Listening Well: The Art of Empathic Understanding

Are you a good listener? How well do you really know the people around you? A capacity for empathic understanding is hard-wired in our brains, but its full expression involves particular listening skills that are seldom learned through ordinary experience. Through clear explanation, specific examples, and practical exercises, Dr. Miller offers a step-by-step process for developing your skillfulness in empathic listening. With a solid basis in sixty years of scientific research, these communication skills are not limited to professionals, and can be learned and applied in your everyday life. Instead of assuming that you know the meaning of what you think you heard, empathic listening lets you develop a more accurate understanding and prevent miscommunication. Empathic understanding can help to deepen personal relationships, alleviate conflict, communicate across differences, and promote positive change. The author also discusses skills for expressing yourself clearly, and for strengthening close relationships and friendships. Through empathic understanding you have access to life experience far beyond your own, and over time, listening well and deeply becomes a way of being, fostering a compassionate and patient acceptance of human frailties–those of others as well as your own.

"The quality of empathic listening that Carl Rogers brought to us decades ago, that unlocks treasures of intimacy, trust, peace and healing, is alive and well in Bill Miller's own unique voice, as he extends the meanings of this vital relational element for today's world. Readily integrated into our everyday lives and the larger cultures of human conflict, my hope is that we choose to live out the delicate yet strong principles of connection that Listening Well offers us."
–Gay Leah Barfield, Co-Founder and Former Director, Carl Rogers Institute for Peace, Center for Studies of the Person, La Jolla, California

"If there ever was a time for Listening Well, it is now. In its pages, we learn to use our ears to dissolve differences, open hearts, and build bridges. Nothing more needs saying."
 –Scott D. Miller, Director, International Center for Clinical Excellence

"Listening Well is a super moon in the dark night sky: brilliant, absorbing, and illuminating. Bill Miller, co-developer of the revolutionary motivational interviewing, blends art and science in teaching the quintessential skills of listening and in fostering human connection."
–John C. Norcross, Professor of Psychology, University of Scranton

"Listening Well is a terrific, hands-on book for individuals or groups dedicated to caring relationships. Full of insight and practical exercises to improve listening skills, I highly recommend it to professionals and lay people alike."
–Debra Engquist, Retired Pastor

"Listening Well is about much more than listening. This short, easy-to-read book provides a brief course in human relationships. With many useful explanations, examples, and exercises, the author demonstrates the what, why, and how of empathy in human interaction. The book is eminently useful for those who want to or need to improve their listening and relationship skills at work or in personal settings."
–Howard Kirschenbaum, Former Chair, Counseling and Human Development, University of Rochester

Dr. William R. Miller is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, with over forty years of experience in teaching empathic understanding. His many books include Lovingkindness, Quantum Change, Motivational Interviewing, and Portals: Two Lives Intertwined by Adoption.