art of listening essay

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Master the Art of Authentic Listening

3 steps to becoming a more effective listener..

Posted August 25, 2024 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

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• Put your own thoughts to one side so that your attention is completely on the other person.
• It is not just someone's words that we need to attend to but all their feelings and meanings.
• Listen without wanting to change anything about the person.

As my regular readers might know, I often write about the importance of relationships for providing us with the right environment to foster authenticity and good mental health. What isn't always pointed out, however, is the scarcity of such relationships.

The fact is that on a day-to-day basis, many of our relationships are controlling, false, or lacking in understanding. If we want to be more authentic in our dealings with others, listening is a vital ingredient. Fortunately, it's a skill that can be learned—by just about anyone.

Asking more questions in your relationships—How was your day? How did you feel about that?—is an often recommended step in more open and authentic communication. But the most important thing to do when you ask a question is to really listen to the answer.

We all know people whose eyes seem to glaze over as you talk to them; you feel that they are not listening to you but simply waiting for their turn to talk. In fact, many people don’t even wait for a turn to talk but barge straight in. You may even be guilty of this yourself.

Other times, we listen to people with the intention of changing them in some way or getting them to see the situation as we do. As such, we argue with them, plead, scold, encourage, manipulate, insult, or whatever else might work to get the other person to see things as we do. The reason we do this is that disagreements and conflicting views can be stressful for us unless we are authentic in ourselves.

However, the more authentic we are ourselves, the more able we are to tolerate ambiguity, conflict, and disagreement; we might even cherish it as an opportunity to challenge ourselves and our own views. Authentic people can be confronted with challenges without feeling threatened and having to defend themselves.

What Authentic Listening Looks Like

In short, authentic people are good listeners. They don’t pretend to listen while waiting for their turn to talk. They will want to understand better your point of view and how you are feeling; they will ask questions and take responsibility for their actions. Authentic listening involves three aspects:

First, be aware of what’s going on within you.

Authentic listening involves the awareness of what is going on inside yourself. Our own thoughts bubble up and colour the ways we interpret what the other person is saying. Put your own thoughts to one side so that your attention is completely on the other person while they are speaking.

Second, see things from the other person’s point of view.

Authentic listening requires the ability to tune in to the other person’s worldview and see things from their point of view. Once we have put our own stuff away and are no longer focused on ourselves, we can truly pay attention to what the other person is telling us. However, it's not just the words that we need to be attentive to but also everything else happening within them, all their feelings and meanings.

Try to imagine yourself in the shoes of the other person. Look at how they are sitting, their posture; listen to the tone of their voice and imagine what it feels like to be in their shoes right now. Try to understand not only what they are saying but how they are feeling as they are saying it.

Third, listen without wanting to change.

Authentic listening involves the ability to listen without wanting to change anything about the person. As we step into the other person’s world and begin to see things from their point of view, we might wish that things were different in some way for that person. But to authentically listen, we need to do so without trying to make things different.

Listening is not the same as giving advice. Listen without trying to solve any problems; listen only with the intention of understanding. Don’t interrupt. If you feel the need to interrupt, ask yourself why—and unless it’s to clarify your understanding, then don’t.

When you finally have your space to speak, check that you understand what you have just heard. Let the other person know that you are listening—not by telling them you are, but by showing them: paraphrase what you have heard them say, in a way that is open to correction and clarification. The chances are that you will have caught some of what has been said, missed other aspects, and even misunderstood other parts. Summarising what the person has said and being open to hearing how you have not understood everything exactly is the art of authentic listening.

The above is an edited excerpt from my book, Authentic: How to Be Yourself and Why It Matters .

Joseph, S. (2019). Authentic. How to be yourself and why it matters . Piatkus, London.

https://www.authenticityformula.com/

Stephen Joseph, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology, health, and social care at the University of Nottingham, UK, and author of What Doesn't Kill Us .

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The Art of Listening: Communication Skill Essay

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Introduction

Communication is a complex process that involves encoding and decoding of information. Listening, which is one of the communication elements, determines how effective the communication process is. Most people do not know how they can improve their listening skills in order to perfect communication. The process of improving listening requires one to develop a specific point of view to use in evaluating a message’s content.

Among all communication skills, the art of listening is less emphasized. In most cases when dealing with communication skills problems, most people overlook listening (McKelvie, 2009). It is however important for communicators to understand that listening promotes good communication. As a good listener, one is required to differentiate the speaker’s emotional and delivery elements from the substance and content of the message (McKelvie, 2009). Most people are unable to overcome the distraction associated with the speaker’s emotional elements and thus end up receiving the wrong information.

To avoid being distracted by delivery and emotional elements which tend to cover the message’s content, it is important for a listener to learn how to differentiate facts and ideas. Generally, a listener should understand that listening entails more than message delivery. When listening, a listener should be keen to identify the core information. To avoid emotional element distraction, it’s important for a listener to bear in mind that emotional and delivery elements are not included in the message as elements for emphasizing the substance of the message, but rather as elements to help one in identifying the main substance of the message.

According to McKelvie, (2009), a listener should try to identify the content of the message rather than dwelling on how the message is delivered. To avoid distraction by the delivery and emotional elements a listener should develop a habit of developing responses about the issues being discussed from the speaker’s messages. In addition, to be more focused on the message’s content and substance rather than its emotional elements, a listener should always try to find the answers for any questions arising from the speech.

Another way through which a listener can learn how to improve communication is by trying to analyze the message or speech’s content from someone else’s point of view (McKelvie, 2009). Analysing the message using a different person’s point of view increases the listener’s horizon which enables him to have a better understanding of the specific topic. In order to avoid distractions when listening and improve on identifying the message content, a listener should learn when and how to focus on facts. Listeners should always bear in mind that facts are generated from ideas (McKelvie, 2009). Since the process of identifying facts is a complex one, listeners need to learn how to give the speaker undivided attention. Making notes while listening can help a listener improve his listening skills (McKelvie, 2009).

