I often see my children hold a question while trying to listen, and I see how it distracts them. They get so frustrated waiting that they blurt or speak over others. Like many parents, I try to teach them to avoid being a self-focused listener whose “own stuff” interferes with their listening. This is hard, and my children struggle with it because they don’t want to forget their own questions or they feel what they have to say is too important to wait.
We all struggle with this. As a lawyer, I have to be an effective listener, which also means finding the best balance between confidently counseling clients, who pay me for my expertise, and exercising humility because my law degree did not bestow upon me a monopoly on good ideas or an all-knowing power to sense my clients’ issues. I need to know when to defer and how to remain quiet and open to my clients’ ideas. My position as an advisor should not become an exercise of vanity at the expense of humility. My clients deserve a lawyer who listens (not just hears them and takes notes) but engages them in a comfortable conversation and a healthy exchange of ideas.
Listening acumen takes training, discipline, and practice. I draw what I learned about listening in college while I was part of EARS at Cornell, and I don’t know where I would be without it. EARS stands for Empathy, Assistance, and Referral Service. It’s a peer-led counseling service for the Cornell community. What I learned from my EARS training, I use every day.
Empathy is at the heart of effective listening. While compassion is important to empathy (just as attentiveness is important to hearing everything said), empathy is more than just compassion. Empathy demands that you try to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and see things through someone else’s eyes. It means you must actively observe the speaker’s word choices, gestures, tone, and body language. It means you repeat back or paraphrase what you hear to gauge your own understanding and make the speaker feel validated because you understand. It takes discipline and practice to master this.
As my children hear me say, you have to be willing to let go to listen. Your question or comment may be awesome, but at the risk of forgetting it, you must acknowledge that others may have an equally wonderful idea, and you must value the exchange more than the satisfaction of making your points. You also have to be willing to let go of your ego, which can be especially challenging for lawyers who are the subject matter expert. This is why empathy is so important to effective listening, and why empathy can be a difficult mental shift from focusing on yourself to others.
Many of us can agree that effective listening is an important tool in any lawyer’s toolbox, but its value exceeds the obvious ability to gather facts, learn a client’s motivations, and understand a client’s goals. It’s really a win-win for the lawyer and client because lawyers who listen effectively find their clients are more likely to listen back (and come back for more advice).