Seek first to understand, then to be understood

emotional intelligence , book-notes , how igor ticks

Imagine going to the eye doctor. After hearing your complaint he takes off his glasses and hands them to you. “Put these on,” he says. “I’ve worn this pair of glasses for ten years now and they’ve really helped me. I have an extra pair at home; you can wear these.” So you put them on, but it only makes the problem worse. “This is terrible!” you exclaim. “I can’t see a thing!” “Well, what’s wrong?” he asks. “They work great for me. Try harder.” “I am trying,” you insist. “Everything is a blur.” “Well, what’s the matter with you? Think positively.” “Okay. I positively can’t see a thing.” “Boy, are you ungrateful!” he chides. “And after all I’ve done to help you!”

These are my insights based on the 7 habits Chapter 5.

This has a lot of similarity to compassion and being curious. From that post:

Lead with curiosity, not judgment. This applies to yourself and to others. Think of a grandmother - a grandmother is full of love and compassion for her grandchildren. She loves them without conditions, no strings attached.She takes care of her grandchildren without needing anything in return. She cares selflessly and she has only the children’s best interest in mind. As she loves her grandchildren, she won’t allow self-destructive behavior and will step in when necessary. But she will always do this with the utmost care and love.

Raccoon seeking first to understand

Character and communication

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 had that enables you to listen so that you really, deeply understand another human being from that individual’s own frame of reference?

If I want to influence you — my spouse, my kid, my report, my coworker — I first have to understand you. Technique alone won’t do it. The moment you sense I’m running a script, you also sense duplicity, and the door closes. The base under the technique is character: my actual conduct, the kind of person I am when no one is grading me. That’s what’s radiating across the table. If my private performance doesn’t square with my public performance, it doesn’t matter how good my listening moves are — you won’t open up, because it isn’t safe to.

So the order is: character builds the trust, trust opens the door, and only then does the listening skill have anything to work with.

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Diagnose before you prescribe

The eye-doctor parable is the whole habit in one image. You don’t trust a doctor who prescribes before he diagnoses. But that’s exactly what I do all day in conversation — hand someone a pair of glasses that have fit me for ten years and tell them to try harder when they can’t see.

It shows up everywhere a professional gets it right and an amateur gets it wrong:

Domain Amateur Professional
Medicine Prescribes from the symptom Diagnoses, then prescribes
Sales Pushes the product Understands the need, sells the solution
Law Writes the case Gathers facts; writes the opposing case first
Engineering Designs the bridge Models the forces and stresses first
Parenting Judges the behavior Understands the kid, then responds

The amateur version of every one of these collapses into the same move: skip the diagnosis, prescribe from my own autobiography. The professional version is slower up front and dramatically faster downstream — because the prescription actually fits the problem.

The diagnostic question I try to keep on me: have I earned the right to give this advice yet? If I haven’t done the work to understand, anything I say is the optometrist’s spare pair.

The normal way we listen - from our own frame of reference.

By default, we assume everyone is like us, and our frame of reference, is their frame of reference. As a result our default approach to listening is some of the following

  • We judge— either agree or disagree;
  • We probe— we ask questions from our own frame of reference;
  • we advise— we give counsel based on our own experience;
  • We interpret— we try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on our own motives and behavior.

These four feel like listening but they’re really four flavors of talking. Probing is the sneakiest — it sounds curious, but the questions come from my map, not theirs. Twenty questions from the wrong map gets nowhere. The same goes for advising “I had this exact problem at your age” — different person, different decade, different problem.

Most listening is actually one of these earlier modes:

Level What’s happening
Ignoring Not really listening at all
Pretending “Yeah. Uh-huh. Right.” while thinking about something else
Selective Hearing only the parts that match my filter
Attentive Focusing on the words, but still inside my own frame
Empathic Inside their frame, listening for feeling and meaning

The first four leave the other person fighting for psychological air. Only the fifth gives it to them.

A better way, empathic listening.

Empathic listening is listening with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply. I’m trying to get inside the other person’s frame of reference and look out through their eyes. Empathy isn’t sympathy — sympathy is a form of agreement and judgment. Empathy is accurate understanding, whether or not I agree.

A useful number to remember: only about 10% of communication is the words. Another 30% is tone and sound. The remaining 60% is body language. So I’m listening with my ears and my eyes and my heart — for feeling, for meaning, for what’s not being said.

The stages of empathetic listening:

  • Mimicking - Simplest, just repeat it back verbatim, without trying to understand.
  • Rephrasing the content - Testing my understanding, I heard you say, is that right. NOTE It’s very important not to tell them the content, but instead ask if you understood it.
  • Reflect the feeling - When I hear you say that, that must be scary?
  • Rephrase content and reflect feeling - Am I hearing you say ‘this happened’, and boy that must make you really mad.

The fourth stage is where the actual unlock happens. Rephrase + reflect lets the person check their own thinking against my mirror, and the gap between what they’re feeling and what they’re saying starts to close. They begin to trust me with the layers underneath, and the conversation peels open like an onion until you reach the soft inner core where the real problem lives.

