Seek first to understand, then be understood

I am a Green Bay Packer fan. I bleed green and gold. There is a cheese head
and a Brett Favre bobblehead doll in my office. When the Packers lose, I
generally get some good-natured kidding. Several years ago on a late autumn
Monday evening, the Packers lost. The next day I was ready for the teasing
to begin.
However, early the next morning we received a phone call. A family member
had passed away. My kids were still in school at the time, so we took them
out of school to be with our family. My daughter was a cheerleader and a
basketball game was to be played that night, so we rushed back to get her to
the gym in time to cheer.
At halftime one of the cheerleaders found me in the stands and sat down. She
said, “I’m sorry to hear about your loss.” I thought she was talking about
the Packers.
With exaggerated exasperation, I said, “Well! Thanks for bringing it up!”
Her eyes grew wide and filled with tears. She wasn’t talking about the
Packers. She heard about the death in our family and was being kind. It is a
unique feeling, a strange, sick feeling, to be a grown man, a pastor no
less, and to make a genuinely caring teenage girl cry in public.
I was reminded in that brief conversation why it is important to know what
is being said to you before you answer.
It is as natural as breathing to assume when you are in a conversation that
you know what the other person means by what they say. Facial expression,
body language and tone of voice are clues we use to determine meaning. But
there are other factors, more subtle influencers that we use in order to
understand what is being said to us. Our personal experiences shape how we
hear others. The caring teenage girl wasn’t the first person to say to me
after a Packer game, “Sorry to hear about your loss.” And our experiences
with other people influence the way we interpret what is being said. I was
much more accustomed to being teased by teenagers than cared for by them.
Put all this together and it is no wonder how we get into arguments with our
spouse, our co-workers, our friends and neighbors, only to realize later
that the whole thing was based on a misunderstanding.
There is real wisdom in the New Testament book of James when the author
writes, “Be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to become angry.” One of
the habits Steven Covey writes about in his book “Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People” is this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
How different our homes, our workplaces, our country, our world would be if
we listened to each other. Mouths closed, ears open, heart and mind engaged
is a formula for understanding.