Empathic listening or active listening?

Social skills are essential to successfully communicate with our environment and relate to those people we meet daily, both personally and professional.

However, not all of them have to do with expressing our ideas and opinions well and also interpreting what we are told; it is necessary to go further and establish a certain emotional connection so that, in this way, we can not be limited by the literalness of what is said, and focus on the real interests of the people.

In this sense, empathic listening is very important, since it is more complete than simple active listening and allows us to develop better in situations of negotiation, persuasion, conflict resolution, and even in the upbringing of our children. We see what it consists of.

• Related article: "Basic communication skills"

Empathic listening as a social skill

Social skills are learned as we develop during childhood and adulthood. adolescence, so that most adults are equipped with them and use them in their day to day day. However, these can be expanded and further developed at virtually any time in life. And it is that although most people naturally acquire these important skills in society,

some people may have trouble both acquiring and telling them apart.

The main social skills that exist are empathic listening, active listening, assertiveness, emotional management in conflict situations, the ability to identify aggravations or affronts, and critical thinking in interactions ambiguous.

In today's article we will focus on the concepts of empathic listening and active listening, two very similar and important skills that can often be confused for one another.

• You may be interested in: "Empathy, much more than putting yourself in another's place"

Differences between empathic listening and active listening

Empathy can be defined as the ability to put ourselves in the other's shoes, that is, to identify and understand at all times what kind of thoughts occupy the mind of our interlocutor, what he feels, and also your preferences, ideas or needs.

When talking about empathic listening and active listening as very necessary skills in any job that is performs in front of the public or as necessary tools for day to day, these two concepts tend to get confused.

In this sense, coaching professionals are specialists in working and training each of these terms in any person who requests it, since as we have said, some of these abilities are not acquired naturally in some people.

Thus, active listening consists of attend openly and consciously to what our interlocutor says and react in real time according to the tone and importance of what comes up in your speech, and it is essential to that any interaction be successful, whether with family, friends, co-workers or superiors in the field labor.

On the contrary, empathic listening incorporates the component of empathy into the ability to listen, and with it we can be able to understand the emotional and intellectual universe of the other person to the point of putting ourselves in his shoes.

Therefore, while active listening shows that we are listening to the other person, empathic listening shows that we understand how our interlocutor thinks, how he feels and what needs or problems he may have in his jurisdiction internal.

The key to the differentiation between concepts is that empathic listening allows us to put ourselves in the place of the other and thanks to that we managed to establish much stronger emotional and intellectual bonds, when expressing that we are making an effort to predict what the person with whom we are speaking thinks and needs.

With empathic listening we can quickly study and successfully analyze what we have been told to draw accurate conclusions about the state in which that person is at the moment present.

In addition to that, it is a very useful skill to persuade, negotiate or intervene as professional and quality coaches or psychotherapists.

• Related article: "9 habits to connect emotionally with someone"

The importance of connecting with the mental model of others

As we have seen, empathic listening implies going a step beyond active listening and establishing a connection that is not only intellectual, but also emotional with the interlocutor. This has a reason for being: allows us, among other things, to adapt to your needs, values ​​and expectations and to better understand how you will react based on what we tell you, something essential to communicate assertively, persuade or even resolve conflicts.

That is why the development of empathic listening skills also means training a set of very important social skills both in the professional field and in private life. In this sense, a large part of the coaching support services have among their main objectives helping people to relate from the interlocutor's mental model.