How to be a good active listener
What is active listening?
To make it simple here are three easy steps to remember when it comes to being a good active listener:
Comprehend. Comprehension is basically when the listener pays attention to the speaker's verbal and non-verbal language to fully understand what they're trying to communicate. Actually listen and pay attention to the fine details of what the person is saying to you. Observe the speaker’s body language and connect with their emotions and story.
Retain. This step is when the listener tries to remember key points of the speaker's message using their memory or via note-taking.After hearing a story, remember the key details and overarching themes within what the speaker is saying. This is key because this is the part where you take the key details of the story and show how you listened to them and are now invested in what they are sharing.
Respond. You respond to the speaker to confirm your understanding of their message and to further your discussion on the subject. This only happens after analyzing and remembering what they said (components one and two). However, sometimes people share information just to release it from their body. If this is the case, its okay to just be silent and offer if they would like advice, or just comfort them. You don’t always have to come back with perfect advice. Just listening to someone is usually enough to make them feel slightly less tense and anxious.
Benefits of active listening
Active listening draws you out from what’s going on in your own head to the ideas and emotions the speaker is sharing, so you can then use this information to respond better. Active listening will help you improve every aspect of your life.
It helps you build connections.
It helps you build trust.
It helps you identify and solve problems.
It helps you increase your knowledge and understanding of various topics.
It helps you avoid missing critical information.
Tips for How to Improve Your Listening Skills Step by Step
You now know the benefits of active listening. Now it’s time to learn how to improve your listening skills step by step.
1. Face the Speaker
Face your conversation partner. Don’t look at your phone, watch, or other people. Look at whoever is talking, even if they’re not looking at you as in the case with lectures or seminars. When you are having an intimate conversation with someone, show that you are physically listening to what they are saying by facing them.
2. Picture What's Being Communicated
Visuals and mental models naturally form in your mind as you hear information. This is normal, and is a sign that all your senses are engaged in analyzing what the other person is saying. Remember keywords, dates, phrases, and other details to help you form a clearer picture of the other person’s story.
3. Don’t Judge
Sometimes, people listen only to help them formulate a response. That’s not active listening. Listening with your full attention means remaining neutral, and not forming any opinions on what the speaker is telling you until they finish talking. Remember, good listeners are open to new ideas even ones that contradict their beliefs.
4. Don’t Interrupt
Interrupting the person talking to you not only makes you rude, it also limits the amount of information you are actually retaining because you are so busy interrupting them. Don’t finish the other person’s sentences, even if you think you know what they’re about to say. Sentence grabbers often get things wrong because they’re following their own train of thought—not the speaker’s.
Save your questions and counter-arguments for later, even if the speaker is discussing the exact subject of your question. Interrupting someone at the middle of an explanation can cause them to lose their train of thought and they might address this question or concern later on.
5. Reflect and Clarify
Reflecting and clarifying are two ways to ensure that you and the speaker are on the same page.
Reflecting means repeating what the other person said in your own words to confirm that you understood their message, while clarifying means asking questions to clear up potential misunderstandings or confusion. Both techniques make the speaker feel heard and understood.
Try these clarifying and reflecting statements:
“So I heard you say….”
“I understand that you felt…”
“Back up one sec, what did you mean by...?”
“What would you consider as…?”
6. Summarize
Summarizing is similar to reflecting, except that when you summarize you’re making it clear that you’re about to move on from your current topic. When you summarize, you only explain the main points of the speaker’s overall topic, the tiny details you may have had to clarify before are no longer important in this part of the conversation.
7. Share or Respond
You might think this is just another variation of steps five and six. It’s not. Yes, you’re the one talking in the two previous steps, but you only talked to confirm your understanding of the other person’s message then.
Now that you’ve gained a better understanding of their message, you can now ask if they would like to hear your thoughts and opinions on the conversation and events.. You've got to go through all the previous steps first before you earn the privilege to share your thoughts. This way, the speaker won’t feel like you’re just ignoring them because you took time to validate their feelings and ideas first.
Pro Tips for Effective Listening
Be honest, but assert your opinions with respect.
If you’re afraid that your suggestions will be seen as an attempt to control the other person’s actions, preface your suggestions with, “If that happens to me, I would…”
1. Smiles and Nods
Smiling from time to time suggests that you agree with the speaker’s message. If you combine this with nods and the occasional “uh-huh,” the person talking to you will feel that you’re paying attention to their message.
Don’t use this technique every time thought. You maybe shouldn’t smile if you’re hearing bad news or are being yelled at. You shouldn’t nod when you don’t agree with what you’re hearing, as well. In both cases, a simple “I understand” or “I get it” would work just fine.
2. Eye Contact
Maintaining eye contact is tricky because not everyone is comfortable doing it, or being the one stared at for that matter. There’s no perfect duration of how long you’re supposed to gaze at the speaker, it just depends on you and the other person. You’ll have to play it by the ear. Steven Aitchison, social entrepreneurship expert, suggests breaking eye contact every five seconds by looking to the side, as if you’re trying to remember something.
If you’re worried that your gaze is too strong or a bit creepy, practice relaxing your face and your eyes will follow suit. Close your eyes for a few seconds and breathe deeply. Your facial expression will be more relaxed when you open them.
3. Posture
You can tell a lot about a person’s interest in what you’re saying with their body language. Arms folded suggest the listener is defensive or not in agreement with the speaker’s message, for example.
Attentive listeners tend to lean in towards the speaker. Sometimes, their head is leaned sideways or resting on one hand. You can learn more about body language here:
4. Mirroring
Mirroring is the act of mimicking the speaker’s facial expressions, and is often used to show sympathy and agreement to their message.
For example, a friend who just got accepted to a new job will break the news to you with an excited look on their face. As a friend showing your support, the natural reaction would be to smile and look excited as well.
5. Avoid Distractions
Turn off your phone’s notifications and don’t fidget too much, as this will distract the person talking to you. It makes them feel like you’d rather be somewhere else.
6. Practice Empathy
Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Try to feel what the other person is feeling while they’re talking to you. Imagine yourself in their situation. What would you feel? How would you react? This is the practice of empathy.
Don’t confuse this with sympathy, which is merely the act of feeling sorry for the misery of others, according to Psychology Today. When you’re sympathetic, you feel concerned for the other person’s welfare and wish them to feel better. Empathy goes beyond commiserating because when you empathize; you’re not only feeling sorry for the person, you’re also trying to see the situation from their perspective.
Empathy is helpful in communicating stressful and hard to explain experiences, because some stories are just hard to explain—you kind of have to be there to understand.
7. Positive Feedback or Reinforcement
Long conversations will feel terribly one-sided without the positive feedback of the listener. If you’re listening to a long story, use verbal signals such as “uh-huh,” “okay” or “I understand” at strategic pauses in the conversation to confirm that you’re still following the story.
8. Remember Small Details
Remembering key points of a conversation will help when it’s your turn to talk. Dates, names, locations, and other pertinent information can help you ask probing questions to clarify the speaker’s message.
Even if you understood what they said, repeating details of their story when you summarize their point shows that you understood and paid attention to them.
If you take note of these details, you can mention them next time you reconnect with the person, as in often the case with people you meet at networking events.
