It is Easier to Misunderstand than to Understand

It is much easier to misunderstand than to understand. It is sort of like shooting a basketball at a hoop: there are many more ways to miss than to make the shot. To make the shot requires focus, practice, confidence, steadiness and sometimes a bit of luck. Just so, to understand requires focusing on the other rather than yourself; practicing listening, including giving and receiving clarifying feedback; calm confidence that you can listen and learn; and a patient steadiness in sustained listening. The luck part usually has to do with asking the right questions, rather like putting on the right lure to catch a fish.

We are going to misunderstand when we do not give others the time and attention they need to say that they want to say. Note that I say the time they need to say something rather than the time we may need to understand. Important matters take much more time to verbalize than trivial concerns. Longer listening promotes real understanding.

We are likely to misunderstand if we assume either before they start or as soon as they begin talking that we know where they are headed.

In my years as a pastor and counselor, I learned to listen longer and harder than I initially thought I was going to have to listen to grasp what a person was actually saying. This happened again recently, when I was unprepared for what someone started sharing, signifying a truly traumatic incident, yet telling me slowly and with little affect. I had to ask a series of questions to get the whole story spoken. To understand, you need to know not just what happened, but what it meant to the speaker. Put differently, words both denote and connote. The dictionary definition for a word is its denotation; the personal meanings to both the speaker and listener is its connotation.

Almost like watching a movie full of surprise twists and turns, and with an ending I did not see coming, so was this person’s unfolding narrative.

Understanding requires listening with your heart as well as head. To understand you must identify with the speaker, doing so with compassion and caring. You also need to realize and accept that what others may share today, feel today about some incident may change tomorrow, as they remember or forget more, as they change, and with that their way of seeing also changes.

The apostle Paul said that when he was a child he thought like a child, he reasoned like a child. And that when he became a man he put away childish things. This maturation process never ceases in us all over the course of our life journey.

So where persons may be when they begin a counseling journey will be different than where they are once they have gotten well into it; and later, once they have begun to move past it. One of the essential tasks of a counselor is to help clients sense, understand and embrace the changes in their perceptions of themselves, significant others and life itself.

Listening to understand is one of the most difficult yet most rewarding things I do. It is also one of the most exhausting. That may be why twenty hours a week of doing counseling is considered full time. If that doesn’t seem like a lot of labor in listening, I assure you it is. But it is worth the effort when you come to understand another, which may include a better understanding of yourself.