There are plenty of obstacles to emphatic conversation. Some people have a tendency to become combative when a discussion gets tense or heated , while there are those who move fast to blame others and make them feel guilty. Another common melody is narcissistic one-upmanship: when a friend reveals their tale of unrequited love, many people cannot help out doing it with their own even more sorrowful tale (if you think that is bad, just hear what happened to me.....) .
One of the most useful skills for getting beyond these obstacles is listening. Studs Terkel was a great fan of it. so is personal development guru Stephen Covey, who points out that while we spent years learning to read, write and speak, most of us dedicate little time to becoming better listeners. But how should we listen? Apart from curiosity about strangers, highly emphatic people have a habit of engaging in what I think of as radical listening, A very particular way of tuning into what others are saying.
One of the most radical listeners of them all is Marshall Rosenberg, inventor of non-violent communication, an approach to conversation that is especially designed to resolve conflicts - in anything from a rocky marriage to gang war fare - and that allows our natural compassion to flourish. He initially trained as psychotherapist with Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic or client centred psychology in 1950s, which encourages the psychotherapist to prioritise empathising with and listening to the client. Rosenberg view was that empathy was a skill that should not be confined to professional therapists, but also practiced by everyone in their daily lives.
A corner stone of Rosenberg's thinking is the idea of receiving empathically, which he sums up like this; what is essential is are our ability to present to what is really going on within - to the unique feelings and needs a person is experiencing in that very moment. This is what radical listening is all about. The first element, 'presence' , involves emptying your faculties and listening to the other person with your whole being
