We cannot underestimate the centrality to good listening skills of empathising and showing that you empathise. When we communicate, unless we are doing so for purely transactional reasons (e.g., “I’d like a medium coffee with semi-skimmed milk on the side, please.”), we want to feel fully seen and heard. It is the job of a skilled listener to not only take in and understand what is being said, but to also communicate a respect for the humanity of the person sharing it.
Good listening skills for relating to other people involve three stages:
- taking in the explicit and implicit information another person is providing you;
- synthesising the information you’re getting and relating it to what you already know; and
- responding to the other person by (a) showing you are paying attention and (b) asking clarifying questions. This is sometimes called active-empathic listening.
This kind of listening is considered a critical prosocial behaviour, meaning that it promotes connections with other people and increases satisfaction in relationships. Listening skills are especially important if you want to be a supportive presence in somebody else’s life. For example, clients report feeling more comfortable with and able to self-disclose to their therapists when their therapists are clearly using the listening skills described above.
Improving Your Listening Skills
Simply put, improving your listening skills will make it easier to develop and maintain close relationships with other people. People with strong listening skills score higher on measures of social skills, so it stands to reason that improving your listening skills might improve your overall social life.
It is said that when people move jobs, they don’t leave companies, they leave bosses. It is because the people involved felt that they could not be heard. Another benefit of improving your listening skills is that you may become more able to understand your own emotions and empathise with yourself.
Examples
Let’s look at a couple examples of listening skills. Some of the most concrete and effective listening skills have to do with the responding stage because they encourage the person who is speaking to keep going, so we will focus on those.
Paraphrasing: When we paraphrase, we simply try to put what the other person has said into our own words. It’s not repeating back to them exactly what they said. Putting their point in your own words shows them that you were listening closely enough to internalize what they said and can explain it yourself.
If you are not sure how to do this, keep in mind a formula such as, “you feel X because Y.” For example, if someone says, “I just couldn’t believe he didn’t ask anybody else what they wanted before he went ahead and booked the meeting”, you might paraphrase back, “you felt surprised because he made that decision without consulting anyone else.”
Open-ended questions: Asking open-ended questions shows the speaker that you as a listener are interested in what they are saying and curious to know more. If you told me, “I’ve got so much to do before I leave for the holidays at my parents’ house,” I might ask, “How are you feeling about going home?” or “How’s it going getting through that to-do list?”
Silence: At certain times, sitting in attentive silence shows that you are actively listening. Especially when somebody is upset, it may be more effective to simply wait for them to say more, while showing that you are paying attention by keeping your nonverbals focused on them (e.g., watching them, staying turned towards them).
Reflecting feelings back: When feelings are running high, people often find it very helpful to have those feelings acknowledged by listeners.
Tips on Listening Skills
My first and most important listening skills tip for you is that listening is both verbal and nonverbal. This applies to both the speaker and the listener. When you are listening, you want to pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the speaker, not just their words. Often, these nonverbal signals give you more information about how the other person is feeling or what they’re thinking – and this information might contradict what they are saying. For example, if a friend tells you, “I don’t really care where we go for dinner,” but they break eye contact with you in the middle of the sentence, they might actually have a preference but are holding it back.
As a listener, your nonverbals matter a great deal, too. You can demonstrate to another person that you are actively listening to them by holding eye contact, mirroring their facial expressions (or, if there is little emotion in the conversation, by just smiling), moving closer to staying close to the person, and keeping your body open and oriented toward the other person. Research tells us that speakers perceive all of these behaviours as indicating that the listener is paying close attention to them.
In Sum
We all get plenty of chances throughout the day to practice and hone our listening skills. You could pick just one relationship in your life that you would like to deepen and make a commitment to implementing some of the listening skills mentioned here. You just might find that both you and the speaker quickly start to feel closer to each other when you push yourself to use your best listening skills.
