Basically, a therapist tries to get at the patient’s viewpoint. The professional listener says: “I am totally listening to everything that you say. You are not totally committed, nor do you need to be, to listen to everything that I say. You might hear many things that I say, that you say, or you might hear little of both. But we are each engaged in arranging different things. You are in a process of rearranging and integrating your new perceptions and calling attention to new ones for you to arrange and integrate.

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

Listening, I’ve come to understand, is bearing witness to lives unfolding, to lives being discovered. Deep listening, listening compassionately, means guiding, gently nudging, or sometimes shoving people down the path of radical self-inquiry so they can make their way to their own truest selves. Then, and only then, can they lead with the dignity and grace of being human.

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.

Seeking first to understand, diagnosing before you prescribe, is hard. It’s so much easier in the short run to hand someone a pair of glasses that have fit you so well these many years. But in the long run, it severely depletes both P and PC. You can’t achieve maximum interdependent production from an inaccurate understanding of where other people are coming from. And you can’t have interpersonal PC—high Emotional Bank Accounts—if the people you relate with don’t really feel understood. Empathic listening is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. You become vulnerable. It’s a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced. That means you have to really understand. That’s why Habits 1, 2, and 3 are so foundational. They give you the changeless inner core, the principle center, from which you can handle the more outward vulnerability with peace and strength.