One of the most important elements in being able to communicate is listening.
There are many people who do not feel heard., even if they pay attention to them, even if they try to talk. Listening is not always an easy task. The lack of a empathic listening and quality does not necessarily occur due to a lack of interest or education. Most of the time, we are unable to let go and get lost in the other person's words. Maybe because we want to give a quick answer, or because our own need to be heard prevents us from doing so.
In any case, it is important to remember that listening is also learned. And doing this can greatly improve the way we relate to others, because truly listening means putting aside our selfishness.
It allows us to understand the other, the foreign, the different... that which has a message to communicate. Of course, the better we understand this otherness, the less room there will be for moral judgments and misunderstandings.
In the article “Erich Fromm's 6 rules of listening: the great philosopher and psychologist on the art of disinterested understanding” from the site Brain Pickings, take up some of Fromm's most notable ideas about listening and remind us of the following:
Listening, Fromm argues, "It is an art like understanding poetry" and, like any art, it has its own rules and regulations. From his half-century of practice as a therapist, Fromm offers six guidelines for mastering the art of disinterested understanding:
1. The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
2. You should not have anything important in mind, you should be optimally free from anxiety and greed.
3. You must have one imagination that works freely and is concrete enough to be expressed in words.
4. It must be endowed with a capacity to empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the other person's experience as if it were their own.
5. The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity to love. Understanding another means loving them, not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to them and overcoming the fear of losing them.
6. Understanding and loving are inseparableIf they are separated, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
In the rest of The art of listeningFromm goes on to detail the techniques, dynamics, and mindsets that make for an optimal listening relationship, both in therapy and in life.
