Podcaster Gives Suggestions for Better Communication

On a recent Mindset Mentor podcast, personal development coach Rob Dial approached the subject of effective communications, which incidentally turned out to be the title of an English class I took in my senior year of high school.  Except that back then the teacher...as was overwhelmingly the case during that time...didn't really teach anything.  Dial, on the other hand, has broken the subject down to interpersonal interaction...usually on a conversational level...with three key elements to his presentation.  They form the acronym L-U-V, coined by psychologist Karol Kumpfer: listen, understand, validate.  This in itself wouldn't be of much help to me, but Dial expands upon them.  With "listen", he decries the way most exchanges go, with silence beyond a brief pause something awkward and to be avoided, and the two sides often thinking more about what they're going to say next than actually picking up what the other is saying.  Instead, Dial suggests that the listener give the speaker his or her undivided attention and, whenever a pause happens, count "one Mississippi" to three before speaking.  This gives the other a chance to continue, often going into a deeper and more meaningful mode of expression. Listen without judgments, and with empathy toward the speaker...for we all have different life experiences leading to where we are today.  With "understand", the idea is to convey that through one's expressions, head nodding, "uh-huh" type cues, and so on, that the speaker is understood (I'm already pretty good with this).  And "validate" is to let the speaker know that you are not there to "fix" them and render judgment, but instead that you are interested in their viewpoint, asking follow-up questions to express that interest and their worthiness as a speaker.  Dial noted that many families have this problem where parents tend to listen to their children with the aim of "fixing" any perceived problems...leading to the kids clamming up and becoming secretive (that was the case with me when I was growing up).  I think all these suggestions are valuable as long as I am focused on communicating in a proactive way...but that's only half of the formula as I see it.  I think all of what Rob Dial presented would be self-evident if I myself, as a speaker, had over the course of my formative years regularly experienced conversations in which the other attentively listened without judgment or interruption and affirmed the worth of my opinion or narrative, not seeing my message as a problem that they were supposed to fix or a challenge that they needed to put down.  The spiritual saying "Do unto others as you would have them to unto you" is the proactive path, but most folks actually learn to "Do unto others as they do unto you"...