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Being a good listener means having empathy. But empathy is one of the most misunderstood listening skills.
Empathy is what we feel when we are trying to understand the world from the perspective of another person.
One of the common misconceptions about empathy is that you need to have lived through what the other person has experienced to understand them.
Simply having the same experiences as another person is not enough to understand them. Two people can face the same challenges or difficulties, but respond in completely different ways. Your experiences are unique to you and no one else can know how you feel, even if they have been wearing your shoes. The only way to understand how someone feels is to listen to them, without assuming that they feel the same as you did in that situation.
So, let’s think about empathy in a different way.
Your unique perception of the world
Imagine that every baby is born holding a wooden frame that contains a pane of glass. Whenever they look at anything in the world, they do so through this glass.
The glass is not completely clear when they receive it. It is slightly warped and discolored, and these are the marks of their genetics and biology. This means that everyone has a different piece of glass through which to see the world. And this glass becomes more marked as each of us moves through our lives. Every experience – good and bad – changes the glass. It warps, scratches, and smudges. Parts of it may be stained in different colors, like church windows. And so our view of the world changes as the glass changes over time.
We do not see the world as it truly exists. Rather, we see the world through a filter created by our biology and life experiences.
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James' World 2 
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