically without any instruction. They discover for themselves that empathic listening is an ability we are born with; it is part of the standard package that comes installed as part of our social brain. The only thing we have to do is improve it with practice.

Specifically, there are four things we can do to strengthen our ability for empathic listening.

1. Mindfulness: With mindfulness, we become more perceptive and receptive.

2. Kindness: When we are kind, we can listen better to feelings.

3. Curiosity: Practice wondering what someone might be feeling when you hear their stories.

4. Practice: Just do a lot of empathic listening. The more you do it, the better you become, especially when you practice it in conjunction with mindfulness, kindness, and curiosity.

Given those insights, below are some suggestions for how you can practice empathic listening informally in an everyday setting. Note that the informal practice is a little trickier than the formal practice. In formal practice, we get to create an artificial environment to talk about how well we are listening to each other’s feelings, but in natural conversation, we do not usually say, “I’m going to tell you what I heard you feel, and you let me know how well I’m doing, yeah?” That is a little awkward. Hence, for the informal practice, I suggest that you focus more on your own inner qualities involved in empathic listening, tread lightly in giving feedback, and feel free to stay close to your own comfort zone. Remember that people generally do not like to be told how they feel, even if you are right (you can try this one at home if you need confirmation: “Clearly you’re feeling hurt.” “I am not!”). So, ask about feelings, or at least remember to start with “This is what I hear” and give the speaker a chance to correct you if you haven’t got it exactly right. Your empathic listening will get better with practice, even if you stay well within your own comfort zone, as long as you put mindfulness, kindness, and curiosity into your effort every time.

INFORMAL PRACTICE OF EMPATHIC LISTENING

Preparing for the Conversation

The qualities that are most conducive to empathic listening are mindfulness and kindness. If you have time to prepare for the conversation, prime the pump for these qualities, first with a few minutes of Mindfulness Meditation (see Chapter 2). When your mind is in that mindful state, you will be more able to pay attention to feelings, both your own and the other person’s. You will also be more able to listen without judging, which allows you to become more open to what you will hear. If you have more time, do a few minutes of the Just Like Me / Loving Kindness exercise from earlier in this chapter toward the other person. Putting yourself in this frame of mind makes the other person more receptive to you, and you more receptive to him or her. During the Conversation

Begin the conversation by thinking to yourself, “I want this person to be happy.” When listening, practice Mindful Listening (see Chapter 3). Remind yourself to listen for the other person’s feelings. Be curious about what he or she may be feeling. Give him or her generous amounts of airtime.

If it is appropriate for the situation and you are comfortable doing so, you may ask the other person how he or she is feeling. If the situation warrants it and you are comfortable doing so, you may tell him or her (gently and with kindness), “I hear that you are feeling…” Generously allow him or her to respond. If you are right about what he or she felt, he or she may feel touched that you understood and may let you know. If you are wrong, allow him or her to tell you so, and listen in a kind and open manner. Meta-Conversation

If it is appropriate for the situation and you are comfortable doing so, at the end of the conversation, you may initiate a meta-conversation by asking, “Was this conversation helpful to you?”

Praising People Skillfully

Besides listening to people empathically, something else you can do to bring out their best is to praise them. First and foremost, always praise authentically (or, never praise falsely)—if your praise is not genuine, it will be sniffed out and you will lose credibility. However, even when your praises are genuine, you need to learn to praise skillfully. It turns out that you can undermine people by praising them, even when you are doing it with the best of intentions!