Amazing

4 Autobiographical Responses

1. Evaluate – agree or disagree

2. Probe – ask questions from our own frame of reference;

* playing twenty questions

3. Advise – we give counsel based on our experience

* "I told you so's."

4. Interpret – try to figure people out, explain their motives, their behavior, based on our motives and behavior.

You will never be able to truly step inside another person and see the world as he sees it until you develop the pure desire, the strength of personal character, and the positive emotional bank account as well as the empathic listening skills to do so.

The emphatic listening skills involve four developmental stages:

1. The least effective is to mimic content, which is taught in active or reflective listening - repeating what the person said back to him or her.

2. To rephrase the content is more effective, but still limited to the verbal communication. It's putting the persons' meaning in your own words. This is a "logical" approach.

3. To reflect feeling involves the right brain, emotional level. You’re not paying as much attention to what he’s saying as you are to the way he feels about what he’s saying.

4. To rephrase the content and reflect the feeling includes both the second and third, attempting to understand both sides of his communication (feeling and content) and give psychological air. It opens a soul to soul flow.

*Psychological Air - Communication between two people that is the same as inhaling and exhaling with breath - there is a give and a take, a time to listen and a time to speak.