As a way of lowering distraction by the emotional and delivery elements of the message and focus more on the content of the message, a listener should learn how to relate the message delivery system with message content. A good listener should be in a position to differentiate ideas and employ this skill in analyzing the message’s content. A listener should be in a position to identify some of the emotional and delivery elements such as biased perspective and environmental factors that are most likely to cause him to have a distracted attention while listening. One strategy through which a listener can avoid message distractions is by learning to focus mainly on facts rather than ideas (McKelvie, 2009).

McKelvie, R., (2009). Listen Better to improve relationships . Suite101 publishers.

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Husband and Wife (detail, 1945) by Milton Avery. Gift of Mr and Mrs Roy R Neuberger. Photo by Allen Phillips/ Wadsworth Atheneum

The art of listening

To listen well is not only a kindness to others but also, as the psychologist carl rogers made clear, a gift to ourselves.

by M M Owen   + BIO

Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realisation crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people. I never listen.

Perhaps never was a little strong – but certainly my listening often occurred through a fog of distraction and self-regard. On my worst days, this could make me a shallow, solipsistic presence. Haltingly, I began to try to reach inside my own mental machinery, marshal my attention differently, listen better. I wasn’t sure what I was doing; but I had crossed paths with a few people who, as a habit, gave others their full attention – and it was powerful. It felt rare, it felt real; I wanted them around.

As a culture, we treat listening as an automatic process about which there is not a lot to say: in the same category as digestion, or blinking. When the concept of listening is addressed at any length, it is in the context of professional communication; something to be honed by leaders and mentors, but a specialisation that everyone else can happily ignore. This neglect is a shame. Listening well, it took me too long to discover, is a sort of magic trick: both parties soften, blossom, they are less alone.

Along the way, I discovered that Carl Rogers, one of the 20th century’s most eminent psychologists, had put a name to this underrated skill: ‘active listening’. And though Rogers’s work was focused initially on the therapeutic setting, he drew no distinction between this and everyday life: ‘Whatever I have learned,’ he wrote, ‘is applicable to all of my human relationships.’ What Rogers learnt was that listening well – which necessarily involves conversing well and questioning well – is one of the most accessible and most powerful forms of connection we have.

T he paucity of my listening powers dawned on me as a byproduct of starting to meditate. This is not to make some claim to faux enlightenment – simply to say that meditation is the practice of noticing what you notice, and meditators tend to carry this mindset beyond the yoga mat, and begin to see their own mind more clearly. Among a smorgasbord of other patterns and quirks, what I saw was a self that, too often, didn’t listen.

The younger me enjoyed conversation. But a low, steady egoism meant that what I really enjoyed was talking. When it was someone else’s turn to talk, the listening could often feel like a chore. I might be passively absorbing whatever was being said – but a greater part of me would be daydreaming, reminiscing, making plans. I had a habit of interrupting, in the rather masculine belief that, whatever others had to say, I could say better for them. Sometimes, I would zone out and tune back in to realise that I’d been asked a question. I had a horrible habit, I saw, of sitting in silent linguistic craftsmanship, shaping my answer for when my turn came around – and only half-listening to what I’d actually be responding to.

The exceptions to this state of affairs, I began to see, were situations where there existed self-interest. If the subject was me, or material that might be of benefit to me, my attention would automatically sharpen. It was very easy to listen to someone explaining what steps I needed to take to ace a test or make some money. It was easy to listen to juicy gossip, particularly of the kind that made me feel fortunate or superior. It was easy to listen to debates on topics where I had a burning desire to be right. It was easy to listen to attractive women.

Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them

On bad days, this attentional autopilot constricted me. On topics of politics or philosophy, this made me a bore and a bully. People avoided disagreeing with me on anything, even trivial points, because they knew it would balloon into annoyance and a failure to listen to their reasoning. In my personal life, too often, I could forget to support or lift up those around me. The flipside of not listening is not questioning – because, when you don’t want to listen, the last thing you want to do is trigger the exact scenario in which you are most expected to listen. And so I didn’t ask my friends serious questions often enough. I liked jokes, and I liked gossip; but I’d forget to ask them the real stuff. Or I’d ask them things they’d already told me a week ago. Or forget to ask about their recent job interview or break-up.

This is where bad listening does the most damage: it signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them, or you do but only in a skittish, flickering sort of a way. And so people become wary of opening up, or asking for advice, or leaning on you in the way that we lean on those people we truly believe to be big of heart.

All of the above makes for rather a glum picture, I know. I don’t want to overstate things. I wasn’t a monster. I cared for people and, when I concentrated, I could show it. I was liked, I made my way in the world, I apparently possessed what we call charisma. Plenty of the time, I listened fine. But this may be precisely the point: you can coast along in life as a bad listener. We tend to forgive it, because it’s common.

Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening (2020), frames modern life as particularly antagonistic to good listening:

[W]e are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.

Why do we accept bad listening? Because, I think, listening well is hard, and we all know it. Like all forms of self-improvement, breaking this carapace requires intention, and ideally guidance.

W hen I discovered Rogers’s writings on listening, it was confirmation that, in many conversations, I had been getting it all wrong. When listening well, wrote Rogers and his co-author Richard Evans Farson in 1957, the listener ‘does not passively absorb the words which are spoken to him. He actively tries to grasp the facts and the feelings in what he hears, and he tries, by his listening, to help the speaker work out his own problems.’ This was exactly the stance I had only rarely adopted.

Born in 1902 – in the same suburb of Chicago as Hemingway, three years earlier – Rogers had a strict religious upbringing. As a young man, he seemed destined for the ministry. But in 1926, he crossed the road from Union Theological Seminary to Columbia University, and committed himself to psychology. (At this time, psychology was a field so new and so in vogue that, in 1919, during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, Sigmund Freud had secretly advised Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador in Paris.)

