Practicing Empathy with Effective Listening

Empathy is the second area of the emotional intelligence which is characterized by respectful listening, feeling the impact on others and service orientation. It is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, to share feelings, that are being experienced by another person being. Respectful listening is listening with our eyes, our heart as well as with our ears. Feeling the impact on others can help us to avoid making wrong decisions for us and also helping others by moving them in another direction. And if we want to help others even if this is not our duty that means we are talking about the third competency of the empathy which is service orientation.
Respectful listening is not something easy to do, in my opinion that needs a lot of learning and practice through a number of trainings. It is not just about listening, it is also about giving a feedback and not any kind of raw feedback, but a feedback that will please our listener, customer and make them to come back for our services more than once. Being a respectful listener can help us also in our lives not just in business, for example, it can help us to win friends, people can improve their marriages, by respectful listening you can make people feel so good about being with you that they will literally follow you anywhere. Respectful listening also means listening with optimism and positive human regard. Good listeners often have the ability to listen to people “positively” despite their immediate negative state.
Feeling the impact on others has also a very strong bond with respectful listening, and that is because in order to feel what is the impact of you words or actions on the people you are communicating with it means that you have to respectfully listen to them, to feel their unspoken fears, concerns, moods, and aspirations at the moment.
And in the end, service orientation is about something that one wants to do, not forced by someone to help others, it should come from your wish, in my opinion