If you aren't, as with everything... you can only change yourself..
Here's some fantastic writing called :"Don't let the call drop", that may be of help for you:
"Learning How to Listen
To listen entails a fundamental letting go of self-centeredness. We have to be willing to put down our own thoughts, views, and feelings temporarily to truly listen. It's a wholehearted, embodied receptivity that lies at the core of both communication and contemplative practice… We learn this kind of deep listening in meditation, discovering the stillness of awareness. With practice we can access it in the midst of conversation. The more we learn how to listen, the more available we become for others and for our life in general…
Completing the Cycle
Checking informally through voice and body language helps us assess the general connection in a conversation, yet it relies on an unspoken assumption. If I ask, "Do you understand?" and say, "Yes," all I really know is that you think you understand. As the saying goes, the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. To make sure the call hasn't dropped, we need a more reliable method, an authentic, lightweight way to confirm that we're actually hearing one another. When listening, we want to know that we've heard correctly, and when speaking, we want to know if we've been understood. In difficult situations, the need is even greater. "You're not listening! You don't understand!" How many times have you said (or heard) this in the midst of an argument? Just because we're speaking the same language doesn't mean we understand each other. We say one thing, they hear something else. They say one thing and mean something else. It's amazing how quickly we can get entangled! When someone says, "You're not listening," part of what they mean is "I don't feel heard right now." It's often a plea for empathy and a sign that we've lost connection. To get back on track we first need to reconnect. Let's look at two examples of how this might play out in a conversation.
PERSON A: "You're not listening!"
PERSON B: "Yes, I am! I heard everything you said."
PERSON A: "You're not listening!"
PERSON B: "It sounds like you're not feeling heard. I'm really trying to listen but let me try again."
OR,
PERSON B: "Okay-I'd really like to understand more. What could I do or say that would help you to feel heard?"
Which conversation is more likely to move toward resolution? In the first instance, each person may feel less understood, which usually spurs us to assert our position more forcefully. This leads to less connection, more assertions, and so on. Most of us know how awful it feels to be caught in this kind of a vortex, how quickly things devolve and how painfully they can end. Notice the difference in the second example, when we find some willingness to listen with empathy. Here, the speaker acknowledges the other person's experience and tries to reconnect. Doing this depends on our ability to lead with presence and come from curiosity and care rather than fall back into our default modes of defending or blaming. The main tool here is using a verbal reflection to "complete a cycle" of communication. We listen, then get confirmation at key moments that what one person hears matches what the other person meant, that message sent equals message received…
The Roots of Empathy
At the heart of verbal reflection is empathy: an intuitive reaching to understand another's experience on its own terms. Without empathy, the reflection will feel empty. Spend time with a giggling toddler or a puppy and something inside softens. Stand near someone who is angry or panicked and we feel it! This is the phenomenon known as emotional contagion. Babies begin to cry when they hear other babies crying. When we see that toddler or puppy hurting, something inside us quivers. We feel a compassionate impulse to reach out. Today we are learning more about the neurological and evolutionary bases of empathy. Infants need empathic connection for their brains to develop properly. One of the most groundbreaking findings for the neurobiology of empathy was the discovery of mirror neurons, which provide an immediate kind of somatic empathy. Mirror neurons fire when we see another being perform an action. Part of our brain is silently enacting the movements of those around us as if we were doing them ourselves. This includes facial expressions. Our brains inwardly mimic the emotional expressions of others; they're wired for empathy. Empathy is at the heart of listening. When I closed my eyes and took the time to really hear Jeremy, I was shifting gears to empathy. Empathy plays many functions: it can create healing and build resilience; it can stimulate healthy bonding; it can de-escalate strong emotions, facilitate understanding, and help resolve differences.
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from their point of view.
Empathy literally means to "feel into." While it can be expressed in many ways (silent listening, verbal reflection, touch, action), empathy is primarily a quality of presence in the heart. It's a receptive attunement to felt experience, our own and others'. We could say that empathy is a union of presence and the intention to understand. It's a genuine, caring interest that allows us to reach into another's world and understand their experience. Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, described empathy in this way: Empathy is a complex, demanding, strong, yet subtle and gentle way of being...it means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive moment to moment to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person. This resonant, receptive faculty of empathy is one of the primary qualities that makes us human. Given adequate safety, sustenance, and other basic needs, the natural tendency of the human being is toward empathy and compassion--to feel with another.
