Listen Up!

“Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.”

― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

You already know that listening is an important skill to have and vital for relationships. We all want to be heard right? Here’s an area where we think we’re good at but probably not. Well, I have learned, and now passing it on to you, that there are two types of listening: active and passive listening.

Passive listening is the most common. This type of listening allows the other speaker to talk with a minimal amount of engagement from the listener. The listener is either distracted, tuned out, or thinking about how to respond. Either way, they are not fully engaged, and often, the speaker can pick up on it. Unfortunately, we’re all guilty of it and have, at one time or another, been the recipient of it as well.

Active listening.

The complete opposite of passive listening, active listening is when the listener is fully engaged, reading the speaker’s verbal and non-verbal cues. Active listeners have removed all distractions like phones, are fully attentive to the speaker and use small utterances to reassure the speaker that they are being heard. Active listening allows the speaker to fully speak while you’re fully engaged.

What Active Listening is Not.

Active is not thinking and rehearsing what to say before we say it. It’s not interrupting with your thoughts or counterarguments and it’s not being constantly distracted by environmental factors.

Good listening is a skill and like anything you want to get better at you have to practice. Within our ever-increasing distracted world, we’ve developed some bad habits. To break these will take some effort, especially when it comes to distractions. So practice your concentration and resist the urge to check your phone when someone is talking to you.

References:

“Active Listening: Hear What People Are Really Saying”

https://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/ActiveListening.htm

“Active Listening Skills” by Communication Coach Alex Lyon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wUCyjiyXdg