Last week a former colleague reached out and asked if I would be willing to provide a consultation to the person who was hired as my replacement. Enthusiastic to help, I agreed to a video call and for over an hour I listened to an academically-trained ESL instructor vent her frustrations and feelings of overwhelm. Her main roadblocks were:
- She wasn’t finding the success she had previously experienced in past teaching roles;
- Her students weren’t showing up consistently despite clearly defining the rules and expectations of her classroom;
- She couldn’t grasp how to both develop and deliver a curriculum for a wide range of people with different needs.
In short, she felt burned out from keeping up with her own professional expectations while performing the social work component of her job. “How did you find success in this role?” she asked.
Redefining Success
How many of us can admit that we are our own worst critics? It’s not that we’re masochists by nature, but many of us are so wrapped up in our own ideas of success that we fail to see we’re all too often trapped in self-limiting perceptions of our own design.
With this in mind, I challenged my replacement to have a closer look at what she considered “success” for her students. “You need to redefine your expectations with the people you are serving,” were the exact words that came out of my mouth.
Academics especially have high standards and specific outcomes that define success, and this instructor was no different. When she showed me a presentation she created to welcome new students, there were a number of slides containing rules. One slide in particular said, “When it is not acceptable to miss class” and showed pictures of people eating at restaurants and shopping. “These people aren’t missing your class because they’re out shopping,” I gently told her. “They’re missing your class because you haven’t connected with them yet. You haven’t understood their problems outside of language or where they’re coming from.” In other words, she hadn’t really listened to them. She needed to focus on the social work – the heart – of the role, not the rigid, academic components.
I struggled immensely with this aspect when I first ventured into nonprofit work, specifically serving people who carried within them trauma induced by war, poverty, and loss. Just because they were fortunate to get a visa and come to the US didn’t mean their problems were alleviated. New crisis arose, and the scars from their experiences remained. If they were fortunate to have their physical needs in place – shelter, food, clothing – their psychological needs were critically next in line.
This begs the question, what are basic human psychological needs? To be listened to, to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated. And the immigrants and refugees who were sent to me to learn English were in desperate need of those validations. They often arrived at my office with a wall up, tentative and slightly fearful. It didn’t take me long to realize these psychological barriers needed to be assuaged before any kind of learning could take place, and the place to begin was by listening.
Seek First to Understand
The nature of life and work is that it is human-based; this involves helping others and getting helped in return. In order to effectively help others, you must first seek to understand before being understood. That is the order of operations I’m endorsing here and the advice I gave my replacement. And if you want to understand others, first you have to really listen.
This concept – seeking to understand before being understood – is the fifth habit of Steven Covey’s universally acclaimed book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and it applies to ESL instruction just like it applies to achieving business deals, designing a successful product, or getting along with your family. Laid out below, I’ve highlighted how this habit informed my work as an ESL instructor and how it can be developed through the skill of empathetic listening.
Getting Out of Our Own Way
Communication consists of four skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Many of us have spent years learning how to read, how to write, and how to speak. But how much time have we devoted to learning how to listen?
Most of us listen to another through an autobiographical filter: “I remember when this happened to me…” or “In my experience, I found that….” Our listening tends to be selective, or attentive at best; rarely is it centered entirely on the other person. In order to shift out of our limiting autobiographical filters, we need to learn how to listen with empathy.
Empathetic listening is listening to another individual so that you can fully, deeply understand them both intellectually and emotionally.
This kind of listening involves employing a set of skills — from learning how to read subtle cues to controlling your own emotional response. It requires both empathy and self-awareness. Here are some guidelines on how to begin:
- Be present. That means being present in both the moment and the task you are actively engaged in: listening to another individual. You are not thinking about a deadline, a chore, a worry, or another client. You are in the here and the now.
- Rephrase the content of what you are hearing. This is also called active listening. It sets up the conversation to show that you are actually present, listening, and thinking about what is being said.
- Reflect feeling. State what the other person is feeling with the information they are sharing. This shows the listener you are attempting to feel what they must be feeling and that you are trying to really understand where they are coming from. In other words, you are demonstrating your ability to care with your listening, not just comprehension.
- Rephrase the content and reflect the feeling. Essentially, putting all the techniques together is what gives the speaker the psychological air they need. You help them work through their own thoughts and feelings and that gives them confidence while establishing trust.
When you empathetically listen and seek to understand another person on these levels, you are providing psychological air for the other person to breathe. They know they have been heard and understood, and as a result trust is established. After this vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving (200-201). In other words, the path to mutual progress finally opens as a result of empathetic listening.
This process in action is often transformational. With an empathetic listener, the speaker works out their true feelings and intentions in the process because the space and trust have been established. Covey puts it succinctly when he says, “As [the speaker] grows in confidence of your sincere desire to really listen and understand, the barrier between what’s going on inside them and what’s actually being communicated to you disappears. It opens a soul-to-soul flow” (206). This kind of trusting relationship is essential for an ESL instructor working with at-risk individuals who often carry trauma that affects their ability to trust and genuinely engage with figures of authority.
Skills and Character
Empathetic listening is a skill, and like all skills, it is developed through practice. Developing and practicing these skills is powerful because it gives you accurate data – about your client, about your product, about your organization – that you can meaningfully work with. It can also inform you in ways you otherwise wouldn’t have considered. The realizations and moments of “aha” that come from empathetic listening may provide paths that you can only see through the effort you spent in understanding. In other words, when you really listen, you usually learn something new.
But empathetic listening as a skill is only the tip of the iceberg. Skills will not be effective unless they come from a sincere desire to understand; that desire is the massive base of the iceberg, where all the character resides (209). It’s important to reflect on yourself and what you value so that you can operate from a genuine place of integrity. Otherwise, using technique alone, people will sense your duplicity and question your motives. As Covey says, “You have to build the skills of empathetic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust” (198).
Success through Listening
Sharing these insights with my replacement, I could feel how “soft” or “social work-y” my words must’ve sounded. It is likely she was expecting some pedagogical strategy or curriculum idea to usher in the changes she wanted, but instead I engaged with her about listening and human connection. “I realize this is me telling you to be more understanding and vulnerable to their difficulties,” I admitted. But the truth I was trying to get at is this: if you want to influence others, you often need to to be influenced yourself. And that’s what empathetic listening does: it establishes a connection of trust that opens others up to being receptive to what you need to say and accomplish. When I understood and empathized with my students, they reciprocated with respect and class attendance. They looked forward to our interactions and were receptive to my instruction. And it was this mutual respect that paved the path towards me finding success in that role.
Work Cited:
Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. [Rev. ed.]. Free Press, 2004.
Allyson Abroad 