Active Listening

Active listening

Active listening means fully concentrating on listening to what is being said verbally and non verbally, as opposed to simply hearing what is being spoken. It is the fulcrum on which empathy depends, and the key to generating more empathy in your life, but what does it actually look like?

The elements of Active Listening

Active listening is a skill that you can refine through practice. The idea is to create the right conditions for someone to freely explore their ideas but attending to everything they are saying and the way that they are saying it through their speech, words and body language. The more you are able to be present with someone while they explain their experiences, the better you are able to understand what is truly being communicated. Lets look at the components that make up active listening

1. Full attention

The beginnings of active listening are anchored in the level of attention you’re able to bring to a conversation. The level to which someone is engaged in conversation with us, the more we feel understood. Engagement in this sense doesn’t mean to provide opinions, advice or direction to the other person, but rather to provide the conditions of them to fully explore where they are. This can be as simple as providing a relative level of eye contact, open body language, good posture and an undefensive manner. It’s easy to fall into behavioural and postural patterns which communicate something we don’t intend, particularly if someone is being vulnerable with us. This related back to the idea of coherence and authenticity. The closer we are able to align our inner feelings and outer behaviours, the more authentic the space we provide for others to express and explore themselves. The mechanics of trust begin with full attention.

2. Mirroring

Once we have created an environment of trust for someone to express themselves, through bringing out full attention to the conversation, we are then able to use certain cues to encourage the person we’re speaking with to communicate the terrain of their experience. The first of these cues is mirroring. Whenever we are fully engaged in a conversation with another, there are certain key points where the true content of what they are trying to express is revealed. The skill here is to stop yourself from providing an opinion on the content of their words, but rather to affirm the words they have used to express it. This feels strange to begin with as the normal mechanics of what we understand sympathetic conversation to be are a powerful programme. It can feel weird to just repeat what someone has said and then allowing them to follow up their own thoughts, but this is the very essence of empathy. It’s about continually providing a space for someone to recognise and explore their world, and helping the to do so. It’s not about redrawing someone else’s map to better match our own.

3. Clarifying

The next skill involved here is to clarify what the there person is saying. This shouldn’t be a soliloquy pronouncing your deeper understanding of the other person’s inner world that they themselves have. Rather, it is about ensuring that you are as close to that person’s reality as possible by ensuring you are both seeing the same thing. Human minds are notoriously bad at sticking to the facts. We spin stories and connect up dots as a matter of evolutionary necessity, but these mental shortcuts often mislead us into thinking we understand where we have instead assumed. By clarifying what another person means through phrases such as “When you say….. Do you mean…..” Or “It sound like……..is that right?” we are again creating an environment in which people are safely able to export the true content of their experience.

4. Summarising

Later in a conversation, summarising is used to conclude the previous clarifying. Once we have give someone our full attention, mirrored there experience through repetition of key phrases and clarified their meaning, we can help integrate their idea through summarising. This is a key skill in the empathy toolkit, as it is the first time we are putting ourselves into the conversation. By summarising our understanding of what someone has said we communicate our understanding to both them and ourselves.

5. Silence

Finally the canvas on which all this is written: silence. It’s difficult to state just how important silence can be in true empathic communication. Sometimes, just providing the space for the other person to express themselves is enough, and this can sometimes be the hardest thing to do. There are any number of conventions to our conversation, where we are expected to offer an opinion, a judgment, or a direction. Providing silence can be the most powerful and difficult choice. Even 4-5 seconds of true silence can feel very strange compared to what we consider normal conversation. If in doubt, remain silent and observant.