Listening can have a powerful, positive effect on wellbeing, as we explored in this article explaining why. But do you know how to listen well?
We put together some practical tips to help you cultivate this important skill.
1. Are you listening to listen and understand, or are you actually listening to form your own response?
Alexandra Efthymiades, Director, Consensio, which specialises in conflict management, suggests asking yourself the following questions:
- What am I paying attention to when listening?
- Am I paying attention to the speaker, or to myself, or something else?
- Can I be curious and interested in what the other person is saying?
- Can I put aside my thoughts and what I’m going to say next and focus on understanding where they are coming from?
2. If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification
A key part of active listening is reflecting back what you’ve just heard to check you have understood correctly.
A good way of doing this, says Efthymiades, is to preface your clarification with “what I’m hearing you say” or “if I’m understanding you correctly”.
“If you disagree with something that was said then explore with that person why they hold that opinion,” she advises.
One of the best ways to increase understanding and to show you are actively listening is to ask the speaker questions.
“Many misunderstandings are born because we assume a person means one thing when they mean another,” says Garry Douglas, Managing Director of GDA Online Training.
“If you have any uncertainty about what the person means, asking a clarifying question both clears up any misinterpretation AND shows you were listening to them carefully.
3. Pay attention to nonverbal cues
“These can ‘tell’ you just as much as the words someone is saying to you,” says Douglas.
He gives the example of a person speaking while hunched over, fiddling or looking down.
“These might be signs they are nervous or uncomfortable, so you can make an effort to adapt your communication with them in response. Perhaps, in this case, by smiling, speaking softly and aiming for ‘open’ body language,” he says.
Bear in mind that there are many experts that believe reading nonverbal cues is much harder via a screen and that listening is generally most effective in person.
4. Don’t interrupt
“I know this can be difficult when you have a point you want to make in response, but butting in is one of the easiest ways to make the speaker feel they are not being heard,” says Douglas.
He recommends taking brief notes as the other person speaks to ensure that you can respond to any points you need to when they have finished speaking.
5. Pay attention to how you feel when you are speaking
Carole Spiers, Chair of the International Stress Management Association (ISMA) UK, trains line managers in listening skills. She often starts with an exercise that illustrates the difference through roleplay between attentive listening, half-listening and switched-off listening.
“This exercise is so powerful because it allows participants to experience firsthand what it’s like not to be heard,” she says. “This creates a lasting impression and helps them understand the importance of genuine, attentive listening.”
Similarly, Julia Rogers, Professional Coach, Mentor Coach and Coach Supervisor, Coaching42, says she always encourages her students and coaches to watch other people talking, either in real life or on television and see if they think they are listening to each other, or just waiting to get their own point across.
“When people realise that this is what is happening a lot of the time they see that it can come across as dismissive and uninterested, and maybe a bit rude,” she says. “This can jolt people into taking more time to listen.”
6. Consider banning mobile phones from meetings and other group get-togethers at work
“There is no doubt we are addicted to our phones,” says Spiers. “They have become our lifeline, so we have to work extra hard at our human interaction of listening.”
Constant notifications are distracting and interrupt the flow of what someone is saying meaning if we are sporadically looking at our phones, we are not fully focusing on what someone is saying. Worse still, we are training our brains to proiritise surface-level rather than deep connection.
“The quick, superficial nature of digital communication often replaces deeper, more meaningful interactions, reducing the quality of our engagements,” says Spiers.
The instant-gratification nature of digital communications also leads, she says, to a lack of patience for the slower, more deliberate process of listening to someone.
“This impatience can severely impact our ability to truly understand and connect with others,” she says.
Rogers agrees, adding in her training sessions she talks about the importance of developing relationships at deeper levels so that the person you are talking to feels really heard: “If you can make people feel listened to they are more likely to feel respected, valued and included.”
While a mobile phone ban might seem extreme and will almost certainly provoke backlash from some, it will send the message to employees to “when you are in the room, be in the room” and boost presence and engagement.
7. Practice makes progress
“You can’t learn skills like active listening by just reading a book or learning a theory,” says Career Coach Tara Rule. “Practice is essential, which is why workshops and trainings need to have space for interaction and practice.”
