Habit 5: Seek First to Understand then to be Understood

Listen or thy tongue will make thee deaf.

-         Native American Proverb

If you can see things from others point of view before sharing your own, a whole new world will be opened for you. This habit is the key to communication is because everyone’s deepest need is to be understood. Everyone wants to be respected and valued for who they are – a unique, one-of-a-kind, individual.

 

There are 5 types of poor listening:

·        Spacing out

·        Pretend listening

·        Selective listening

·        Word listening

·        Self-centered listening

Spacing out is when someone is talking to us but we ignore them while we wander off to our own little word. 

Pretend listening is when we aren’t paying much attention to the other person, but we make pretend comments like “yeah,” “uh-huh,” “cool.” The other person will often feel like they aren’t good enough to be heard or paid attention to. 

Selective listening is where we pay attention only to the parts that we want to hear. Since you’ll always want to talk about what you want to talk about, instead of what the other person wants to talk about, chances are you’ll never develop lasting friendships.

Word listening is when we actually pay attention to the words of someone, but not the body language. If you focus on only the words, you won’t really get what the person’s deeper emotions and feeling actually are.  

Self- centered listening is when we listen, but we see everything from our perspective. Instead of standing in another persons shoes, we want to stand in our own.  

But then there is genuine listening. To do this you must listen with your eyes, hart, and ears. Listening with just your ears isn’t enough, because only 7% of communication is done with words. The rest comes from body language, and tone or feeling. To hear what people are really saying, you need to listen to what they are not saying.