Here is an excerpt from an article written by Mark Goulston for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
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Disclaimer: It’s probably not a good idea to read this before you eat.

I still remember how it felt when, as a medical student, I drained my first abscess in a patient. We called the procedure “I & D” which stands for “Incision and Drainage” (I told you not to read this just before you eat).

When you do an I & D, you locate what is the most protruding and bulging part of the abscess, wipe it off with alcohol, than pierce it with a scalpel. At that point the pus comes out first, followed by any blood. After this procedure, you may put the person on an antibiotic. Over time, the wound heals from the inside out. If you don’t drain the abscess first, and just start with the antibiotics, the undrained pus may prevent the wound from healing.

Today as a practicing business psychiatrist and CEO advisor, I’ve noticed that when you’re faced with an upset customer, client, employee, shareholder, child, parent, spouse, friend, it can actually feel like they’re bulging with emotion and about to explode. Your instinctual and intuitive reaction may be to try to calm them down, urge them to cool off, suggest it’s not worth getting so upset about. And sometimes that may work. But in cases where they’re really upset, you may need to drain their emotional abscess just as you would have to do with a physical abscess. In those situations, asking them to calm down before they’ve vented will be about as useful as skipping straight to antibiotics before cleaning their wound.

And yet a lot of people don’t know how to listen to someone venting. Usually, people take one of two attitudes. Option 1 is to jump in and give advice — but this is not the same as listening, and the person doing the venting may respond with “Just listen to me! Don’t tell me what to do.” Option 2 (usually attempted after Option 1) is to swing to the other extreme, and sit there silently. But this doesn’t actively help the person doing the venting to drain their negative emotions. Consequently, it is about as rewarding as venting to your dog.

The way to listen when someone is venting is to ask them the following three questions:

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He poses the three questions and then suggests how to be most helpful during the conversation they stimulate. To read the complete article, please click here.

Mark Goulston, M.D., F.A.P.A. is a business psychiatrist, executive consultant, keynote speaker and co-founder of Heartfelt Leadership. He is the author of Just Listen and co-author of Real Influence: Persuade Without Pushing and Gain Without Giving In (AMACOM, 2013). To contact him here, please click here.

To read his other blog posts, please click here.