فصل 31

Habit 5—Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

You Have Two Ears and One Mouth … Hel-lo!

Let’s say you go into a shoe store to buy a new pair of shoes. The sales clerk asks, “What kind of shoes are you looking for?” “Well, I’m looking for something that…”

“I think I know what you’d like,” he interrupts. “Everyone is wearing these. Trust me.” He rushes off and comes back with the ugliest pair of shoes you’ve ever seen. “Just take a look at these babies,” he says.

“But I really don’t like them.”

“Everyone likes them. They’re the hottest thing going right now.”

“I’m looking for something different.”

“I promise you. You’ll love them.”

“But I…”

“Listen. I’ve been selling shoes for ten years and I know a good shoe when I see it.” After this experience, would you ever want to go to that store again? Definitely not. You can’t trust people who give you solutions before they understand what your needs are. But did you know that we often do the same thing when we communicate?

“Hey, Melissa, how’s it goin’? You look really depressed. Is something the matter?” “You wouldn’t understand, Colleen. You’d think it was stupid.” “No, I wouldn’t. Tell me what’s going on. I’m all ears.” “Oh, I don’t know.”

“C’mon. You can tell me.”

“Well, okay … uuhm … things just aren’t the same between Tyrone and me anymore.” “I told you not to get involved with him. I just knew this would happen.” “Tyrone’s not the problem.”

“Listen, Melissa, if I were you, I’d just forget about him and move on.” “But, Colleen, that’s not how I feel.”

“Believe me. I know how you feel. I went through the same thing last year. Don’t you remember? It practically ruined my entire year.” “Just forget it, Colleen.”

“Melissa, I’m only trying to help. I really want to understand.

Now, go on. Tell me how you feel.”

It’s our tendency to want to swoop out of the sky like Superman and solve everyone’s problems before we even understand what the problem is. We simply don’t listen. As the American Indian proverb goes, “Listen, or thy tongue will make thee deaf.” The key to communication and having power and influence with people can be summed up in one sentence: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. In other words, listen first, talk second. This is Habit 5, and it works. If you can learn this simple habit—to see things from another’s point of view before sharing your own—a whole new world of understanding will be opened up to you.

The Deepest Need of the Human Heart

Why is this habit the key to communication? It’s because the deepest need of human heart is to be understood. Everyone wants to be respected and valued for who they are—a unique, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-cloned (at least for now) individual.

People won’t expose their soft middles unless they feel genuine love and understanding. Once they feel it, however, they will tell you more than you may want to hear. The following story about a girl with an eating disorder shows the power of understanding: I was a professional anorexic by the time I met Julie, Pam, and Lavon, my college roommates my freshman year. I had spent my last two years of high school concentrating on exercising, dieting, and triumphing in every ounce I lost. At eighteen years old and five foot eight, I weighed in at a breezy ninety-five pounds, a tall pile of bones.

I didn’t have many friends. Constant deprivation had left me irritable, bitter, and so tired I couldn’t carry on casual conversations. School social events were out of the question too. I didn’t feel like I had anything in common with any of the kids I knew. A handful of loyal friends really stuck it out with me and tried to help, but I tuned out their preachy lectures about my weight and chalked it up to jealousy.

My parents bribed me with new wardrobes. They badgered me and demanded that I eat in front of them. When I wouldn’t, they dragged me off to a series of doctors, therapists, and specialists. I was miserable and convinced my whole life was going to be that way.

Then I moved away to attend college. The luck of the draw settled me into a dormitory with Julie, Pam, and Lavon, the three girls who made my life worth living again.

We lived in a tiny cinderblock apartment, where all my strange eating patterns and exercising neuroses were right out in the open. I know they must have thought I looked strange with my sallow complexion, bruises, thinning hair, and jutting hips and collarbones. When I see pictures of myself at eighteen, I’m horrified at how terrible I looked.

But they weren’t. They didn’t treat me like a person with a problem. There were no lectures, no force feeding, no gossiping, no browbeating. I almost didn’t know what to do.

Almost immediately, I felt like one of them, except that I didn’t eat. We attended classes together, found jobs, jogged in the evenings, watched television, and hung out on Saturdays. My anorexia, for once, was not the central topic. Instead, we spent long nights discussing our families, our ambitions, our uncertainties.

I was absolutely amazed by our similarities. For the first time in literally years, I felt understood. I felt like someone had taken the time to understand me as a person instead of always trying to fix my problem first. To these three girls, I wasn’t an anorexic needing treatment. I was just the fourth girl.

As my sense of belonging grew, I began to watch them. They were happy, attractive, smart, and occasionally they ate cookie dough right out of the bowl. If I had so much in common with them, why couldn’t I eat three meals a day too?

Pam, Julie, and Lavon never told me how to heal myself. They showed me every day, and they really worked to understand me before trying to cure me. By the end of my first semester in college, they were setting a place for me at dinner. And I felt welcome.

Think of the influence these three girls had on the fourth girl because they tried to understand her instead of judging her. Isn’t it interesting that once she felt understood and not judged, she immediately dropped her defenses and was open to their influence? Contrast that with what might have happened had her roommates turned preachy on her.

Have you ever heard the saying “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”? How true it is. Think about a situation when someone didn’t take the time to understand or listen to you. Were you open to what they had to say?

While playing college football I developed some severe arm pain in my bicep for a time. It was a complex condition and I had tried a number of different techniques to fix it—ice, heat, massage, lifting weights, and anti-inflammatory pills—but nothing worked. So I went to see one of our more seasoned athletic trainers for help. Before I had described my condition, however, he said to me, “I’ve seen this thing before. This is what you need to do.” I tried to explain more, but he was already convinced he knew the problem. I felt like saying, “What a minute. Hear me out, Doc. I don’t think you understand.” As you might have guessed, his techniques actually made my arm hurt worse. He never listened, and I never felt understood. I lost confidence in his advice and avoided him at all costs whenever I had an injury. I had no faith in his prescriptions, because he never diagnosed. I didn’t care how much he knew, because he hadn’t shown me that he cared.

You can show you care by simply taking time to listen without judging and without giving advice. This short poem captures how badly people just want to be listened to: PLEASE LISTEN

When I ask you to listen to me

and you start giving me advice,

you have not done what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me

and you begin to tell me why

I shouldn’t feel that way,

you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me

and you feel you have to do something

to solve my problem,

you have failed me,

strange as that may seem.

Listen! All I ask is that you listen.

Don’t talk or do just hear me.