Assignment: One on One Deep Empathic Listening

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Offer to Listen to Someone for One Hour.

This assignment is to empathically listen to someone for an entire hour. If you are not able to find people to hold an Empathy Circle with, this could be an alternative exercise or in addition to that. You empathically listen to someone just like in the Empathy Circle, but for a full hour. So to be clear, you are not taking turns like in an Empathy Circle, but are just listening for the full hour.

Your Invitation

You might say to the prospective speaker. "I'd like to offer to empathically listen to your for an hour. "

As the reason, you might say;

1. "I'm taking a course and this is one of our exercises. Would you help me out?"

2. "I'm trying to improve my listening skills and I'd like to practice my empathic listening skills."

3. "I would like to learn more about you."

4. etc. (Let us know in the training what approach or reasons worked for you?)

"My intention is to listen to you without judgement, advice, agreeing or disagreeing, analysis, or diagnosing. I may ask a question, but will primarily just listen. It will be helpful if you periodically pause so I and reflect my understanding of what you said. I may periodically ask you to pause so that I can recap or summarize what I have understood that you are feeling and thinking. This is just so I can be sure I am accurately understanding you. "

Topics - "You can talk about whatever is on your mind".

Tips -It is best to do this with someone you are not in conflict with.

> Report back in the training on what approach you used to invite someone to be listened to and how it went.

Empathic Listening Examples
Here are some examples of empathic listening. You can watch these to see how others do it.

Empathic Listening by Carl Rodgers
These are examples of Carl Rogers doing Empathic Listening in a therapy counseling session. He is the person who developed the Empathic Listening process,