Communication is the most important skill in life. We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: You’ve spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening? What training or education have you got that enables you to listen so that you really, deeply understand another human being from the individual’s own frame of reference?
Comparatively few people have had any training in listening at all. And, for the most part, their training has been in the personality ethic of technique, truncated from the character base and the relationship base absolutely vital to authentic understanding of another person.
If you want to interact effectively with me, to influence me – your spouse, your child, your neighbour, your boss, your co-worker, your friend – you first need to understand me. And you can’t do that with technique alone. If I sense you’re using some technique, I sense duplicity, manipulation. I wonder why you’re doing it, what your motives are. And I don’t feel safe enough to open myself up to you.
The real key to your influence with me is your example, your actual conduct. Your example flows naturally out of your character, or the kind of person you truly are – not what others say you are or what you may want me to think you are. It is evident in how I actually experience you.
Your character is constantly radiating, communicating. From it, in the long run, I come to instinctively trust or distrust you and your efforts with me.
If your life runs hot and cold, if you’re both caustic and kind, and, above all, if your private performance doesn’t square with your public performance, it’s very hard for me to open up with you. Then, as much as I may want and even need to receive your love and influence, I don’t feel safe enough to expose my opinions and experiences and my tender feelings. Who knows what will happen?
But unless I open up with you, unless you understand me and my unique situation and feelings, you won’t know how to advise and counsel me. What you say is good and fine, but it doesn’t quite pertain to me.
You may say you care about and appreciate me. I desperately want to believe that. But how can you appreciate me when you don’t even understand me? All I have are your words, and I can’t trust words.
I’m too angry and defensive – perhaps too guilty and afraid – to be influenced, even though inside I know I need what you could tell me.
Unless you’re influenced by my uniqueness, I’m not going to be influenced by your advice. So if you want to be really effective in the habit of interpersonal communication, you cannot do it with technique alone. You have to build the skills of empathic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust. And you have to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that create a commerce between hearts.