Eric Maddox Empathy-Based Listening Program Overview Video

Eric Maddox Listening With Purpose – Empathy Based Listening Program Overview

Eric Maddox:

Hi, I'm Eric Maddox, the former US Army interrogator, who in 2003 while assigned to a Delta Force team in Iraq, tracked down Saddam Hussein, and I'm the creator of Empathy Based Listening, the communication process to build the highest level of trust that I had to create, develop, to gain cooperations of prisoners on the battlefield. You think highest level of trust, that's a bold statement.

How do we build trust? When you think about trust with yourself and your clients, yourself and your team, friends, we think, well, we have to demonstrate that we're good at our job. We have to demonstrate we have the knowledge, experience, the wisdom, and we like to have a brand and name recognition in order that we communicate when we work for them. They go, "Wow, you know exactly what you're doing."

I also want you to think about your clients in your industry. What are they telling you? What are they telling all advisors? "Do you get me? Do you really understand me? I trust you're good at your job and the tools and all that stuff and all of your success, but do you have the ability to get me?" That is all the interrogations were about for me, and I created this empathy based listening communication process, which I've studied and honed for the last 20 years.

It comes down to this - partnerships, relationships. They first want to know, "Are you going to make it about yourself or do you have the ability to get to understand me," and I call it getting on their stage versus what? Do we drag them to our stage? Do we give them our solutions and trust us and we make our stages really awesome, but do we really understand how to get on someone's stage? The first thing we have to do in order to do that, we've got to be able to get off our stage.

What does that mean? Our listening distractions. I'm going to give you a statistic. On average, we only listen to approximately 25% of what we hear in conversations. Why? Because all these things going on in our mind. If we can reduce those distractions, then we've got to know what do we listen for, and it's called breadcrumbs. Every time somebody makes a statement, there's a key word, term or phrase they most want us to hear. When we hear it, we have one of two choices. We can solve on it, drag them to our stage, or we can discover. It's that proper discovery to demonstrate to them, "I get you. Maybe I don't get you perfectly, but I'm seeking to understand what it means to be you."

Now 20 years studying this communication process, I promise it is the number one soft skill that will change, grow your business, grow your professional acumen.

 

Neither MFS nor any of its subsidiaries is affiliated with Eric Maddox. The views expressed are those of the speaker and are subject to change at any time.

FOR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL USE ONLY. Should not be shown, quoted, or distributed to the public.

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