Three Dimensions of Empathy …
True empathy is three-dimensional; it is at once cognitive, affective, and somatic. Cognitive empathy is about taking the other's perspective. It's the ability to put ourselves in another's shoes and understand intellectually how a person feels. Affective (emotional) empathy means being able to feel along with the other person. It goes beyond a cognitive grasp of another's internal world to an emotional experience of it. Just as a stringed instrument vibrates with harmonic resonance, so too our heart can tremble in resonance with the suffering or delight of another. The third kind of empathy is somatic empathy, which is the ability to sense another's experience in an embodied way. This is a visceral, gut-level understanding… Deepening empathy is not merely a cognitive or intellectual exercise, though it begins there. It is an endeavor to inhabit both an emotional and an embodied understanding of another's experience. Without these complementary dimensions, our empathy will be incomplete. When cognitive empathy is divorced from affective empathy, it can be used to manipulate or harm others, even to make torture more effective. True empathy is the integration of all three of these domains. It can bring healing, resilience, and transformation. Empathy challenges the view that we are separate and invites us to reach for our shared humanity with others. The first step is connecting more deeply with our own experience through mindfulness. Self-awareness is the basis for empathic connection. As we experience the inner landscape of our life with more detail and richness, so grows our ability to understand the inner lives of others…
PRACTICE: Empathy
Try practicing this in conversations that aren’t about you. It’s often easier to access empathy when you’re not under fire. Remember that empathy is not in the words; it’s a quality of presence in your heart. Aim to understand the other person’s experience and let the words flow naturally.
SILENT EMPATHIC PRESENCE:
Practice listening completely, with the heartfelt intention to understand and “feel into” what the other person is saying. How is this for them?
PARAPHRASE:
After listening, summarize the gist of what you’ve heard. What are the key features of what they’ve said? Sometimes simply repeating one or two key words can be enough.
EMPATHIC REFLECTION:
After listening, check that you understand by reflecting what you hear is most important to them. This may include how they feel and/or what they need. What matters most to this person, beneath the story? How can you help them feel heard? Remember to phrase your reflections as questions, checking to ensure you’ve got it right. There are many other ways to show empathy. We may express empathy through a kind word, with loving touch, or by sharing how we feel in response to what we hear. At times, we can n show empathy by expressing interest with open-ended invitations, "Tell me more...!' or "What else?" My student Susan teaches high school art and told me the following story. Avery, a freshman who is usually cheerful and bubbly, began showing up early to class. Susan struck up a conversation and realized how much Avery was struggling. They agreed to meet later that day to talk, when Susan had more time. "I don't want to go to this school anymore," Avery said. She was thinking about dropping out. Susan noticed the impulse to go into problem-solving mode, an old habit of hers. Having just finished our week's lesson on empathy, she paused and decided to try listening instead. "Tell me more. What's going on?" Avery began to open up. She was being bullied. She felt sad, alone, and depressed. Every time Susan noticed the urge to fix or solve, she attended to feeling the weight of her body and her feet on the floor, and resisted the temptation to offer solutions. Susan focused her attention on what Avery was feeling and reflected what she was hearing. Avery began to cry, oscillating between speaking, sobbing, and awkwardly making eye contact as if to check whether all of this was okay. There were a lot of tears, tissues, and long moments in which Susan simply held Avery's gaze. Avery spoke more about her feelings of sadness, loneliness, and not feeling valued. "I've felt like this since first grade," Avery mentioned. "Was that the first time you felt so sad and alone?" Susan inquired. No, it started when she was three, when her dad left. They looked at each other, realizing they'd hit the root of her pain. Eventually they explored what Avery might need at school. They came up with some strategies to address the bullying. Avery decided to stay in school and to make a public art piece for the classroom about depression. This is the power of empathy. We can receive each word expressed, each emotion revealed, with a listening heart. When we come from curiosity and care instead of our default, habitual communication strategies, healing and transformation are possible."