Rogers’s early work was focused on what were then called ‘delinquent’ children; but, by the 1940s, he was developing a new approach to psychotherapy, which came to be termed ‘humanistic’ and ‘person-centred’. Unlike Freud, Rogers believed that all of us possess ‘strongly positive directional tendencies’. Unhappy people, he believed, were not broken; they were blocked. And as opposed to the then-dominant modes of psychotherapy – psychoanalysis and behaviourism – Rogers believed that a therapist should be less a problem-solver, and more a sort of skilled midwife, drawing out solutions that already existed in the client. All people possess a deep urge to ‘self-actualise’, he believed, and it is the therapist’s job to nurture this urge. They were there to ‘release and strengthen the individual, rather than to intervene in his life’. Key to achieving this goal was careful, focused, ‘active’ listening.

That this perspective doesn’t seem particularly radical today is a testament to Rogers’s legacy. As one of his biographers, David Cohen, writes , Rogers’s therapeutic philosophy ‘has become part of the fabric of therapy’. Today, in the West, many of us believe that going to therapy can be an empowering and positive move, rather than an indicator of crisis or sickness. This shift owes a great deal to Rogers. So too does the expectation that a therapist will allow themselves to enter into our thinking, and express a careful but tangible empathy. Where Freud focused on the mind in isolation, Rogers valued more of a merging of minds – boundaried, but intimate.

On bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle

Active listening, for Rogers, was essential to creating the conditions for growth. It was one of the key ingredients in making another person feel less alone, less stuck, and more capable of self-insight.

Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view , just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyse it, categorise it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard. As a teenager, I was a passionate atheist and a passionate Leftist. I saw things as very simple: all believers are gullible, and all conservatives are psychopaths, or at minimum heartless. I could hold to my Manichean view precisely because I had made no effort to grasp anyone else’s viewpoint.

Another of my old mental blocks, also flagged by Rogers, is the instinct that anyone I’m talking to is likely dumber than me. This arrogance is terrible for any attempt at listening, as Rogers recognises: ‘Until we can demonstrate a spirit which genuinely respects the potential worth of an individual,’ he writes, we won’t be good listeners. Previously, on bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle. I would look for clues that this person was wrong, and could be made to feel wrong. But as Rogers writes, to listen well, we ‘must create a climate which is neither critical, evaluative, nor moralising’.

‘Our emotions are often our own worst enemies when we try to become listeners,’ he wrote. In short, a great deal of bad listening comes down to lack of self-control. Other people animate us, associations fly, we are pricked by ideas. (This is why we have built careful social systems around not discussing such things as religion or politics at dinner parties.) When I was 21, if someone suggested that some pop music was pretty good, or capitalism had some redeeming features, I was incapable of not reacting. This made it very hard for me to listen to anyone’s opinion but my own. Which is why, Rogers says, one of the first skills to learn is non-intervention. Patience. ‘To listen to oneself,’ he wrote, ‘is a prerequisite to listening to others.’ Here, the analogy with meditation is clear: don’t chase every thought, don’t react to every internal event, stay centred. Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.

And when we do intervene, following Rogers, we must resist the ever-present urge to drag the focus of the conversation back to ourselves. Sociologists call this urge ‘the shift response’. When a friend tells me they’d love to visit Thailand, I must resist the selfish pull to leap in with Oh yeah, Thailand is great, I spent Christmas in Koh Lanta once, did I ever tell you about the Muay Thai class I did? Instead, I must stay with them: where exactly do they want to go, and why? Sociologists call this ‘the support response’. To listen well is to step back, keep the focus with someone else.

A nice example of Rogers’s approach, taken from his career, is his experience during the Second World War. Rogers was asked by the US Air Force to assess the psychological health of gunners, among whom morale appeared low. By being patient, and nonjudgmental, and gentle with his attention, Rogers discovered that the gunners had been bottling up one of their chief complaints: they resented civilians. Returning to his hometown and attending a football game, reported one pilot, ‘all that life and gaiety and luxury – it makes you so mad’. Rogers didn’t suggest any drastic intervention, or push any change in view. He recommended that the men be allowed to be honest about their anger, and process it openly, without shame. Their interlocutors, Rogers said, should begin by simply listening to them – for as long as it took, until they were unburdened. Only then should they respond.

Much like meditating, listening in this way takes work. It may take even more work outside the therapy room, in the absence of professional expectation. At all times, for almost all of us, our internal monologue is running, and it is desperate to spill from our brain onto our tongue. Stemming the flow requires intention. This is necessary because, even when we think an intervention is positive, it may be self-centred. We might not feel it, Rogers says, but, typically, when we offer our interpretation or input, ‘we are usually responding to our own needs to see the world in certain ways’. When I first began to observe myself as a listener, I saw how difficult I found it to simply let people finish their sentences. I noticed the infinite wave of impatience on which my attention rode. I noticed the slippery temptation of asking questions that were not really questions at all, but impositions of opinion disguised as questions. The better road, I began to see, was to stay silent. To wait.

The active listener’s job is to simply be there, to focus on ‘thinking with people instead of for or about them’. This thinking with requires listening for what Rogers calls ‘total meaning’. This means registering both the content of what they are saying, and (more subtly) the ‘ feeling or attitude underlying this content’. Often, the feeling is the real thing being expressed, and the content a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy. Capturing this feeling involves real concentration, especially as nonverbal cues – hesitation, mumbling, changes in posture – are crucial. Zone out, half-listen, and the ‘total meaning’ will entirely elude us.

Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists?

And though the bad listener loves to internally multitask while someone else is talking, faking it won’t work. As Rogers writes, people are alert to the mere ‘pretence of interest’, resenting it as ‘empty and sterile’. To sincerely listen means to marshal a mixture of agency, compassion, attention and commitment. This ‘demands practice’, Rogers said, and ‘may require changes in our own basic attitudes’.

Rogers’s theories were developed in a context where one person is attempting, explicitly, to help another person heal and grow. But Rogers was always explicit about the fact that his work was ‘about life’. Of his theories, he said that ‘the same lawfulness governs all human relationships’.

