Beyond Making Conversation – The Power of Active Listening
I recently treated myself to an extra long weekend. During my break I covered a lot of ground moving around Victoria. I went from city to country to coast then back to the city over just four days. It was social and fun, but it was not restful. With many activities, parties, and meals planned, I was introduced both to new people and old, familiar faces. At the end of the long weekend, there was a prevailing theme across these social interactions. It left me feeling disheartened and, for lack of a better word, feeling lousy.
What stood out to me was the pattern and nature of the conversations. Several times I noted it would start with someone greeting me and routinely asking how I am or what I’ve been up to lately, to then completely disengage from my answer. When this happened I felt a lack of care, or intent to hear, really hear, what my response was. I wondered if I replied with something completely out of the ordinary, would they even notice?
These experiences allowed me to reflect on my listening abilities. In his book The Road Less Travelled, Author Scott Peck notably wrote ‘You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time”. I pondered whether I had also made others feel this way because I had not truly listened to what they had said. In all honesty, it is more than likely!
Active listening is about gifting other people our empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard
Researchers of psychology, Richard Farson and Carl Rogers, were the first to propose back in the 1950s that humans ought to listen and listen “actively” (they literally wrote the book on it!). Active listening involves shifting focus from one’s own standpoint, to fully engage in what the other person is saying. This fosters understanding of their experience, and develops empathy for it. It’s not about how what they’re saying relates to you. It’s about how what they’re saying relates to their experience, and what that is like.
Active listening can strengthen relationships by demonstrating a willingness to empathise with the other’s perspective and make the other person feel valued and heard. According to Farson and Rogers, two factors are central to active listening – a robust attention span and a high empathetic capacity.
Active listening requires us to focus our full attention and practice empathy
To truly listen to what others are saying, we need our attention to be fully present. It means you give your full attention to the speaker and use all your senses to listen, verbally and non-verbally. Deep and genuine emotions are held and communicated in the body, and actively listening means being aware and paying attention to the person’s emotional experience.
The second component is a high empathetic capacity. Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by really imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. What this looks like is the listener accepting, supporting, and respecting what is being communicated, rather than dismissing or bringing in their judgments or beliefs. Often this means stepping aside from what you think the person ‘should’ be thinking or feeling, and instead recognising that their perspective is a different one, regardless of your opinion on the matter.
Barriers to active listening
Active listening takes effort and practice. For a lot of us, it is not a natural skill. One barrier to practicing active listening is our internal monologue. Often this internal monologue will cling to the conversation being had and, instead of actively listening to the person speaking, it provides a running commentary on how what the person says relates to us. This might include:
- Contemplating how what they have said reminds us of our own lives
- Ruminating on what to say next in the conversation
- Reacting to the other person’s perspective, such as thoughts that agree or disagree with what they’ve said
This kind of inward gaze and preoccupation means we are distracted and potentially miss what is being communicated to us, especially non-verbal cues.
Active listening can also be uncomfortable at times as we allow ourselves to feel, really feel, another’s pain. There is no denying it’s easier to zone out after you have routinely asked about a person’s day or well-being. However, passive listening doesn’t give us the benefits of building deeper relationships and making the other person feel valued.
There are three broad skills to focus on if you want to be a better listener
Body Language: When someone else is speaking, many of us tend to fidget, judge or have opinions, wander our gaze, or track the thoughts in our minds. However, this gets in the way of us being fully present in the moment. It is useful to engage with your body language and consider how you are meeting the person. Are you maintaining eye contact, responding with facial expressions, and telling them, with your body position, that they have your attention? This is the first skill because engaging your body will make it easier to empathise with what they are communicating.
Following: You can only follow what a person is saying and observe themes and a narrative if you give the person space to speak. This means not interrupting them with questions, and not filling silence. Conversations that have lots of questions and rapidly move back and forth often indicate an absence of active listening.
Reflecting: As you actively listen, you are taking in the verbal and non-verbal information being communicated. To demonstrate your understanding, reflect on what you have heard in a short, summarised manner. This illustrates to the listener that you are interested and taking in what they are saying. This also allows for the opportunity to be corrected if there is a misunderstanding.
Remember, active listening takes effort and practice.
Remember to be patient with yourself, it is difficult learning a new skill but the benefits you will receive from practicing active listening are truly worth it! A good way to start practicing active listening can be to work on being more attentive in conversation and being more in the present moment.
If you feel like you have the skills of body language, following and reflecting down pat, this article breaks active listening down even further. If you notice your inner monologue is particularly loud and you observe that you are bringing in your own unhelpful beliefs or judgments, you may want to check out this blog post which does a deep dive into challenging unhelpful thinking. You can also read about how to make your relationships more secure here.