By Dr. William Miller

”A capacity for empathic understanding is hard-wired in our brains, but its full expression involves particular listening skills that are seldom learned through ordinary experience.

Through clear explanation, specific examples, and practical exercises, Dr. Miller offers a step-by-step process for developing your skillfulness in empathic listening. With a solid basis in sixty years of scientific research, these communication skills are not limited to professionals, and can be learned and applied in your everyday life.

Instead of assuming that you know the meaning of what you think you heard, empathic listening lets you develop a more accurate understanding and prevent miscommunication. Empathic understanding can help to deepen personal relationships, alleviate conflict, communicate across differences, and promote positive change.

The author also discusses skills for expressing yourself clearly, and for strengthening close relationships and friendships. Through empathic understanding you have access to life experience far beyond your own, and over time, listening well and deeply becomes a way of being, fostering a compassionate and patient acceptance of human frailties--those of others as well as your own.”

The communications skills present in CRAFT and expanded in the Invitation to Change Approach are pulled from Motivational Interviewing, the method employed by this book. Dr. Miller teaches through description but also provides opportunities for structured practice at the end of each chapter to encourage you to systematically work on your skills.

If you are interested in this you might also like…

• the ground-breaking book “Beyond Addiction”

• the “20 Minute Guide” from the Center for Motivation and Change, which include worksheets on communication skills.