Source: Say What You Mean by Oren Sofer
"Learning How to Listen
To listen entails a fundamental letting go of self-centeredness. We have to be willing to put down our own thoughts, views, and feelings temporarily to truly listen. It's a wholehearted, embodied receptivity that lies at the core of both communication and contemplative practice… We learn this kind of deep listening in meditation, discovering the stillness of awareness. With practice we can access it in the midst of conversation. The more we learn how to listen, the more available we become for others and for our life in general…
Completing the Cycle
Checking informally through voice and body language helps us assess the general connection in a conversation, yet it relies on an unspoken assumption. If I ask, "Do you understand?" and say, "Yes," all I really know is that you think you understand. As the saying goes, the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. To make sure the call hasn't dropped, we need a more reliable method, an authentic, lightweight way to confirm that we're actually hearing one another. When listening, we want to know that we've heard correctly, and when speaking, we want to know if we've been understood. In difficult situations, the need is even greater. "You're not listening! You don't understand!" How many times have you said (or heard) this in the midst of an argument? Just because we're speaking the same language doesn't mean we understand each other. We say one thing, they hear something else. They say one thing and mean something else. It's amazing how quickly we can get entangled! When someone says, "You're not listening," part of what they mean is "I don't feel heard right now." It's often a plea for empathy and a sign that we've lost connection. To get back on track we first need to reconnect. Let's look at two examples of how this might play out in a conversation.
PERSON A: "You're not listening!"
PERSON B: "Yes, I am! I heard everything you said."
PERSON A: "You're not listening!"
PERSON B: "It sounds like you're not feeling heard. I'm really trying to listen but let me try again."
OR,
PERSON B: "Okay-I'd really like to understand more. What could I do or say that would help you to feel heard?"
Which conversation is more likely to move toward resolution? In the first instance, each person may feel less understood, which usually spurs us to assert our position more forcefully. This leads to less connection, more assertions, and so on. Most of us know how awful it feels to be caught in this kind of a vortex, how quickly things devolve and how painfully they can end. Notice the difference in the second example, when we find some willingness to listen with empathy. Here, the speaker acknowledges the other person's experience and tries to reconnect. Doing this depends on our ability to lead with presence and come from curiosity and care rather than fall back into our default modes of defending or blaming. The main tool here is using a verbal reflection to "complete a cycle" of communication. We listen, then get confirmation at key moments that what one person hears matches what the other person meant, that message sent equals message received…
The Roots of Empathy
At the heart of verbal reflection is empathy: an intuitive reaching to understand another's experience on its own terms. Without empathy, the reflection will feel empty. Spend time with a giggling toddler or a puppy and something inside softens. Stand near someone who is angry or panicked and we feel it! This is the phenomenon known as emotional contagion. Babies begin to cry when they hear other babies crying. When we see that toddler or puppy hurting, something inside us quivers. We feel a compassionate impulse to reach out. Today we are learning more about the neurological and evolutionary bases of empathy. Infants need empathic connection for their brains to develop properly. One of the most groundbreaking findings for the neurobiology of empathy was the discovery of mirror neurons, which provide an immediate kind of somatic empathy. Mirror neurons fire when we see another being perform an action. Part of our brain is silently enacting the movements of those around us as if we were doing them ourselves. This includes facial expressions. Our brains inwardly mimic the emotional expressions of others; they're wired for empathy. Empathy is at the heart of listening. When I closed my eyes and took the time to really hear Jeremy, I was shifting gears to empathy. Empathy plays many functions: it can create healing and build resilience; it can stimulate healthy bonding; it can de-escalate strong emotions, facilitate understanding, and help resolve differences.
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from their point of view.
Empathy literally means to "feel into." While it can be expressed in many ways (silent listening, verbal reflection, touch, action), empathy is primarily a quality of presence in the heart. It's a receptive attunement to felt experience, our own and others'. We could say that empathy is a union of presence and the intention to understand. It's a genuine, caring interest that allows us to reach into another's world and understand their experience. Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, described empathy in this way: Empathy is a complex, demanding, strong, yet subtle and gentle way of being...it means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive moment to moment to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person. This resonant, receptive faculty of empathy is one of the primary qualities that makes us human. Given adequate safety, sustenance, and other basic needs, the natural tendency of the human being is toward empathy and compassion--to feel with another.
