Tag Archives: habit 5

Seven Habits – Day 15 – Habit 5 (with good and bad examples)

15 Wednesday Jul 2020

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Empathic communication – sounds deep. And it is, but it isn’t impossible. Empathy is more than sympathy, which is just a form of agreement. Empathy is truly understanding another from their frame of reference, as if you’re in the same situation and feeling the same emotions. Why is that so hard?

It’s hard because in our world we listen with the intent to reply – or, more accurately, butt in with our better story or advanced and superior opinion. This is actually normal, so don’t grieve if you find yourself doing that. But when you can, work in your Circle of Influence, be proactive and aware, and decide to listen with the intent to understand before speaking. Habit 5 is called Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood. There is a sequence, and it is both logical and pathological.

There are 5 levels of listening; ignoring, pretending, selective, attentive and empathic. Most of us vacillate between selective and attentive, but the latter is the most effective in conversations involving emotion – like political and sociological debate. The enemy of empathic listening is the need to probe, advise when only listening is required, to interpret (wrongly) based on our experience, and to evaluate or judge.

To properly hear what someone is saying you have to listen with your ears, eyes and heart. Your eyes and ears will add emotion to the words being spoken, and your heart will seek to interpret what is really being said. Unfortunately, the Twitter world says we must decide in advance what the racist/sexist/transphobic misogynist is saying, even before they speak, and we then call ourselves enlightened and woke.

Covey’s advice is to reflect and reframe someone’s communication as a means of seeking to understand and to demonstrate that you hear what they are saying. If you want an example of how this is NOT done, watch Jordan Peterson being interviewed by Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News, where she keeps reflecting back what she has decided he said, when he clearly has not! (Go HERE)

My own experience is that once you start to listen ‘better’, you find yourself finishing other people’s sentences before they do – hopefully in less emotional discussions but the principle applies. You are clearly listening with intent to understand if you can demonstrate that understanding by completing the other’s thoughts!

Another way of seeing that you are effectively exercising Habit 5 is when you disagree with someone’s opening statement, then listen and find that your original counter-argument is amended – or even unnecessary. Listening has resulted in them realising the error of their thoughts – or in you doing the same.

Consider the art of empathic communication next time you watch any political debate on the television, and you will soon realise that ‘our betters’ are rarely interested in the first part of Habit 5. At the risk of starting an argument, watch Jacob Rees-Mogg and Vince Cable HERE, and see how each listens to the other without interruption, so that each can understand and counter the other’s argument. Then compare it to most such debates you see.

Habit5 requires that you work within your Circle of Influence out of genuine interest in the other’s thoughts and words; exercising the character to listen rather than speak; and also the maturity to be willing to be influenced by what is being said.

Stephen Covey once said that this was the hardest Habit for him – and if it’s hard for him, recognise that means you have to start practising now!

Tomorrow -Synergy.

Habit 5 – The Bit We All Missed

28 Thursday May 2020

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I have been studying Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits for a quarter of a century, as have many of those with whom I have connected on LinkedIn. The recent 30th Anniversary Edition hit my hallway floor last Saturday – actually, it hit the outside step as the delivery person stood safely distant –and I am deep within its pages again. I have already discovered a few missed nuggets. Including today.

Habit 5 – Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood – has been a familiar tenet in the corporate world, I am sure. I have read that chapter many times, and always sworn to try to apply it in testing or inquisitorial conversations. The book itself describes its use in many such instances, using examples from the perspective of the lives of individuals in their personal and working lives to illustrate how verbal conversations can be improved through application of the aforementioned Habit..

Today, I found a bit I missed and, according to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (if my experience is anything to go by), so have a lot of other people. And possibly the reason I missed it is because this nugget was detailed not in Habit 5’s chapter, but in Habit 7’s, on renewal.

He wrote about great literature that ‘(reading in various fields) can expand our paradigms and sharpen our mental saw, particularly if we practice Habit 5 as we read, and seek first to understand.’

That was a AHA! moment. Or indeed a DUH! moment. I’d never thought about that, even if I’d exercised it. ‘Seek First to Understand what we READ’. It isn’t just a conversational model.

Realising that, and recognising its importance, led me to ask the question, “If people read the news with an enquiring rather than an assumptive mindset, would most of the rubbish on social media go away?’

Yes. People would read the allegations, check the facts, research any science or laws applicable, review the political past of the reporter/witness/commentator and eventually, perhaps, come to a less) emotional, ideological or ill-informed conclusion. And then shut the hell up.

(Of course, it might wind them up even more…..)

At the moment, we are witnessing a change in the reportage of the media. They have gone from just reporting, worked through and past analysis, and on to out-and-out commentary. Unfortunately, this is proving to be commentary without real, deep, objective or unbiased analysis.

It’s as if the middle bit is a bar to profit for the printed and commercial media, and a bar to fame and notoriety for the public-broadcaster’s employees who are all vying for a better position, or their own programme. The objective is no longer balanced reportage – it is fame and/or profit through a ‘shock-jock’ style approach..

(The last time newsreaders did something outside simple news-reading for fame, they dressed as sailors and did flick-flacks for Morecombe and Wise.)

Where have the Paul Foots and the Martin Bells and the Michael Buerks gone? They all reported injustice and societal disasters without the need for constant personal attack or self-importance. Even the famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward now seems to be left-biased, and only appears when the right is to be attacked. (I would’ve said criticised but they’ve all gone way past that.)

But more to my point – why have we, the public, stopped putting in the effort and started to just accept what is thrown at us by the media without asking ‘Is this true, exaggerated, misunderstood or made up?’ Why have we omitted that step and then just lost our sanity and sense of calm over what we have not checked is worth that effort?

Habit 5 – Seek First To Understand is a sensible, reasoned, objective and intellectually satisfying approach to news, documentaries and other sources of information. The counter to Habit 5, Seeking First to Assume, makes an – well, you know.

Don’t be one of those.