Empathetic Way.  When you do this you 'see' them, and in that they feel acknowledged and made whole.

 When hospice patients were surveyed some years ago, they said that in the last days of their lives they wanted two basic things: 

 1.  To be physically touched

2.  To be understood for who they are

 By deeply listening to someone you seek to understand them, and this validates their existence.

 Take 5 min to read the following excerpt from a book by the psychologist Carl Rogers.  In it he highlights the power of listening.  If you want to develop leadership skills, this is where to start!!

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I find, both in therapeutic interviews and in the intensive group experiences which have meant a great deal to me, that hearing has consequences.  When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen.  There is first of all a grateful look.  He feels released.  He wants to tell me more about his world.  He surges forward in a new sense of freedom.  He becomes more open to the process of change.
I have often noticed that the more deeply I hear the meanings of this person, the more there is that happens.  Almost always, when a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten.  I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy.  It is as though he were saying “Thank God, somebody heard me.  Someone knows what it’s like to be me.”  In such moments I have had the fantasy of a prisoner in a dungeon, tapping out day after day a Morse code message, “Does anybody hear me?  Is anybody there?”  And finally one day he hears some faint tappings which spell out “Yes.”  By that one simple response he is released from his loneliness; he has become a human being again.  There are many, many people living in private dungeons today, people who give no evidence of it whatsoever on the outside, where you have to listen very sharply to hear the faint messages from the dungeon.
If this seems to you a little too sentimental or overdrawn, I would like to share with you an experience I had recently in a basic encounter group with fifteen persons in important executive posts.  Early in the very intensive sessions of the week they were asked to write a statement of some feeling or feelings which they were not willing to share with the group.  These were anonymous statements.  One man wrote, “I don’t relate easily to people.  I have an almost impenetrable façade.  Nothing gets in to hurt me but nothing gets out.  I have repressed so many emotions that I am close to emotionally sterility.  This situation doesn’t make me happy, but I don’t know what to do about it.  Perhaps insight into how others react to me and why will help.”  This was clearly a message from a dungeon.  Later in the week a member of the group identified himself as the man who had written that anonymous message, filling out in much greater detail his feelings of isolation, of complete coldness.  He felt that life had been so brutal to him that he had been forced to live a life without feeling, not only at work but also in social groups and, saddest of all, with his family.  His gradual achievement of greater expressiveness in the group, of less fear of being hurt, of more willingness to share him with others, was a very rewarding experience for all of us who participated.
I was both amused and pleased when, in a letter a few weeks later asking me about another matter, he also included this paragraph:  “When I returned from [our group] I felt somewhat like [someone] who had been seduced but still wound up with the feeling that it was exactly what [I] had been waiting for and needed!  I am still not quite sure who was responsible for the seduction - you or the group, or whether it was a joint venture.  I suspect it was the latter.  At any rate, I want to thank you for what was a meaningful and intensely interesting experience.”  I think it is not too much to say that because several of us in the group were able genuinely to hear him, he was released from his dungeon and came out, at least to some degree, into the sunnier world of warm interpersonal relationships.
Let me move on to a second learning that I would like to share with you.  I like to be heard.  A number of times in my life I have felt myself bursting with insoluble problems, or going round and round in tormented circles or, during one period, overcome by feelings of worthlessness and despair.  I think I have been more fortunate than most in finding at these times individuals who have been able to hear me and thus to rescue me from the chaos of my feelings, individuals who have been able to hear my meanings a little more deeply than I have known them.    These persons have heard me without judging me, diagnosing me, appraising me, evaluating me.  The have just listened and clarified and responded to me at all the levels at which I was communicating.  I can testify that when you are in psychological distress and someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good!  At these times it has relaxed the tension in me.  It has permitted me to bring out the frightening feelings, the guilts, the despair, and the confusions that have been a part of my experience.  When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on.  It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.  I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experienced this sensitive, empathetic, concentrated listening.
 
From “A Way of Being”    

 “Dr. Sergey Sorin’s Daily Message”  - The Transitional Thoughts for the day by Dr. Sergey Sorin are with collaboration from KC. Hildreth, an Industry Consultant. 

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