Active Listening

“Listening doesn’t always equate to hearing. Hearing doesn’t always lead to understanding. But active listening helps each person truly “see” the other.”

— Sanjo Jendayi

Active listening is one of the interpersonal skills that are often the object of focus in counseling or coaching, but its principles are really often practiced in any other activity that requires any level of relating to other people. Which, in the majority of our cases, could mean dealing with a client, a supervisor, someone we are supervising, a colleague, or anyone. Active listening doesn’t require us to go as deep as doing talking therapy, but it does require a certain amount of effort, focus, and intention on our part. While in most helping professions this skill can certainly have a lot of weight, for most of our daily job it doesn't have to be nearly as nuanced and intricate as in those cases. But we do often want to go beyond just gathering superficial information and really understand: understand the person, understand the direction we are given, acknowledge the other person as a human being. Active listening isn’t really complicated or weird, in fact, most of it is simply common sense. But it does require some practice, and it might not be obvious for everyone. Here are some of the key concepts of active listening. 

• Attend without judgment. Active listening always begins with a genuine want to really understanding the other person. If this desire is not there, every "tactic" we'll use will just feel cold, distant, and manipulating. In any encounter, if we come to a conversation with an already pre-established idea of how things "should" be, how we want them to be, or what we think is "right" to do, we inevitably close the door to all other possibilities. In these cases, it often becomes a lot harder for both sides to find a direction, we will try to pull everything towards our side, while the other person will have to make double the efforts to get us unstuck and move towards their vision. It can become extremely frustrating for everybody involved. In this case, the passive component of listening remains the same, we become a sponge to what the other person is saying. Our role is to actively let go of our judgment, question our assumptions, empty ourselves of biases, so that we can fully embrace and focus our attention on what the other person is saying. 

• Reflect back on what you're hearing. We can never assume that what a person means came clear in the words they spoke, and we can never assume that we interpreted the words they spoke the way they were intended to be understood. Reflecting back is a practice where the listener takes his or her interpretation of what has been said and reflects it back, in a different form, to the person who was talking. This has the purpose of confirming that both people are on the same page, that what was said was understood so that the conversation can move on, or to correct and realign both people quickly. Reflecting back helps the listener avoid miscommunication and it shows people collaboration instead of hostility. Reflecting back doesn't mean parroting, we don't want to simply repeat the words the other person spoke. We want to digest them in our own way and reflect back, in our own words, the meaning they had for us. Examples of reflecting back can be: "So what I'm hearing is...", "You mean it's...".  

• Do not justify, ask for guidance instead. When we cannot make something work the way it was asked of us, our first instinct is often to try to defend ourselves by explaining all the reasons why a certain thing cannot work. This can be very frustrating for those who are on the other side because all we are doing is cutting out possibilities and closing ourselves off of other creative paths and limiting the conversation. Asking for guidance instead opens the conversation to explore different solutions, different ways of doing things. 

• Look at the emotional tone of what is being said. How we feel about something often does reveal part of the way we think: what we believe, what we value, what triggers us, what scares us, what stresses us. We can never just "say" something, we always convey a message in different ways depending on the emotion of the moment. Understanding how another person is feeling helps us be more delicate and adjust the way we respond and interact with them, at least on this particular occasion. If we don't adapt and shape our behavior to the emotional tone of the other person, we can quickly fall into deep sands that we might never come out from. Something that could have been taken as a funny remark on one day can have a very different outcome on another. Acknowledging the emotions of the other person can often help them feel more at ease, demonstrating that we are present with them, listening. 

• Look for meaning instead of words, seek to understand. The meaning of a sentence is that ungraspable, unexplainable, indescribable cloud that sits behind everything we say and that we are trying to convey with words. It is the underlying structure that connects all the words that are being spoken, the gestalt of what is being said. Computers can read words, but they can't make meaning out of them. When we grasp the meaning of something, we are not restricted to simply what has been told us, we can make sense of it, understand it, play with it. When we understand the concept someone is trying to convey, we get a sense of direction and we see the destination, if we simply focus on the words, we are blindly turning left and right and following orders. In the first case, we become flexible and creative in choosing our path to get where we need to go, in the second case, we are forced to be micromanaged. 

• Develop a framework, know what you're looking for. This can have its pros and cons, knowing what you're looking for can help you anticipate and develop a greater sensibility to what is being said. Because our attention is focused on a specific area, we are better able to grasp more of the nuances of the conversation. We can sort of anticipating what comes next, we are primed to hear what is being said. We catch up on things faster, easier, and with more precision. The downside of looking at the conversation with an already established framework is that if what it's been talked about falls outside of where we were focusing on, it will require more energy to suddenly shift your focus, and things that are important might be misinterpreted or missed altogether. 

• Try to see the whole picture. People differ in the way they think, and so they differ in the way they explain their thoughts. Some people focus on the larger, maybe less specific idea, so it can be hard for us to understand the practicality of what they are saying. Some people focus on the practical details, sometimes leaving out the big picture, so it can be hard to see how it all should work together in the end. By chunking up and chunking down the conversation we can move its focus to understand what we think we are missing. "For what purpose?", "What is this a part of?" are examples of chunking up, moving from details to see the bigger picture. "What specifically?", "What is an example of this?" Can be examples of chunking down, getting practical directions on the idea presented. 

Listening isn't just passive hearing, although that is certainly a good part of it. When we try to actively understand, we are taking the first step into moving ourselves towards the other person. We leave behind what we think we know or what we think is right, and embrace the point of view of someone else. Even without long talks, simply taking the time to acknowledge the other can deepen the connection and smoothen communication between each other, which often means less trouble, greater enjoyment, trust, and cooperation.  

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