How to Improve Your Effective Listening Skills

“Can you see me? Do you hear me?” In this internet age we live in, with the lightning-fast capability of transmitting our thoughts to people via a variety of media, there is certainly a lot of communication going on. Whether it is effective listening and communication is another question altogether.

We all want to be seen and heard by others, but we don’t always know how to return the favor. Many of us think we’re good at listening, but often that’s not the case. One of the greatest gifts we can give another human being is to acknowledge them and affirm that we respect them.

How do we go about doing this?

Being a great listener is an effective way of ensuring that you understand the people around you, and of affirming their worth. After all, when we give up our time, attention, and the opportunity to speak and have ourselves be heard to listen to someone, we are extending a great honor to that person. We are displacing the focus on ourselves to make room for them.

When you choose to listen and listen well to someone, you are effectively saying that in this moment they are the most important person in the room. With all the words and ideas, we want to get across, the limited amount of time we have in interactions with most people, giving up the right to speak in order to hear the other person out is a huge sacrifice.

This is true whether we are speaking of a colleague, your spouse, your children, your neighbor, or even a stranger you’re in conversation with. Being an effective listener is a skill that will enhance your ability to communicate with others because it allows you to create room to understand the other person, as well as the right to speak. While we may think that we are great listeners, we usually aren’t, and learning what effective listening looks like will help up curb those impulses that undermine great listening.

What are some of the things that are the enemies of good, effective listening? Sometimes, what hinders our listening (and what communicates to the other person that we aren’t listening!) is:

• we interrupt the other person
• we don’t look at the other person while they speak
• we suggest solutions too quickly
• we spend more time talking than hearing what’s being said

Being an effective listener requires us to unlearn some ways of communicating with others and picking up a few helpful habits along the way. When you are an effective listener, you will show your interest in what the other person is saying and help them to know that you were listening and understood what was being said.

Tips to Develop Your Effective Listening Skills

How can you become a better listener? Here are a few tips to help you develop your effective listening skills.

1. Create the right atmosphere for a relaxed conversation.

Often, one of the main obstacles to listening well is that we are in a hurry, seem to be in a hurry, or are simply too distracted to have a focused conversation with someone. In other words, we are often not present. Talking with someone while our mobile phone is in front of us, or with one earphone still plugged in, or on our way somewhere else communicates that we aren’t there in the moment.

Taking the time to sit down, close the door, and lower your laptop screen allows you to pay closer attention to the person in front of you. Not only does it slow you down and create the right atmosphere for a conversation, but it lets the other person know that they have your attention.

2. Be open-minded.

When someone is speaking, quite often we have thoughts racing through our minds. Our mouths can’t keep up with our brains, and sometimes that means we’re forming conclusions even as the other person is trying to make their point.

Add to that the fact that we often assume we know what the other person is trying to say, and that means we don’t hear what they are saying – we hear what we think they are saying. Being open-minded means hearing what the other person is saying in their own words, rather than filling in the gaps and coming to your own conclusions before they’ve finished.

3. Face the speaker and maintain eye-contact.

One of the ways we can help ourselves to pay attention and show the other person that we are paying attention is to turn our bodies so that we face them and maintain eye contact with them. If someone is speaking to you and they have one eye on you and the other on the book or laptop in front of them, you’re never sure if they are listening.

In those situations, attention is often divided between the task and the speaker. Looking at someone in the eye communicates that you see them. Maintaining eye contact indicates that you’re continuing to see them, and your focus is on them.

This is especially important if the cultural context is a Western one where eye contact communicates respect and honesty. In a multicultural setting, you must pay attention to how different cultures show that they are paying attention and giving respect.

4. Don’t interrupt.

To listen well, it’s important to let the other person finish their thought before you interject with your own opinions. It takes patience to pay attention and let someone say their whole piece before you say anything in response. Interruption can communicate that you don’t think what they’re saying is important.

5. Ask clarifying questions.

When the other person pauses or finishes what they are saying, ask clarifying questions to ensure understanding. The goal of those questions is to understand what they are saying, and not to insert your thoughts into the conversation at that point. Asking what they mean when they are using certain phrases or words or asking them to explain certain concepts is a great way to get a greater understanding of what they are trying to communicate.

6. Reflect what you’re hearing.

When you’ve listened, asked questions to gain clarity, and feel you’ve heard them, reflect what you’ve heard back to them by giving feedback and summarizing what you’ve heard. This lets them know that you were listening, and if there is any point, they feel you misheard or misunderstood, they can correct you and set you straight.

The goal of communication is, after all, for people to understand one another, and summarizing what you’ve heard in your own words provides a space for that mutual understanding o be established.

7. React properly to emotions.

Communication is about more than words. When you see a person clearly in distress even though they haven’t used words to articulate it, react to that distress accordingly. Different emotional states should draw out corresponding reactions that show we see what they are feeling. If someone is sad, reacting by laughing shows we’re not paying attention.

8. Pay attention to non-verbal cues.

As suggested above, we communicate using more than our words. We need to be aware of other people’s non-verbal cues as well as our own to make sure that we’re hearing the entirety of what they are communicating, and to be consistent with what we are trying to say in response.

Actions such as nodding and leaning in while someone is talking communicates that we hear them and that we are paying attention to them. If someone is saying they are happy, but they do so through gritted teeth or tears, something deeper is happening that we ought to acknowledge and address.

Being an effective listener means showing your interest in what the other person is saying and helping them to know that you were listening and understood what was being said. Paying attention to these tips will help you develop more effective listening skills.

Learning to listen

Being a better listener is key for being a better leader, but also for being a better friend, spouse, neighbor, colleague, and human being. When people feel we’ve heard them, they feel valued and understood. In his letter, James wrote to his fellow Christians saying, “Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires” (James 1:19-20).

Learning to listen is one of the greatest gifts we can give to others, and ourselves. It requires deep humility and calls us to value others at least as much as we value ourselves, and it is a skill well worth acquiring.