I think I started off from a lower point; by nature, I think my brain tends toward distraction and self-regard. But one would not need to be a bad listener to benefit from Rogers’s ideas. Even someone whose autopilot is an empathetic, interested listener can find much in his work. Rogers did more than anyone else to explore listening, systemise its dynamics, and record his professional explorations.

Certainly, being a good listener had an impact on Rogers’s own life. As another of his biographers, Howard Kirschenbaum, told me, Rogers discovered that ‘listening empathically to others was enormously healing and freeing, in both therapy and other relationships’. At his 80th birthday party, a cabaret was staged in which two Carl Rogers impersonators listened to one another in poses of exaggerated empathy. The well-meaning gag was a compliment; in a somewhat rare case of intellectuals actually embodying the ideas they espouse, Rogers was remembered as an excellent listener by everyone who knew him. Despite the kind of foibles that can weigh down any life – a reliance on alcohol, a frustration with monogamy – Rogers appears to have been a decent man: warm, open, and never cruel.

That he was able to carry his theories into his life should give encouragement, even to those of us who aren’t world-famous psychologists. Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists? Why else does all seduction start with riveted attention? Consider your own experience, and you will likely find a direct correlation between the people you feel love you, and the people who actually listen to the things you say. The people who never ask us a thing are the people we drift away from. The people who listen so hard that they pull new things out of us – who hear things we didn’t even say – are the ones we grab on to for life.

P erhaps above all, Rogers understood the stakes involved in listening well. All of us, when we are our best selves, want to bring growth to the people we choose to give our time to. We want to help them unlock themselves, stand taller, think better. The dynamic may not be as direct as with a therapist; there is more of an equal footing – but when our relationships are healthy, we want those around us to thrive. Listening well, Rogers showed, is the simplest route there. Be with people in the right way, and they become ‘enriched in courage and self-confidence’. They feel the releasing glow of attention, and develop an ‘underlying confidence in themselves’. If we don’t want this for our friends, then we are not their friends.

Indeed, such is the generosity of active listening that one can view the practice as one that borders on the spiritual. Though Rogers traded theology for psychology in his early 20s, he always maintained an interest in spirituality. He enjoyed the work of Søren Kierkegaard , an existentialist Christian; and, over the years, he had public discussions with the theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber . In successful therapy sessions, said Rogers, both therapist and client can find themselves in ‘a trance-like feeling’ where ‘there is, to borrow Buber’s phrase, a real “I-Thou” relationship’. Of his relationship to his clients, Rogers said: ‘I would like to go with him on the fearful journey into himself.’

Perhaps this is a bit rich for you; perhaps you would rather frame active listening as simply good manners, or a neat interpersonal hack. The point is: really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing. Only rarely will people notice, let alone thank you, for your efforts. Yet this generosity of attention is what people deserve.

And lest this all sound a bit pious – active listening is not pure altruism. Listening well, as Rogers said, is ‘a growth experience’. It allows us to get the best of others. The carousel of souls is endless. People have deeply felt and fascinating lives, and they can enfranchise us to worlds we would never otherwise know. If we truly listen, we expand our own intelligence, emotional range, and sense that the world remains open to discovery. Active listening is a kindness to others but, as Rogers was always quick to make clear, it is also a gift to ourselves.

Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel

Rogers became a hero of the 1960s counterculture . He admired their utopian dreams of psychic liberation and uninhibited communication; late in life, he was drawn to the New Age writings of Carlos Castañeda. All of this speaks to one of the key critiques of Rogers’s philosophy, both during his lifetime and today: that he was too optimistic. Rogers recognised himself that he was, in Cohen’s words, ‘incorrigibly positive’. His critics called him a sort of Pollyanna of the mind, and thought him naive for believing that such simple interventions as empathy and listening could trigger transformation in people. (Perhaps certain readers will harbour similar critiques about my own beliefs as expressed here.)

Those inclined to agree with this assessment of Rogers will probably think that I have overstated the case. Listening as love? Listening as spiritual practice? But in my own life, a renewed approach to listening has improved how I relate to others, and I now believe listening is absurdly under-discussed. Good listening is complex, subtle, slippery – but it is also right here, it lives in us, and we can work on it every day. Unlike the abstractions of so much of ethics and so much of philosophy, our listening is there to be honed, every day. Like a muscle, it can be trained. Like an intellect, it can be tested. In the very same moment, it can spur both our own growth and the growth of others. Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I couldn’t write nonfiction that anyone else actually wanted to read until I began trying to truly listen.

‘The greatest compliment that was ever paid me,’ said Henry David Thoreau, ‘was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.’ Left on autopilot, I can still be a bad listener. I’ll interrupt, finish sentences, chivvy people along. I suspect many of the people I know still find me to be, on balance, an average listener. But I try! With anyone I can impact – and especially those whose souls I can help to light up – I follow Rogers; I offer as much ‘of safety, of warmth, of empathic understanding, as I can genuinely find in myself to give.’ And I open myself to whatever I can learn. I fail in my attentions, again and again. But I tune back in, again and again. I believe it is working.

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Betty Bigombe had already hiked eight miles through the jungle, and there was still no sign of life. She was no stranger to a long walk — growing up in northern Uganda, she’d walked four miles each way to school. She subsisted on one meal a day in a communal homestead where her uncle had eight wives.

Now she had made it all the way to the Ugandan Parliament, and she was undertaking a challenge that none of her colleagues would brave: Trying to make peace with a warlord.

Joseph Kony was the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. He and his rebel group would eventually be held responsible for murdering more than 100,000 people , abducting over 30,000 children , and displacing over two million Ugandans.

In the early 1990s, Betty convinced the Ugandan president to send her in to see if she could stop the violence.

When Betty finally made contact with the rebels after months of effort, they were insulted at the prospect of negotiating with a woman. Yet Betty negotiated her way to getting permission to meet Kony himself. Soon he was referring to her as “Mummy,” and he even agreed to leave the jungle to start peace talks.

Although the peace effort didn’t succeed, opening Kony’s mind to conversation was a remarkable accomplishment. For her efforts to end the violence, Betty was named Uganda’s Woman of the Year. When I spoke to her, I asked how she had succeeded in getting through to Kony and his people.

