I Hear You

I Hear You explores the idea of becoming a better listener, engaging in productive conversations and avoiding building up frustrations by taking charge of your communication patterns and improving them in your further dialogues.

A good dialogue consists of someone who listens and someone who shares, while both of them take turns. When it comes to talking and sharing our views, the majority of us are doing a good job. Some of us have a problem expressing our thoughts, while some have troubles with oversharing and forgetting how to listen. Therefore, the first step towards initiating meaningful conversations is learning how to listen to the other person.

To do so, you must turn to empathy. Explore your ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and actively engage in their story when they share it with you. However, be careful not to mirror your emotions on them, nor adopt the victim mentality right away. For example, if someone comes angrily towards us, ready to initiate a conflict, chances are we’ll become defensive and meet them with anger as well, trying to protect our point of view.

Instead, try to meet that person with calmness and understand their point of view. Instead of thinking you are the victim of an unfair situation, think about why that person feels the way they do. Acknowledge their frustration and actively look for solutions together. In other words, be empathic towards them. This will make them feel understood and reduce the tension in your dialogue, therefore leading to a productive and frustration-free encounter.

Conflicts are a natural part of life, and everybody will get to experience them during their lifetime. Conflicts serve as life lessons, as ways of learning how to listen and tame frustrations, and most importantly, as a way of building our relationships with those around us. Both healthy and toxic relationships experience conflicts, but the way we respond to them is what will ultimately make the difference. Therefore, during a conflict, it’s important to recognize the other person’s point of view by acknowledging it to their face. When expressing yours, make sure to have them listen to it and acknowledge it as well. Then, focus on your perspective. It’s hard to think of your point of view as being wrong, because we always consider it as an objective truth. Moreover, the bigger the gap between you and your interlocutor’s point of view, the more difficult it gets to respect their opinion. Although hard, you must take charge of the conflict in a mature way. This implies making the other person the narrator of the story. Ask them questions to find out more about their perspective, and who knows? Maybe you’ll find common…