Builds emotional intelligence: When you practice empathetic listening, you become attuned to others’ emotional experiences and can begin to understand their behavior more clearly and consider the best response.Practicing empathetic listening has many positive outcomes in the workplace. Through empathetic listening, you can create a space in which others feel safe being themselves, laying the foundation for open and honest communication between both the speaker and the listener. This kind of listening goes beyond the literal, and even beyond the subtext of what’s been said, to the emotion beneath it. (Sure, this information can also help you get to a better to-do list or set of action items, but these would be the byproducts of building a stronger relationship with someone, rather than the first-level goal.)Įmpathetic listening asks you to go beyond the surface of what is being said to unpack why and how it’s being said and get to know someone’s emotional experience-and empathize with it.

Where active listening may readily result in a list of action items, empathetic listening is focused on a stronger connection among teammates and a clearer understanding of another person’s needs, motivations, and perceptions. But unlike active listening, empathetic listening puts a special emphasis on understanding the other person’s emotional experience.

It’s similar to its counterpart, active listening, in that both kinds of listening require giving your full attention to another person in order to better understand them. It means taking in what another person is saying-or not saying-with the intent to understand and relate to them on a human level. Empathetic listening is what happens when you deliberately slow things down and seek to understand others’ inner worlds.

At its core, empathetic listening is about connection.

Empathic listening meaning