As anyone who has followed my blog for some time will tell you, I’m a big proponent of listening skills. In fact, I believe that listening is the key component of the successful communication.

In a book that I’m reading, Life is a Series of Presentations (one that I’ll review in the coming days), he mentions a passage Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that discusses listening. I had actually forgotten that Stephen Covey discusses the importance of listening skills in his book, so immediately dug out the book and looked up the passage. And was actually, surprisingly, quite disappointed because he gets it wrong — what’s more, he gets it wrong on such an important topic. Overall, the chapter, Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood, has a lot of valuable information. But I want to add some clarity where Covey has muddied the issue.

(Mr. Covey, if you ever read this — yeah right! — please don’t take this personally; overall, I really respect and enjoy your work, but I do think that you don’t do this topic justice—and, in fact, are wrong in places.)

First off, he oversimplifies the roadblocks that prevent effective listening:

When another person speaks, we’re usually “listening” at one of four levels. We may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all. We may practice pretending. “Yeah. Uh-Huh. Right.” We may practice selective listening, hearing only certain part of the conversation. …we may even practice attentive listening, paying attention and focusing energy in the words that are being said. But very few of us ever practice the fifth level, the highest form of listening, empathic listening.

None of the above is flat out wrong. It just doesn’t quite cover the many ways that we, as listeners, put up roadblocks to prevent us from the really understanding the speaker. Bolton does a much better job of describing and explaining these roadblocks. So perhaps, for what Covey needed in his book, the description suffices, but he doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. I would encourage fans of Covey to dig deeper into the roadblocks that prevent us from really listening to and understanding the speaker. Once you understand the roadblocks, you can better identify them in yourself and take steps to eliminate them.

Now, in the next paragraph, he will contrast empathic listening with reflective listening and this is where hecompletely loses me.

When I say empathic listening, I am not referring to the techniques “active” listening or “reflective” listening, which basically involve mimicking what the another person says. That kind of listening is skill based, truncated from character and relationships, and often insult those quote listened quote to in such a way.

Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. The purpose of reflective listening is to understand the meaning — which includes both the emotional and verbal content. If the listener is merely mimicking the speaker, he is not engaged in reflective listening. He’s mimicking, which is one of roadblocks that Bolton mentions in his book. This is such an important point that I’m going to write it again: Mimicking is not reflective listening. In fact, why don’t you say it out loud: Mimicking is not reflective listening.

Now the next part, he gets right:

When I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand. It’s an entirely different paradigm.

And a few paragraphs later:

Empathic listening involves much more than registering, reflecting, or even understanding the words that are said. Communications experts estimate, in fact, that only ten percent of arc vindication is representative of the words we say. Another thirty percent is represented by our sounds, and sixty percent by her body language. And empathic listening you listen with your ears, but you also, and more importantly, listen with your eyes and with your heart. You listen for feeling, for meaning. You listen for behavior. You use your right brain as well as you are left. You sense, you intuit, you feel.

Now, this sounds a lot like reflective listening. And that’s because it is. The purpose of reflective listening is to empathize with the speaker, and you do that by reflecting emotional and verbal meaning to first ensure that you have understood what the speaker has meant as well as to communicate that you have understood. (In fact, by using reflective listening, you’re often helping the speaker to clarify exactly what he means.

In the end, the purpose of the chapter is spot on: we must first seek to understand the speaker, then attempt to be understood. The first part is invaluable (setting the stage for the second part) and can only be accomplished when we fully understand how to listen and how not to listen.

So, yesterday I recommended the book Chasing Daylight. Today, I’m recommending an old favorite of mine: People Skills. A book that I have recommended before, but definitely worth recommending again.

In fact, stop reading whatever book you’re reading and read Chasing Daylight.

This is, perhaps, the most important book you’ll ever read. In the book, Eugene O’Kelly documents his experiences during the last few months of his life. In fact, his wife writes the final chapter because Eugene has died. And no matter how tough you are, the second you turn the page from the end of the second-to-last chapter to the beginning of the last chapter and realize that Corinne has taken over, you’ll be in tears.

What this book does — at least what it did for me — was give me the perspective on what I’m doing and where I’m going with my life. He inspires the question: am I really doing what matters to me? And if not, why? For all the words that so many people like David Allen and Stephen Covey say and write to get people thinking about these questions, their words just don’t compare to the words of a dying man.

It’s powerful, and it’s life changing. So, like I said, stop reading whatever book you’re reading and read Chasing Daylight. It’s not even to 200 pages, so you should be to finish it in just a few hours.

To get you started, here are a few of the opening paragraphs:

I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live. You think that to put those two sentences back-to-back, I must be joking. Or crazy. Perhaps that I lived a miserable, unfulfilled life, and the sooner it was done, the better.

Hardly. I loved my life. Adored my family. Enjoyed my friends, the career I had, the big hearted organizations I was part of, the golf I played. And I’m quite sane. And also quite serious: the verdict I received the last week of May 2005 — that it was unlikely I’d make it to my daughter Gina’s first day of eighth grade, the opening week of September — turned out to be a gift. Honestly.

Because I was forced to think seriously about my own death. Which meant I was forced to think more deeply about my life that I’d ever done. Unpleasant as it was, I forced myself to acknowledge that I was in the final stage of life, forced myself to decide how to spend my last one hundred days (give or take a few weeks), forced myself to act on those decisions.

In short, I asked myself to answer two questions: must the end of life be the worst part? And, Can it be made a constructive experience — even the best part of life?

No. Yes. That’s how I would answer those questions, respectively. I was able to approach the end while still mentally lucid (usually) and physically fit (sort of), with my loved ones near.

As I said: a blessing.

Of course, almost no one thinks in detail about one’s actual death. Until I had two I didn’t — not really. We fill general and profound anxiety about, but figuring out the nuts and bolts of how to make the best ones last days, and then how to ensure that one follows the planned course of action for the benefit of oneself and one’s loved ones, are not typical habits of the dying and most certainly not the healthy and hearty. Some people don’t think about that because a come suddenly and prematurely. Quite a few who died this way — in a car accident, say — had not yet even began to think of themselves as mortal. My death on the other hand, while somewhat premature (I was fifty three at the time of the verdict) cannot be called sudden (anyway, you couldn’t call it that two weeks after the death sentence had sunk in), since I was informed quite explicitly that my final day of this or if what happened during the two thousand five calendar year.

Like I said, life-changing. Read the book.

My last post before the break was about risk and self-doubt. I’d like to report, albeit eight months later, that the event was a great success.

Not only did we have a great turnout, we also used the event to jumpstart a local professional organization, which I’m now the president. So was it worth it? Absolutely. I learned a lot—particularly that we should start planning earlier this year. Which, of course, we have. There is still quite some lingering self-doubt, but having done it once, I feel much more confident about the outcome. After all, I have a new organization behind me.

And so if there’s any lesson here it would be: persevere, persevere, persevere. Don’t let your self-doubt get the better of you; you are stronger than it and better than it. When you really push yourself, you’ll find that you have supporters where you least expect them. What’s more, no matter what happens, your work and accomplishment is so much sweeter because you know you pushed yourself.

So how long has it been? By my count, nearly eight months. Far too long.

There are several reasons why I haven’t posted, but the biggest reason has been that I’ve developed a repetitive strain injury, so I’ve been limiting my computer use. I’m still having trouble with my wrists, but I’ve discovered text-to-speech speech-to-text software, which has almost given me my computer back. I’m going to try posting for a few days and see how this goes. If all goes well, I’ll start posting on a regular basis.

See you tomorrow.