8. Ask questions that encourage them to share more
During one training session, Rule introduced an exercise where participants had to keep asking their partner “what else?” in order to elicit more information, and make them feel truly heard.
Afterwards, one attendee told her:
“I was practicing only asking ‘What else?’ like we’d been instructed. I felt like we were going nowhere, when suddenly, after the seventh ‘what else?’ the other person stopped and said, ‘what a great question, and suddenly they unlocked something really deep’. It was so amazing to see how powerful it was to simply ask ‘what else?’ instead of giving my opinion.”
9. Reduce the amount of chatter around you
We have bandwidth for around 1.6 human conversations at a time, according to sound expert and keynote speaker Julian Treasure, who has done five TED Talks on the topic of listening/being heard and sound.
“Nobody can understand two people talking simultaneously and so if you’ve got somebody talking in an office, and you’re hearing them, it takes away ‘1’ of your 1.6 and leaves you less able to listen to the voice in your head (if you’re working alone) or the voice of the person talking to you,” he says.
This throws up interesting dilemmas about how to encourage listening at work, where often large open plan spaces are favoured today because they are seen as less hierarchical.
10. If you are trying to listen to yourself, then headphones with music may not be the best idea
One way people often get around being distracted by the words of others around them while they are working is to put on noise cancelling headphones and tune into some music. Treasure says this may not be working for productivity as well as they think:
“Music is mostly a very distracting sound. It’s meant to be listened to, so it’s designed to divert our attention. Lyrics make it much more distracting. But even listening to words without lyrics is distracting; after all, Beethoven designed his music to be listened to!”
So what does he advise listening to in order to best listen in to your own thoughts?
“If you want to put something on headphones when you’re working, then birdsong is ideal”, he says. “As nature’s alarm clock, it tends to make you more alert and most people feel reassured by birdsong because we’ve learned over thousands of years that when the birds are singing, things are normally OK, so the body relaxes.”
Because of this insight, some companies are now playing “biophilic sound” into offices: “Many, many people work in pretty sterile offices. So sound can be a very important aspect of biophilia. And it can be very productive, because it can reduce that zone of distraction and produce a much more healthy and productive work environment.”
11. Validate the person speaking
“Making people wrong, invalidating them, is at the root of just about all human conflict,” says Treasure. That’s why he thinks validation is one of the most important aspects of listening.
He suggests you can do it by saying something like ‘I don’t agree with you, but I can see that’s why you think that way’. This, as he says, is completely different from “making someone wrong” or making yourself right, “which is becoming addictive in the digital world”.
12. See everyone as an opportunity to learn, especially those who are different from you
One of Treasure’s favourite listening quotes is by former US President Barrack Obama. He said “I will listen to you, especially if we disagree”.
“Unfortunately we live in a world which is getting more and more polarised, and where opinions are confused with facts, where people are seeking out affirmation rather than challenge,” he says. “But it’s so powerful to have the humility to seek to learn from everybody you meet and that means really listening to them without judging and dismissing.”
Treasure trains employees on his listening courses to “listen for challenge”. Challenging ideas is very important, he says, to avoid having a “rigid” culture which “stamps on” creativity and innovation. That’s why the Court Jester was such a valuable character; because he often spoke truth to power.
The difficulty is when speaking to someone with different views – especially in a conflict situation – is that the emotion makes it harder to listen and not hyper focus on your view.
As conflict management expert Efthymiades says:
“You have to be very self aware to be a good listener. You need the ability to be present and to clear your mind, while also noticing if you are being triggered by something the other person is saying and notice how you want to respond to that. And, rather than responding, good listening is often about sitting with that discomfort. It’s hard. Especially as we become more polarised and less able to see nuance.”
13. Beware of your tendency to want to be right at the expense of relationships
“We need to be very conscious of that ego-driven desire to be right and make other people wrong,” says Treasure. “Humility is a really big factor in listening. Arrogant people don’t listen very well.”
Another of Treasure’s favourite listening quotes is from the Counsellor and Author Harville Hendricks who said: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be in relationship?” Because you can’t always have both.”
