In this blog we will be talking about ways to become a better listener. It is not always easy to listen to someone when you want to make your own points and be sure you are being heard. So get comfy cozy, open your heart, open your mind and let’s get into it…
Welcome back adventurers and friends to Adventures Inward Let’s Talk Series. For those of you who are here for the first time, hello! Welcome! Thank you for joining us!
First let’s discuss some Key Points:
Listening is a vital life skill, helping to build relationships in ways that you might not even realize.
Knowing what qualities make for a good listener can help you foster better and more fulfilling relationships.
The fact that communication is a two-way street is something that everyone accepts, but not everyone keeps in mind.
Perhaps you’ve become frustrated with one of your friends, who never seems able to stay on track in the conversation. You can tell that their mind wanders almost as soon as you start talking. They ask you a question that literally would involve a restatement of what you’ve just said. Even in a conversation as mundane as deciding how to get to someone’s house, you find yourself repeating the same information at least twice.
Communication researchers have long emphasized the importance of good listening.
Apart from the professional need to be good at listening, the ability not just to “hear” but comprehend what someone else is saying is fundamental to good relationships. Your friend may be your friend no matter what, but wouldn’t it be great if they could engage with you in a way that shows they put value in the words that come out of your mouth?
The Science of Listening
Competent listening is defined as attending to all available information in a way that best preserves the content of a message (what was said) and its relational intent (what was meant). Several “affective precursors” or mood-related factors can help improve the ability to listen well, including mindfulness, or conversational sensitivity.
In other words, you need to be able to clear your mind of your own emotions and instead zero in on what someone is actually saying. This means being “in the moment,” as the expression goes, and not letting your thoughts stray.
There is also a cognitive component to good listening, where you pay attention to facts and details. To do this, you need to set your own emotions aside.
Putting these two components of listening into concrete terms means that you want to be sensitive to the conversation as a relational tool, and also to the details you need to be able to offer a response. However, specialists argue additionally that if you’re going to be a “high quality” listener, it helps to express a positive intention toward the other person. Feeling and understanding the other person can help them feel better about themselves, making this an important relationship-building technique.
Unpacking the Behaviors of Good Listening
Research in the field of communication science goes beyond setting up these desired features of good listening to identifying the specific behaviors that constitute good listening. Use these to see how you measure up.
Number one on the list is attentiveness. Just pay attention to what is unfolding in a conversation, a behavior that you can put into action with such cues as making eye contact, paraphrasing what someone said, and asking clarifying questions. Now the other person knows you’re engaged and not letting your mind drift off to someplace you’d rather be at the moment.
Next, you can move into what is referred to as “communication competence,” which is what enhances good listening to improve relationships even further. These behaviors include being:
Expressive
Persuasive
Open and direct
Assertive
Intelligent
Organized
Unbiased
Finally, the seemingly elusive quality of being “socially skilled” includes a set of these attributes:
Friendly
Other-oriented
Helpful
Outgoing
Enjoy new people
Accepting
High in self-esteem
Not nervous
You might recognize some of these qualities as similar to personality
traits, specifically such Five Factor attributes as being low in neuroticism and high in extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experiences. Some people are naturally socially skilled if they have these qualities. If you’re not, knowing how important they are to good communication could provide you with a set of qualities you can try to develop.
Putting Good Listening in the Context of Relationships
There are many situations in which good listening can serve to help you fulfill your life goals, and understanding that listening is an essential life skill. Whatever the situation, though, communication researchers have found that listeners construct shared realities with their conversational partners. The minute you open your mouth, you’ve started to create that reality.
A friendly “Hi!” can make all the difference in the world, but a grumpy “Oh, you?” can lead to the opposite outcome. Words themselves create relationships in the moment.
When you’re a good listener, you use that context to your advantage. In active listening, you move the narrative along in a way that allows the other person to elaborate on their thoughts and feelings, helping them gain greater insight and self-awareness. The insights you express, based on what the other person communicated to you, can create a positive relationship bubble in which the two of you feel intimately connected.
This set of developments certainly needn’t apply to all of your interactions. If you’re waiting in a long line at checkout and the person in front of you comments on your shared predicament, it doesn’t mean you need to start building an intense connection. However, at least acknowledging the other person’s expression of the reality you’re both in can create, for a moment, a sense of shared understanding.
My Final Thoughts
To sum up, listening is indeed an essential skill to success in life, and it is also one you can develop if it’s not your strong suit. Research will continue to advance the academic understanding of this valuable attribute but in the meantime, you can advance your own ability to use it to build your own life’s path toward fulfillment.
Remember to be kind to yourself, give yourself grace, and always, always love yourself.
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