Three Dimensions of Empathy …
True empathy is three-dimensional; it is at once cognitive, affective, and somatic. Cognitive empathy is about taking the other's perspective. It's the ability to put ourselves in another's shoes and understand intellectually how a person feels. Affective (emotional) empathy means being able to feel along with the other person. It goes beyond a cognitive grasp of another's internal world to an emotional experience of it. Just as a stringed instrument vibrates with harmonic resonance, so too our heart can tremble in resonance with the suffering or delight of another. The third kind of empathy is somatic empathy, which is the ability to sense another's experience in an embodied way. This is a visceral, gut-level understanding… Deepening empathy is not merely a cognitive or intellectual exercise, though it begins there. It is an endeavor to inhabit both an emotional and an embodied understanding of another's experience. Without these complementary dimensions, our empathy will be incomplete. When cognitive empathy is divorced from affective empathy, it can be used to manipulate or harm others, even to make torture more effective. True empathy is the integration of all three of these domains. It can bring healing, resilience, and transformation. Empathy challenges the view that we are separate and invites us to reach for our shared humanity with others. The first step is connecting more deeply with our own experience through mindfulness. Self-awareness is the basis for empathic connection. As we experience the inner landscape of our life with more detail and richness, so grows our ability to understand the inner lives of others…
PRACTICE: Empathy
Try practicing this in conversations that aren’t about you. It’s often easier to access empathy when you’re not under fire. Remember that empathy is not in the words; it’s a quality of presence in your heart. Aim to understand the other person’s experience and let the words flow naturally.
SILENT EMPATHIC PRESENCE:
Practice listening completely, with the heartfelt intention to understand and “feel into” what the other person is saying. How is this for them?
PARAPHRASE:
After listening, summarize the gist of what you’ve heard. What are the key features of what they’ve said? Sometimes simply repeating one or two key words can be enough.
EMPATHIC REFLECTION:
After listening, check that you understand by reflecting what you hear is most important to them. This may include how they feel and/or what they need. What matters most to this person, beneath the story? How can you help them feel heard? Remember to phrase your reflections as questions, checking to ensure you’ve got it right. There are many other ways to show empathy. We may express empathy through a kind word, with loving touch, or by sharing how we feel in response to what we hear. At times, we can n show empathy by expressing interest with open-ended invitations, "Tell me more...!' or "What else?" My student Susan teaches high school art and told me the following story. Avery, a freshman who is usually cheerful and bubbly, began showing up early to class. Susan struck up a conversation and realized how much Avery was struggling. They agreed to meet later that day to talk, when Susan had more time. "I don't want to go to this school anymore," Avery said. She was thinking about dropping out. Susan noticed the impulse to go into problem-solving mode, an old habit of hers. Having just finished our week's lesson on empathy, she paused and decided to try listening instead. "Tell me more. What's going on?" Avery began to open up. She was being bullied. She felt sad, alone, and depressed. Every time Susan noticed the urge to fix or solve, she attended to feeling the weight of her body and her feet on the floor, and resisted the temptation to offer solutions. Susan focused her attention on what Avery was feeling and reflected what she was hearing. Avery began to cry, oscillating between speaking, sobbing, and awkwardly making eye contact as if to check whether all of this was okay. There were a lot of tears, tissues, and long moments in which Susan simply held Avery's gaze. Avery spoke more about her feelings of sadness, loneliness, and not feeling valued. "I've felt like this since first grade," Avery mentioned. "Was that the first time you felt so sad and alone?" Susan inquired. No, it started when she was three, when her dad left. They looked at each other, realizing they'd hit the root of her pain. Eventually they explored what Avery might need at school. They came up with some strategies to address the bullying. Avery decided to stay in school and to make a public art piece for the classroom about depression. This is the power of empathy. We can receive each word expressed, each emotion revealed, with a listening heart. When we come from curiosity and care instead of our default, habitual communication strategies, healing and transformation are possible."
Source: Say What You Mean by Oren Sofer
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