Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Listening

1.The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
 2.Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
3.He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
4.He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
5.The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love.To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
6.Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

Fromm's rules apply not just outside his profession but independently of era or culture: wherever you are or whenever it happens to be, you can always practice freeing your mind so as to concentrate as completely as possible on the person talking to you, honing your imagination so as to vividly experience in your mind what they have to verbally communicate. Of course, to love, in Fromm's sense, remains a particular challenge in this process, and for humans may well stand as the challenge of existence.  But whether or not you credit psychoanalysis itself, the fact remains that we all must, to the greatest extent possible, understand one another's minds as our own; the very survival of humanity has always depended on it.
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