Interactive skills while finding out how a person feels are possibly the most important communication skills in building and maintaining Rapport.
They are also known as reflective skills or empathetic skills.
Reflecting is when you make remarks that acknowledge and show empathy for the speaker's feelings. Using this interactive skill creates win-win outcomes. Most of us easily feel empathy for a person who is experiencing something we have experienced ourselves, but true empathy is a skill, it is not based on the memory of a situation that we have experienced in the past.
Negotiators who have developed this reflecting interactive skill can be empathetic even with counterparts with whom they have little in common. It's not even necessary to like each other; empathy does not presuppose liking someone; however respecting each other is a prerequisite.
A negotiator's ability to empathize has been found to significantly affect the counterpart's behavior and attitudes.
To be empathetic,
o you need to accurately perceive the content of the speaker's message
o recognize the emotional components and unexpressed meanings behind the message, and
o attend to the speaker's feelings.
Empathy is not the same as sympathy.
A sympathetic individual adopts another person's feelings as his own.
An empathetic person appreciates, respects, and relates to the other person's feelings, while remaining detached.
For example:
o I can see that you are frustrated because .....................
o You seem very confident that you can do a great job for......................
o I appreciate that this set of circumstances can be frustrating.
o (Rather than: I understand how frustrated you are feeling.)
We can never say that we understand how another person feels, because we cannot; we can appreciate how they feel; we can respect how they feel; but only they know how they really feel.
When you are truly practicing reflective listening, you make no judgments, share no opinions, and provide not solutions.
You simply acknowledge the emotional content of the speaker's message, recognize that there is one, giving it no meaning and moving on.
For example:
o Speaker: How do you expect me to complete the project by next Monday?
o Reflective response: It sounds like you feel overwhelmed by your workload.
o Speaker: Hey, Mary, what's the idea of not approving my requisition for a new filing cabinet?
o Reflective response: You sound upset that your request was not approved.
o Speaker: I cannot believe you want me to do the job in less than a week.
o Reflective response: You sound concerned about the amount of time you have to complete the job
The goal of reflective listening is to acknowledge the emotion your counterpart has conveyed, and reflect the content back to your counterpart using different words. By using different words, yet using the same content, this situation is defused and the speaker feels that he has been heard, and therefore his contribution and how he feels are important.
This is empathetic listening; this is interactive listening and this is an interactive skill.
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