Empathic Communication
Do you sometimes feel that you are misunderstood? Do people get the wrong end of the stick with you? A wrong word here, a tone of voice there, a look, or a sense of being judged can upset the applecart and create friction, miscommunication and tons of stress.
One of the most meaningful methods of changing those patterns is empathic communication. This is a way of using language and focusing attention that creates more understanding, and gives us a sense of a shared humanity, a commonality of purpose that can profoundly affect our everyday lives and relationship with partners, children, parents, friends, colleagues and just about anyone with whom we have conversations. It gives us and those with whom we are communicating a sense of well-being, compassion and peace.
There are four components of empathic communication: observation, feeling, need and request.
Our natural instinct is to judge situations and construct our own understanding around things we perceive. For instance, a colleague passes you in the corridor and does not greet you. You think how rude and unfriendly that person is. A student puts his head down on the desk while you are talking and you think how disrespectful this student is. Once we have made these evaluations of the situations, we often report them to our friends. So and so is a very unfriendly person, that student is disrespectful and unmotivated.
Why is it that we judge or evaluate in this way? Our brains are wired to recognise events out there in the world based on our own previous past experiences. Hence, we are constantly predicting the data that comes into our brains and reacting according to those predictions. Sometimes, however, those predictions do not serve us so well as they can lead to feelings of anger, sadness, and hurt. We may also react in a way that hurts others.
If we can learn to disconnect our judgements from what we observe, in other words describe what someone said or did in a neutral manner, without evaluation, agreement or disagreement, approval or disapproval, we can start changing those predictable patterns and communicate more effectively.
The colleague who did not greet us on the corridor may have been preoccupied with her own thoughts, worried about an email she just received from the principal, or in a rush to get to her class. Similarly, the student who put his head on the desk may have a bad headache, may have been bullied during recess, or may be feeling sad because of a poor grade.
Looking at the person’s action without the value that our brains attach to it is not an easy process because we seek in others’ behaviour that which is in harmony with what matters to us. Underneath the judgement we place, and the offence we take lie our own needs. We need to be seen and heard, to be respected, we seek reciprocity, fairness, order, etc.
However, if we communicate based on those judgements, we tend to create the opposite of what we really want. We create resistance. The key is to catch ourselves making evaluations and to take a step back. Go over what was done or not done, said or not said, and step into neutral observation in a way that can calm our nervous systems and soothe us.
If you find yourself in a relationship where you tend to misunderstand or be misunderstood, how might you disengage your judgement and use observation to change the course of your responses and counteract the resistance in the other?