In one poll, one-third of women said their pets were better listeners than their partners.

The key, she explained, was not persuading or even coaxing, but listening .

Think about how rare good listening is. It’s common for doctors to interrupt their patients within 11 seconds , even though patients may need 29 seconds to describe their symptoms. And among managers who had been  rated as the worst listeners by their employees, 94 percent of them evaluated themselves as good or very good listeners. In one poll, one-third of women said their pets were better listeners than their partners.

Listening well is more than a matter of talking less. It’s a set of skills in asking and responding. It starts with showing more interest in other people’s interests, rather than in trying to judge their status or prove our own.

When we’re trying to get people to change, that can be a difficult task. Even if we have the best of intentions, we can easily slip into the mode of a preacher perched on a pulpit, a prosecutor making a closing argument or a politician giving a stump speech. We’re all vulnerable to the “righting reflex,” as psychologists William Miller and Stephen Rollnick describe it — the desire to fix problems and offer answers, but a person who’s skilled in motivational interviewing resists the righting reflex. Although people want a doctor to fix their broken bones, they often want sympathy rather than solutions when it comes to the problems in their heads.

In a series of experiments , interacting with an empathetic, nonjudgmental, attentive listener made people less anxious and defensive . They felt less pressure to avoid contradictions in their thinking, which encouraged them to explore their opinions more deeply, recognize more nuances in them, and share them more openly.

Many communicators try to make themselves look smart. Great listeners are more interested in making their audiences feel smart.

These benefits of listening aren’t limited to one-on-one interactions. They can also emerge in groups. In experiments across government organizations, tech companies and schools, people’s attitudes become more complex and less extreme after they sat in a listening circle , where one person at a time held a talking stick and everyone else listened attentively.

Psychologists recommend practicing this skill by sitting down with people whom we sometimes have a hard time understanding. The idea is to tell them we’re working on being better listeners, we’d like to hear their thoughts and we’ll listen for a few minutes before responding.

That’s what Betty Bigombe set out to do in Uganda. Betty started traveling through rural areas to visit camps for internally displaced people. She figured some might have relatives in Joseph Kony’s army and might know something about his whereabouts. Although she hadn’t been trained in motivational interviewing, she intuitively understood the philosophy. At each camp, she announced to people that she wasn’t there to lecture them but to listen to them.

Her curiosity and confident humility caught the Ugandans by surprise. Other peacemakers had come in ordering them to stop fighting. They’d preached about their own plans for conflict resolution and prosecuted the past efforts that failed.

As Betty Bigombe muses, “Even the devil appreciates being listened to.”

But Betty — a politician by profession — didn’t tell them what to do. She just sat patiently for hours in front of a bonfire, taking notes and chiming in from time to time to ask questions. “If you want to call me names, feel free to do so,” she said. “If you want me to leave, I will.”

To demonstrate her commitment to peace, Betty stayed in the camps, even though they lacked sufficient food and proper sanitation. She invited people to air their grievances and suggest remedial measures to be taken. They told her it was rare and refreshing for an outsider to give them the opportunity to share their views. She empowered them to generate their own solutions, which gave them a sense of ownership. Eventually, they rethought their resistance to her.

People in the camps ended up calling Betty “megu,” which translates literally to “mother”. It’s also a term of endearment for elders. Bestowing this honorific was particularly striking given that Betty was representing the government, which was seen as the oppressor in many of the camps. It wasn’t long before people were offering to introduce her to coordinators and commanders in Joseph Kony’s guerilla army.

As Betty muses, “Even the devil appreciates being listened to.”

Excerpted from the new book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant. Published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Adam Grant.

Watch his TED Talk here:

About the author

Adam Grant PhD is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, a #1 New York Times bestselling author and the host of the TED podcast WorkLife.

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Gray Matter

The Science and Art of Listening

By Seth S. Horowitz

• Nov. 9, 2012

HERE’S a trick question. What do you hear right now?

If your home is like mine, you hear the humming sound of a printer, the low throbbing of traffic from the nearby highway and the clatter of plastic followed by the muffled impact of paws landing on linoleum — meaning that the cat has once again tried to open the catnip container atop the fridge and succeeded only in knocking it to the kitchen floor.

The slight trick in the question is that, by asking you what you were hearing, I prompted your brain to take control of the sensory experience — and made you listen rather than just hear. That, in effect, is what happens when an event jumps out of the background enough to be perceived consciously rather than just being part of your auditory surroundings. The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention.

Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.

This is because hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal that something dangerous or wonderful is somewhere within the kilometer or so that your ears can detect.

This is where attention kicks in.

Attention is not some monolithic brain process. There are different types of attention, and they use different parts of the brain. The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle . A chain of five neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second — elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders and making you cast around to see if whatever you heard is going to pounce and eat you. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.

More complex attention kicks in when you hear your name called from across a room or hear an unexpected birdcall from inside a subway station. This stimulus-directed attention is controlled by pathways through the temporoparietal and inferior frontal cortex regions, mostly in the right hemisphere — areas that process the raw, sensory input, but don’t concern themselves with what you should make of that sound. (Neuroscientists call this a “bottom-up” response.)

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Essay on Listening Skills

Students are often asked to write an essay on Listening Skills in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Listening Skills

Importance of listening skills.

Listening skills are vital in all aspects of life. They help us understand others, learn new things, and build strong relationships.

Types of Listening

There are different types of listening: active, passive, and empathetic. Each type is useful in different situations.

Improving Listening Skills

To improve your listening skills, pay attention, avoid distractions, and show empathy. Practice also plays a key role in enhancing these skills.

Benefits of Good Listening

Good listeners are successful in personal and professional life. They can solve problems, make better decisions, and foster positive connections.

250 Words Essay on Listening Skills

Introduction, the importance of listening skills.

In an academic setting, students with good listening skills tend to excel as they can understand and retain information more effectively. In professional environments, these skills help in building strong relationships, solving problems, and making informed decisions. They are crucial in team collaboration, as they foster understanding and mutual respect among team members.

