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Empathetic listening rings with authenticity. It may not be sufficient to building healthy relationships, but it is certainly necessary. The deeper the relationship, the deeper the listening we are likely and expected to bring to it. This is why empathetic listening is a primary component in theories of counseling, therapy, teaching, and parenting. When we speak even minor needs or concerns out loud and have them listened to empathetically, we tend to feel appreciated and nurtured. There is no substitute for this value.

The specific techniques above are worth learning and practicing on their own. It's also useful to gauge how well others in a conversation are using these techniques, to see how much attention and care they are "bringing to the table."

But body posture and movement are not easy to practice, and indeed it may feel artificial to do so. It turns out that aside from this exploded view of conversation attention, there is another way to view the care and empathy we bring to listening: our level of presence.

Presence is the opposite of absent-mindedness. Your presence as a listener is the amount of focused physical and mental attention you can sustain for the speaker. As speakers many of us can subtly sense the listener's level of physical and mental presence with us (for us) as we speak. Are you mainly here now in this moment while I speak, or are you mainly elsewhere in your mind?

Presence is an excellent conduit of approval, trust, and respect. If you already care about the speaker, you are likelier (but by no means certain) to be fully present for them. With enough presence, you may tend to use the listening mechanisms listed above automatically and autonomically.

Few of us enjoy speaking to someone who ignores us. That's fairly straightforward to detect. It can make us uneasy or angry to speak to a listener whose attention often wanders, or who stares through us blankly. Harder to detect are various levels of partial attention and false attention. Presence is the stuff of genuine friendliness - it's what false, polite congeniality pretends to be. It's the difference between a big cold smile and a small warm one.

But despite what we would each want as listeners ourselves, we are many of us quite poor listeners. We listen more or less distractedly, giving less as listeners than we attempt to take as speakers. As the other party speaks, instead of focusing our minds in the present moment on their words, we place our minds in the future by preparing a reply (or worse, a rebuttal). It turns out that presence as listeners is damned hard for most of us to give. Our ability to do it seems to be related to the presence we have for ourselves (another topic entirely).

Empathetic Listening can be exhausting. The attention you pay, the value you convey, eventually drains you emotionally and physically. The more emotionally challenging the material conveyed by the speaker (e.g., rage!), the more difficult and draining such presence can be. Sometimes your body reflexively decides to "check out." Next time you witness negative remarks let loose on an all-hands meeting by a blowhard boss, check to see how many listeners drop their gazes to the floor, exchange glances, roll their eyes, rub their eyes, or sip their coffee. We tend to spend our attention judiciously, where it is most comfortable, and where we suspect (at some level) it is likeliest to be reciprocated. We tend to be more present for those whom we like, trust, and respect, and who like, trust, and respect us (though in intimate relationships, closeness itself can become a challenge to presence).

So in a healthy software team of people sharing lots of cameraderie, it's easier for us to be present for one another. We don't have to "spend" much to be present, and we get a lot in return. Indeed, this is a self-strengthening feedback loop: we become closer, as levels of approval, trust, and respect go up.

In a dysfunctional team (sadly, closer to the norm), the high levels of negative ambient emotion make presence difficult to sustain. What we may be present for, much of the time, is explicit or tacit judgement, disapproval, invalidation, antagonism, or recrimination. This may drive us into deeper and deeper social absence, emotionally and physically. This is a worsening feedback loop: the community gradually dissolves.

As you might suspect, dysfunctional teams, like dysfunctional families, need the most attention, the most listening, the most presence.

Our presence for listeners requires consciousness of our presence, both for them, and for ourselves. We witness and monitor ourselves paying attention to the speaker (or not), paying attention to our reaction to the speaker, and watching the rest of the communication going on in the room. We cannot sustain presence without this kind of awareness. It's important and difficult.

But even if presence is difficult to give to ourselves and each other, we benefit from becoming more conscious of our decisions to be present or not, and of others' decisions to be present for us or not. And they are certainly decisions, whether or not we are conscious of them. Does it in fact feel better to you to be listened to deeply? How difficult is it for you to sustain close attention to a friend, or for the blowhard boss?

A little empathetic listening goes a long way. If we can become conscious of our depth of listening and presence for each conversational context, we can eventually learn to control it. We can then begin to improve our social context in subtle and profound ways.

Many of us have seen how a single so-called "Power Programmer" can be the primary engine of productivity for an ordinary team of programmers. There is no substitute for a true master programmer's experience with software patterns, principles, and practices. Such a programmer can seem to "rescue" the rest of his or her team, again and again.

An experienced listener with more than his or her share of equanimity can have a similar effect on a team. And if a small likely fraction of the people on a software team with the most "people skills" can become dedicated listeners in their conversations, this can spread.

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