Today during a financial education seminar that I attended, I was reminded of the 5th habit from Stephen Covey's book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", which is: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood. Right there, I knew that this principle would be the challenges for these 2 days. In today's challenge I'll be focusing on the first part "Seek First To Understand", and tomorrow (Day 12 Challenge), I'll share about "To Be Understood."
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of." ~ Pascal
Too many of us (including me of course), "seek first to understand' can be really challenging, because it involves a very deep paradigm shift. We typically seek first to be understood. It's easy for us to project our own experiences onto other people's behaviour. We tend to listen with the intent to reply, rather than to understand.
In order to seek first to understand, Covey suggested a very important concept called "empathic listening" - which is listening with intent to understand. Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out through their perspectives, you understand their worldview, their paradigm and how they feel.
Today I've committed myself to working on really listening to others, seek first to understand through empathic listening through my interactions with people around me. And I'll ask for feedback in a week. Will you join with me in seek first to understand?
4 comments:
This is good...I am down to be apart of this. Although I have really already begun to do this. The Holy Spirit has really begun to teach me this. I am much slower to speak than I use to be. Although I still have the slip ups...good stuff. I like the Pascal qoute. That name sounds so familiar to me, but my mind can't recollect it. I think I will google it! lol..God bless! :)
Good on you Chris! Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. I like some of his thinking! :) x
this sounds like a good concept and a different way of thinking.
Hi
Pascal is also the name of a redundant software programming system a bit like Basic Chris
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