Improving listening skills requires conscious effort. It begins with giving undivided attention to the speaker, avoiding distractions, and being genuinely interested in the conversation. It also involves practicing patience, not interrupting the speaker, and providing feedback to ensure understanding.

Active Listening

Active listening is a step further. It involves showing empathy, asking relevant questions, and paraphrasing to confirm comprehension. This not only enhances understanding but also makes the speaker feel valued and heard, strengthening the relationship.

In conclusion, listening skills are an essential part of effective communication. They play a crucial role in academic achievement, professional success, and personal relationships. By practicing active listening, we can enhance these skills and improve our interactions with others.

500 Words Essay on Listening Skills

Listening is an integral part of communication, a skill often overlooked in our fast-paced, technology-driven world. It is more than just hearing the words spoken by another person; it involves understanding and interpreting these words in a meaningful way.

Listening skills are crucial for effective communication and are a fundamental requirement in many professional environments. They can enhance our relationships, improve our understanding of the world, and foster effective problem-solving and decision-making. By actively listening, we can better comprehend others’ perspectives, ideas, and emotions, leading to more empathetic, meaningful interactions.

The Art of Active Listening

Active listening is a more involved form of listening where the listener not only hears the words but also understands and interprets them. It involves giving feedback, such as nodding or paraphrasing, to show understanding. This kind of listening also requires one to avoid distractions, maintain eye contact, and show empathy towards the speaker. Active listening can lead to better understanding, improved relationships, and more effective communication.

Barriers to Effective Listening

Several barriers can hinder effective listening. These include physical distractions, such as noise or discomfort, and psychological distractions, like preconceived notions or emotional bias. Additionally, cultural differences can also pose a challenge, as they can lead to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the speaker’s words. Overcoming these barriers requires conscious effort and practice.

1. Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness helps us focus on the present moment, making it easier to concentrate on the speaker’s words without being distracted. 2. Provide feedback: Giving feedback, such as nodding or paraphrasing, can show the speaker that you are actively engaged in the conversation. 3. Ask questions: Asking questions not only shows your interest but also helps to clarify any misunderstandings. 4. Respect cultural differences: Understanding and respecting cultural differences can help avoid misinterpretation and foster better communication.

In conclusion, listening skills are a vital part of effective communication. They require active engagement, understanding, and empathy. By practicing active listening and overcoming the barriers to effective listening, we can improve our communication skills, enhance our relationships, and better understand the world around us. Indeed, the art of listening is a skill that, when mastered, can open a world of possibilities and deeper connections.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist on the Art of Unselfish Understanding

By maria popova.

“An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said,” wrote Hannah Arendt in reflecting on how language confers reality upon existence . “And unless it is said it is, so to speak, non-existent.” But if an experience is spoken yet unheard, half of its reality is severed and a certain essential harmony is breached. The great physicist David Bohm knew this: “If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature,” he wrote in his excellent and timely treatise on the paradox of communication , “we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.”

How to do that is what the influential humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explored in a 1974 seminar in Switzerland, the 400-page transcript of which was eventually adapted into the posthumously published The Art of Listening ( public library ).

Listening, Fromm argues, is “is an art like the understanding of poetry” and, like any art, has its own rules and norms. Drawing on his half-century practice as a therapist, Fromm offers six such guidelines for mastering the art of unselfish understanding:

The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words. He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own. The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself. Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

In the remainder of the The Art of Listening , Fromm goes on to detail the techniques, dynamics, and mindsets that make for an optimal listening relationship, in therapy and in life. Complement it with Ursula K. Le Guin on the magic of real human communication and Alain de Botton on what makes a good communicator , then revisit Fromm on the art of living , the art of loving , how to transcend the common laziness of optimism and pessimism , and the key to a sane society .

— Published April 5, 2017 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/04/05/erich-fromm-the-art-of-listening/ —

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The Art of Listening: Cultivating Empathy and Connection

n today’s fast-paced world, the skill of listening with our hearts has become increasingly vital for fostering genuine connections and understanding among individuals. Mastering the art of listening goes beyond mere communication—it lays the foundation for empathy, compassion, and meaningful relationships. By exploring the significance of listening and its profound impact on interpersonal dynamics, you are empowered to build connections based on mutual respect, empathy, and genuine understanding.

Mastering the art of listening goes beyond mere communication—it lays the foundation for empathy, compassion, and meaningful relationships.

Understanding the Importance of Listening

Listening is not merely a passive act of hearing words—it is an active engagement with the thoughts, feelings, and needs of others. By delving into the importance of listening, you learn that attentive listening not only fosters meaningful communication but also strengthens relationships. They understand that by actively listening to others, they demonstrate respect for their perspectives, laying the groundwork for building trust and connection.

Moreover, understanding the importance of listening also equips you with essential conflict resolution and problem-solving skills. When you learn to listen attentively, you create an environment conducive to dialogue and understanding, fostering a culture of collaboration and cooperation. You will recognize that through active listening, you can navigate conflicts and challenges more effectively, leading to mutually beneficial outcomes and stronger relationships.

Furthermore, learning about the value of listening as a way to show respect and care for others instills a sense of empathy and understanding. When you understand that listening attentively is a form of empathy, you are more likely to approach interactions with sensitivity and consideration for the feelings of others.

Learning about the value of listening as a way to show respect and care for others instills a sense of empathy and understanding.

Empathy and Understanding

Empathy lies at the heart of effective listening, enabling you to connect with others on a deeper level and foster genuine understanding. When you listen with empathy, you transcend surface-level interactions and forge bonds of compassion and mutual respect. By attuning your ears to the nuances of emotions and experiences, you learn to step into others’ shoes and view the world from their perspective.

Empathy is not merely a passive response but an active engagement with the feelings of others and their experiences. When you practice empathy in your listening, you validate others’ emotions and create a safe space for expression and vulnerability. You understand that through empathy, you can foster a sense of belonging and acceptance, nurturing inclusive and supportive relationships.