A practical rule for the back-and-forth: as long as their reply is logical, I can ask questions and offer counsel. The moment it goes emotional again, I drop back to empathy. Logic mode and emotion mode need different tools, and using the wrong one is how good conversations crash.

And the deposit this makes is huge. Next to physical survival, the deepest human need is psychological — to be understood, affirmed, validated, appreciated. Empathic listening is that air. Once someone has it, they don’t need to fight for it anymore, and they can hear me.

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Understanding and perception

The deeper I listen, the more I notice that two people can be looking at the same situation and seeing entirely different things. Not because one of us is dumb. Because we’re standing on different paradigms — different scripts, different defaults, different glasses we don’t even know we’re wearing.

You see the young woman in the picture; I see the old lady. We’ve each lived inside our own paradigm long enough that it stops feeling like a paradigm and starts feeling like the facts. Then anyone who can’t see the facts must be a fool or a liar.

A few of the perception splits I run into all the time:

  • Spouse-centered vs work-centered framing of the same calendar conflict.
  • Abundance vs scarcity scripts — “there’s plenty” vs “there’s not enough.”
  • Right-brain holistic vs left-brain sequential approaches to the same problem.
  • Past-pain scripts where the same neutral event reads as threat to one person and as nothing to the other.

This is why most failed communication isn’t a failure of words. It’s a failure of perception. Two people fluently exchanging accurate sentences about two different rooms. Until I understand which room you’re in, my best paragraphs are landing somewhere I can’t see.

The move is to surface the paradigm before debating the content. “Tell me how you’re seeing this” before “here’s why I think X.” Once both maps are on the table, the disagreement often shrinks to something workable — and sometimes it dissolves entirely, because the underlying perceptions weren’t actually in conflict, just unstated.

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Then seek to be understood

Seek first to understand — but the second half is real. After I understand you, I still owe you my actual point of view, presented well. Skip that and I’ve abandoned the conversation. The Greeks named the order: ethos, pathos, logos.

Word What it is What it does in a conversation
Ethos My character and credibility Earns me the right to be heard at all
Pathos My alignment with their feeling Shows I’ve understood them, not just their words
Logos The logic of my argument Makes the case once the first two have landed

The order matters. Most people walk into a hard conversation and lead with logos — the spreadsheet, the bullet points, the airtight argument. And it bounces, because there’s no ethos under it (they don’t trust me yet) and no pathos around it (they don’t feel heard). The logic is correct and useless.

Maturity is the balance of courage and consideration. Seeking to understand is the consideration. Seeking to be understood is the courage. Win/Win needs both. If I have all consideration and no courage, I disappear and concede every argument; if I have all courage and no consideration, I steamroll and win nothing real. Habit 5 is where I practice carrying both at once.

The practical version, when I have a point I really need someone to take seriously: I describe their position better than they can themselves before I open my mouth about mine. The professor in the parable walks in and says “let me make sure I understand your objectives and your concerns before I make my recommendation” — and halfway through, the senior professor turns to his colleague, nods, and says “you’ve got your money.” The pitch hadn’t even started yet. The understanding was the pitch.

I notice this most in disagreements at work. The first instinct is to load up the deck — “here are the seven reasons we should do it my way.” The instinct that actually works is to spend the first ten minutes describing their proposal back to them so accurately that they nod. After that, my proposal lands as a contribution to a shared problem, not as an attack on their plan.

Be Proactive, Have 1:1s and Dates

You don’t need to wait for a problem to have empathetic listening, instead you can be proactive and setup time to talk now. Having standing dates or 1:1’s to ensure everything is working well before you have a problem.

You need space to build these relationship, family dates and 1:1 prompts are critical to make it happen.

The same principle applies at work. With every direct report I have a standing 1:1, and the rule I try to hold is: their agenda first, mine second. If I lead with my list, I never learn what’s actually going on. If I lead with theirs and listen empathically, the things on my list often surface on their own — and the ones that don’t, I can raise with way more accuracy because I now know the room.

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Understand before you coach

After you’ve been listening empathetically, you’re often asked for advice, for that look at coaching:

Coaching is like midwifery. A midwife can not give birth to the baby, she facilitates the birth. Similarly, a coach can not give a solution, she must give birth to the insight from within the coachee. Coaching is asking questions, guiding, and facilitating understanding, and this post collects my studies on the topic.

When someone is really given the chance to open up, they often unravel their own problem on the way to telling me about it. The solution becomes clear to them, and I never had to prescribe anything. My job at that point is to stay out of the way — to keep listening so they can keep thinking out loud — not to seize the opening to deliver the brilliant advice I’ve been queuing up.

The discipline is hardest when I actually do have good advice. The temptation is to skip the listening, jump to the prescription, and “save them time.” Almost every time I’ve done that I’ve delivered a generic answer that doesn’t fit, and made a withdrawal from the trust account on top of it.

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