Resources for Active Listening
Behind the Mirror: Reflective Listening and its Tain in the Work of Carl Rogers
Kyle Arnold
"Over the course of his career, Rogers’ position on reflective listening passes through three crucial moments.
Initially, Rogers conceives of reflection as a minimalist technique designed to maintain absolute fidelity to the client’s emotional experience to facilitate catharsis. Reflection, in Rogers’ original formulation, is a product of therapist self-restraint.
However, Rogers later realizes that strict self-restraint lends itself to insincerity on the part of the therapist. Accordingly, he comes to view reflection as a means of congruently implementing underlying therapist attitudes of empathy and acceptance. Yet, this approach, too, seems to lend itself to a kind of insincerity.
Eventually, Rogers outgrows the concept of reflection and reshapes it into interactional concepts of empathic listening and testing understandings. These interactional concepts do not eliminate the opposition between empathy and genuineness, but reframe it as a generative tension that drives the psychotherapist’s empathic activity."
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's Not Enough to Listen
Carl Rogers taught empathy as attunement, not parroting.
Listening is one of the most important skills you can have. How well you listen has a major impact on your job effectiveness, and on the quality of your relationships with others."
- pay attention/