Furthermore, learning about the importance of empathy in listening helps you develop stronger social skills and emotional intelligence. As you learn to recognize and validate others’ feelings, you become more adept at navigating complex social situations and forming meaningful connections with others.

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Through consistent practice, you can hone your ability to listen attentively and respond with sensitivity and compassion.

Practicing Active Listening

Practicing active listening empowers you to apply your understanding of empathy in real-life interactions and develop strong communication skills. From making eye contact and nodding to asking clarifying questions and paraphrasing what the speaker said, active listening involves demonstrating genuine interest and engagement in the conversation. Through consistent practice, you can hone your ability to listen attentively and respond with sensitivity and compassion.

Moreover, practicing active listening cultivates self-awareness and mindfulness in your interactions with others. By tuning into your own thoughts and emotions, you become better equipped to empathize with others and navigate diverse social situations with grace and empathy. You will recognize that through active listening, you can build stronger connections, resolve conflicts peacefully, and create a supportive and inclusive environment where every voice is heard and valued.

n conclusion, the art of listening with our hearts is a transformative skill that empowers you to build meaningful relationships, navigate conflicts, and foster a culture of empathy and understanding. As we embark on the journey of mastering the art of listening, let us cultivate a culture where every interaction is an opportunity to connect, learn, and grow together. Through the power of active listening, you can truly make a difference in the world by fostering compassion, empathy, and mutual respect in your communities.

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The Lost Art of Listening

It can be said in general that most people no longer know how to listen–either to one another or to themselves. Though most of us have ears that can hear very well, we do not actually know how to use these ears to listen. Listening has indeed become a lost art. And the results are obvious not just in education, society, business, and politics but also in the very fabric of our individual lives.

To be sure, there are many who teach listening skills for education and business. In a classic and informative article (“Listening to People”) written in the 1950s and published by the Harvard Business Review in 1988 in a collection entitled People: Managing Your Most Important Asset, the authors (Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens) remind us that whereas the average speech rate of the majority of Americans is around 125 words a minute (and, of course, comparable numbers would hold true for other languages as well), the human brain processes words at a much faster rate. When we listen to someone speaking, therefore, we are asking our brain to slow down dramatically in relation to its ordinary speed. This means that we are left with a lot of spare time for thinking, “and the use or misuse of this spare thinking time holds the answer to how well a person can concentrate on the spoken words. … A major task in helping people to listen better is teaching them to use their spare thinking time efficiently.”

Deep Listening

The relationship of thinking to listening is an important subject, not just for individuals but for society as a whole, and one that the authors go into in great depth in relation to developing better listening skills. In this essay, however, we will keep this relationship in mind but our emphasis will be slightly different. Our emphasis will be on listening as a way of self-knowledge and self-transformation. Our emphasis will be on the  being  of the so-called listener. Our emphasis will be on what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “deep listening.”

Deep listening has to do with the very essence of our relationship to ourselves and others. Deep listening requires love, being, and understanding. From the perspective of self-knowledge, self-transformation, and self-realization, to listen deeply means to welcome, to make ourselves fully available to, what is actually taking place now both in and around us. This is only possible, however, when we are inwardly quiet, alert, and sensitive, when we are in a state of receptivity. Deep listening requires a balance between activity and passivity. It requires us to empty our minds without losing them. It requires us to find a “middle ground,” a space in ourselves, where the vibrations of life can enter and be reflected in our consciousness without discrimination, where the forces coming from both outside and inside can be experienced without attachment, fear, interpretation, or judgment.

Deep listening has nothing to do with our so-called will power. It most often begins spontaneously at the very instant we realize that we are not listening, when we see our self-importance puffing up, when we see clearly how our “identification” with our thoughts, feelings, or sensations interferes with what is being said or offered. At that moment, if we continue to be sincere with ourselves and don’t react with inner criticism, we realize that there is something in us–a deeper level of silence, a deeper “self,” a witness–that can include our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the process of listening. We also realize that this deeper silence comes into play only when we can confront the truth about ourselves without any judgment, or, in other words, with compassion. It is this inner silence that will not only allow us to hear the subtle nuances of what is being said but will also bring us to a central, more-balanced place in ourselves. For if our attention goes too far outside ourselves we begin to react to the events around us too aggressively, whereas if it goes too far into ourselves we fall asleep or dream. In both instances we lose touch with the subtle dance, the moving interaction, of inner and outer impressions that sustains our lives.

Opportunities to Experiment 

Our day provides us with many opportunities to experiment with listening. From the moment we wake up in the morning and our thoughts and emotions begin to propel us automatically into various activities, to the numerous discussions we have at work, to the intimate conversations we undertake with friends and loved ones, to our own thoughts about the many aspects of our lives, to the various voices within us, we can study listening in many different ways.

One exercise, which is always useful, is to sit quietly when you can and simply turn your auditory attention inward. Listen not only to sounds reaching you from the outside world but also to the various sounds and voices of your own body and psyche. Start by listening to your breathing, especially to the movements of exhalation and inhalation. Once your mind has become quiet enough to follow your breathing, include any sensations and tensions that seem to be speaking to you. Listen to your thoughts. See if you can actually “hear” them emerging out of silence. It is important, however, not to try to analyze what your hear. Simply listen to everything without discrimination.

Another exercise is to listen to yourself as you speak to others. The aim here is to listen to yourself as though you were a stranger whom you wanted to get to know better. For you are a stranger. We are all strangers to ourselves. And when we are confronted with strangers in whom we are interested, what do we do? We listen not only to their words, but also to their intonations. Consciously or unconsciously, we notice where their voice is coming from: is it coming from up high in themselves, their throat or even the top of their head, or lower down from their solar plexus or belly? We also watch their movements and gestures. We sometimes even try to “feel” their atmosphere. In this experiment we are open to perceiving all of these things–but in ourselves. As you listen to yourself in this way, of course, you will see just how much your attachment to your self-image, supported by your habitual thoughts and feelings and expectations, interferes with actually listening.

