GENERATIVE LISTENING — listening with curiosity and openness. Listening underneath and in between the words and feelings for clues as to what the speaker may be implying or moving toward. This form of listening sometimes arises as a feeling, image, or intuition. It is a way of helping another person see more clearly; it is not advice giving or problem solving.

“In that sense a therapist or good friend listens to another to find out who she is, what is special about her. In this kind of listening you not only take in someone’s words but also discover who they are.

Truly listening involves relating to another person not through your internal filter but in a quiet, observant, connected way.

Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand—highly developed qualities of character. It’s so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and to give high-level advice.

Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel. Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement, a form of judgment. And it is sometimes the more appropriate emotion and response. But people often feed on sympathy. It makes them dependent. The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone; it’s that you fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.