Empathic ListeningSee also: Top Tips for Effective Listening
Our page on Mindful Listening explains that listening to someone with your full attention—including consciously bringing your mind back if it wanders—can increase your empathy. However, there is also
Empathic ListeningSee also: Top Tips for Effective Listening
Our page on Mindful Listening explains that listening to someone with your full attention—including consciously bringing your mind back if it wanders—can increase your empathy. However, there is also a separate concept called empathic listening. This describes a way of listening with your “ears, eyes and heart”, as one blog writer put it eloquently.
Just like mindful listening, some people suggest that empathic listening is the same as Active Listening. Certainly both mindful and active listening can improve your empathy. However, there is more to empathic listening than simply paying attention and responding.
This page describes empathic listening, and explains what skills you need to develop this ability.
What Is Empathic Listening?
Empathic listening is the process of making an emotional connection with someone who is speaking. This enables you to put yourself into their shoes, and feel with them—the definition of empathy.
It is therefore an extension of active listening, but requires a conscious and much stronger focus on feelings. Crucially, empathic listening gives the speaker space to feel heard and validated. It is therefore perhaps more of a therapeutic technique than active listening, which is more about supporting good two-way communication.
The main aim of empathic listening is usually to provide support or encouragement to the speaker.
This therefore sets it apart from other forms of active listening, where the goal is to understand the communication and respond in whatever way seems most appropriate.
However, this does not mean that empathic listening is only for therapeutic situations. It can be extremely useful at work for ensuring that you fully understand a situation, both facts and feelings, and actively showing that you have heard, understood and accepted someone’s message.
Empathic listening and time
Perhaps more than any other form of listening, empathic listening takes time.
When you are engaging in empathic listening, you have identified that the speaker may be processing emotions, and needs you to be emotionally engaged. This is unlikely to be a rapid process.
It is therefore important that you clear your mind, including your mental calendar or ‘to do’ list to give the other person that time.
This may not be convenient—but emotions are not always convenient in their timing, and sometimes you need to provide support more than you need to make that phone call, or go to that meeting.
Practical Empathic Listening
Aside from needing to give the speaker adequate time, there are other characteristics of practical empathic listening. They include:
A complete lack of judgement. Empathic listening requires you to put aside your own opinions and views, and concentrate wholly on the speaker. Importantly, you need to show that you accept the speaker’s message, even if you don’t necessarily agree with it. You can show that you are doing this by using phrases such as ‘I understand’ and ‘I see’.
Giving your full attention. As with any kind of effective listening, empathic listening requires you to give the speaker your full attention. In order to do this, you have to be ‘present’. You may find our page on Mindful Listening is helpful in developing this technique.
A focus on both facts and feelings. Empathic listening means being aware of, and understanding, the speaker’s feelings and emotions, as well as the words that they are using. This means consciously trying to understand the meaning of what they are saying—but also what is behind the words, and what they are not saying. Much of this will probably be in their body language and other non-verbal communication.
Acknowledging feelings. Especially at work, it can feel strange to acknowledge feelings in a conversation. However, it is an important part of empathic listening—and even just saying ‘I can see that you feel quite strongly about this’ is helpful in s