seek first to understand then to be understood

This person will want to know if you had similar experiences and how you acted. Once an employee has the feeling that you are really listening, this person will ask you what your opinion is. Instead, giving your employees the feeling that you (as a leader) are truly listening, has great impact. How can you understand someone else within a few words and reply with an entire story? When people answer with something resembling “I went through the very same thing, let me tell you about my experience”, these people actually project their own situation onto someone else, instead of truly listening. Many leaders mistake talking for listening, even though listening is one of the most essential characteristics a leader could have.

Instead, we first need to understand others in order to reach a Win-Win situation (habit 4). We shouldn’t be judgmental and associative. How we listen incorrectlyĬovey explains that we can change our interaction with people by changing the way we listen to others. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But how helpful is such advice? In the ‘5th habit of highly effective people’ Covey explicitly puts a focus on listening with the heart: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Although we haven’t even carefully looked at someone else’s situation, we tend to associate other people’s problems with our own experiences.

There is a common tendency to just listen for a few seconds, and then judgmentally blurt out an advice.

Seek first to understand then to be understood