“When you listen with curiosity, compassion, patience, and a genuine desire to understand, you’re unlikely to stray far from the path.” —William R. Miller
In this week’s Tips for High-Impact Teamwork article, we will continue our discussion of William Miller’s concept of empathic listening. In my previous article I introduced this approach to listening and described how it involves an intentional mindset, “heartset” and behaviors that can positively impact the speaker and the listener. In this article we will deepen our exploration of this potent form of listening by examining the three components of empathic listening: nonverbal communication, asking questions, and making reflective statements. This will be a summary of several chapters of Miller’s superb book, Listening Well: The Art of Empathic Understanding, and I encourage you to read the book for more details.
Most of what we communicate is nonverbal or paraverbal (tone), not verbal. Therefore, the first component of empathic listening is nonverbal communication. This includes giving the speaker our undivided attention (not looking around the room, checking our smartphones, interrupting, doing other tasks during a Zoom conversation, etc.), maintaining consistent and appropriate eye contact, varying our facial expressions in response to what the speaker is saying and using occasional and soft audible sounds to show that we are indeed listening intently (“uh huh,” “hmm,” etc.). Our affect and responses should be aligned with the speaker’s affect, though not as intense. As I mentioned in my last article, listening is not simply silence and it is not passive. In this first component of empathic listening, I believe that Miller is emphasizing the importance of being intentional with our listening—leaning in both physically and psychologically—and exerting effort to be present. In other words, if a brain SPECT scan were performed on us while using this approach to listening, it would show a high degree of glucose metabolism and brain activity even though we are sitting relatively still and quiet. Effective listening requires an investment of energy!
In Miller’s model of listening, the speaker is talking much more than the listener. When the listener does occasionally speak, they are manifesting the second and third components of empathic understanding: asking questions and making reflective statements. When we ask questions during empathic listening, we make sure that the questions are genuine (ones we do not know the answers to), typically open-ended, and based on our curiosity and an authentic desire to learn about the other person’s perspective. This is very important because asking questions by itself is frequently counterproductive to listening. Asking too many questions can make the conversation seem like a micro-interrogation, and questions without purpose can become a roadblock to listening. (I will discuss listening roadblocks in the next article.) With this in mind, it is probably best to avoid asking more than two questions in a row.
If you can only ask a few questions at a time, what does the listener do in addition to asking questions when they speak? In empathic understanding, the listener is making more reflective statements than asking questions. I think this is one of the more compelling and influential aspects of this approach. A reflective statement is an educated guess about what the person is saying or what they mean. For example, instead of asking a genuine question like, “Do you mean that she made you very frustrated,” the listener makes a statement like, “Her statements caused frustration.” Even if the statement is not completely correct, if it is understated tentatively from a place of curiosity, it typically will not impede the speaker’s flow. In this way, reflective statements help “move down the [conversation] road without a roadblock.” The best ways to convert questions into reflective statements is to remove the interrogative word at the beginning of the sentence (“What,” “Who,” “How,” etc.), and at the end of the statement you should inflect your voice downward (like a statement) instead of upward (like a question). This can take some practice and will almost certainly feel uncomfortable, awkward, or even presumptuous when you start using reflective statements more. But with practice, it really can help be a very impactful way to show that you are listening with your whole presence, understanding the emotional underpinnings that the speaker experienced in the situation, and fully synthesizing what is being said.
So how do we put all three of these components together? Miller recommends that the listener intermingles reflective statements with genuine questions, ensuring that there are more reflective statements than questions and asking just one or two questions at a time. But most importantly, remember that the listener is speaking much less than the speaker and is demonstrative active listening through the nonverbal behaviors discussed earlier.
You may wonder if the listener ever gets to share their perspective or express themselves in this approach. The answer is certainly yes, but only after the speaker has been given ample space to completely share what is inside them and what needs to be expressed. In situations where deep listening and empathic understanding is important, the speaker typically needs to empty themselves of what is weighing down or pressuring them before they will be in a cognitive, psychological and emotional place to attend to what the speaker says. Miller points out that reflective listening is sacrificial because it allows speakers to express themselves and explore their own experience. The listener suspends their perspectives, opinions, judgments, suggestions and other “stuff.”
Once the speaker has fully expressed themselves, it is appropriate and expected for the listener to share their perspective. When they do, they should ask the speaker if they can offer their perspective and then use “I” statements so that what they are saying comes across as their perspective, not “truth” or the “correct way” of seeing the situation. The listener can be assertive about the merits of their own perspective as their perspective without trying to convince the speaker that they need to have the same perspective. I have found that this approach can be very powerful because in the process both individuals are more willing to genuinely listen to understand and can see the value of another perspective without feeling the need to completely abandon their viewpoint.
I recommend that you practice integrating nonverbal communication, reflective statements and genuine questions in situations where empathic understanding is warranted. And there are a lot more of those situations than you may initially recognize, including team situations where there is conflict, differences of opinions and heightened emotions. In my experience, this approach can have unexpected, beneficial and profound implications for your team and other interactions. Miller’s concluding comments are certainly pertinent:
With ability in empathic understanding can come greater acceptance, compassion, forgiveness and humility. It is an ever present reminder that you are not the center of the universe, the sole source of truth. Accurate empathy opens your awareness of both the diversity and the interconnectedness of human beings. At least that has been my experience.