Letting Go of Expectations & Interpretations

Real listening requires inner relaxation. To listen to ourselves and others means to let go of our own psychological expectations and interpretations and to allow our attention to move in new, spontaneous ways in ourselves, to move toward the unknown. It means to let go of the narrow habits of mind and feeling that block this “free” movement of attention and channel it toward the known. Such habits include, for example, thinking that we know how someone is going to finish their sentence. (We may well know the words they are going to use, but while we’re thinking about these words we probably won’t hear the subtle meaning the speaker may give them.) Real listening means first of all to observe and then to find a way to free ourselves from the mental and emotional noise that arises automatically during the “spare time” we have for thinking, no matter what value we may give to the noise of these thoughts and emotions. Real listening means that we open ourselves to the deep, underlying silence in ourselves, the ground of our own being, and realize that it is only this silence that can truly listen. In real listening, “there is not a you and not another. Call it love.”*

Copyright 2009 by Dennis Lewis.

*Jean Klein,  The Book of Listening ,” (Non Duality Press, United Kingdom, 2008)

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The Art of Attentive Listening

Most people think that to become a good communicator they have to focus on becoming great speakers, but listening is just as important as speaking in the communication process. Whether you’re dealing with coworkers, managers, or clients, being a good speaker and a great listener are crucial workplace skills . Our ability to listen properly can give us insight into the rationale behind decisions and a better understanding of what the speaker is trying to accomplish.

Yet being a good listener isn’t always easy. Studies have shown that the average person can only remember 50% of what they’ve heard straight after they’ve heard it. Another study has shown that only 10% of the initial message communicated is retained after 3 days. The reason for these shocking stats is that most of us think of listening as a passive process that requires no effort.

Often, we listen to the words being said without truly grasping the meaning behind them. This is usually because we’re focused on our own internal dialogue rather than what the speaker is actually saying. Sometimes we don’t pay attention because we’re daydreaming while someone is talking – we all have so much on our plates that it can be difficult to quiet our minds long enough to really listen to someone. Or we may have a pre-conceived bias against either the speaker or the topic that shuts our ears to what’s being said.

Whatever the reasons we struggle with being good listeners, honing that skill can have a lot of benefits. Here are the top 8 reasons to create a workplace where employees both listen and are heard. Listening better to one another can:

• Build relationships. Attentive listening can help your workforce come closer together. And as communications improve among employees, so will their teamwork, leading to increased productivity and business.
• Foster learning.  The art of listening is about finding out what the speaker thinks about something. When employees listen to one another, they learn from one another. A free flow of ideas that are truly listened to can lead to a workplace where employees are constantly learning from each other.
• Encourage respect. Respect is crucial in any workplace. Fostering attentive listening can help establish respect, as managers and employers listen not only to their employees’ ideas but also to their issues or concerns.
• Establish a culture of communication . By fostering attentive listening, you establish a company culture in which employees know how to speak and listen to one another. This raises the communication expectations between employers and employees.
• Facilitate conflict resolution. When issues or conflicts arise, listening is essential to clarifying disagreements. Attentive listening helps employees get to the root of a problem, come up with solutions, and decide the best course of action to take.
• Promote open-mindedness. Employees all have different viewpoints. Encouraging them to listen to each other can help promote an environment of open-mindedness and inclusion, where everyone can feel that their opinions are heard and valued.
• Further progress. Employees are more likely to be creative and share their ideas if they feel they are listened to and their ideas are taken into account. Actively listening to employees’ input can reinforce the acceptance of future contributions.
• Improve decisions. Making decisions and judgments based on assumptions can cause many workplace problems. By encouraging attentive listening, you will find that employees are more likely to ask questions, clarify understanding, and make better decisions based on a more accurate understanding of a given situation.

Encouraging good listening helps employees work together better as a team, and promotes innovative thinking and more effective communication. Here are some of the basics of attentive listening.

• Make eye contact. Looking directly at the person who’s speaking is a clear way to indicate you’re paying attention to him or her. Looking away, even if you’re still listening, will make it seem like you’re distracted or not interested.
• Make appropriate facial expressions. Nodding, tilting your head, smiling – all of these expressions show a response to what the speaker is saying, which indicates that you’re grasping the meaning and are interested in what he or she’s saying.
• Ask questions. Critical listening involves asking questions to get all the information. When you ask the speaker a question, it also drives the conversation and shows that you’re interested in clarification and understanding the issues.
• Don’t interrupt. Although it’s good to ask questions, try not to interrupt the speaker. Let the person complete his or her thoughts before responding or asking questions.
• Paraphrase. When you restate, in your own words, what the speaker is saying, you prove that you’re listening carefully – after all, you wouldn’t be able to repeat anything if you weren’t paying attention.

Keeping these tips in mind will help you become a more effective listener, which is more than half of what it takes to be a really good communicator.

I’ve always thought of myself as a great listener until I came across a situation when I was communicating my ideas and I felt I wasn’t heard. It was the first time when I actually asked myself “Am I a Good Listener?” After having the courage to acknowledge to myself that I was not – I started working on improving this skill by really paying attention to what the person was saying.

I agree with Sarah that the most difficult thing is to acknowledge the problem. But after this you start working on improving your skills and become a better professional. I also like sharing my personal experience with others, so that they can learn something from me or at least stop for a moment and ask themselves: Do I really have all the skills necessary for a good communication?

This is a very useful article for anyone. I think the most important communication problems have the inability of listening as a specific cause. The area in which we activate shouldn’t matter when it comes to organizing communication training – sessions. I think they’re extremely helpful for any organization!

We often forget that communication is a two-way process – it’s not only about communicating one’s ideas, but also about careful listening. While listening to others, I always paraphrase some sentences or ask follow-up questions to make sure that I didn’t miss any piece of information.

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Productivity

Productivity tips

How to Master the Art of Listening

Listening is the unsung hero of communication. We love to praise great orators and recite lines from famous speeches, and rightly so. Words are powerful. But listening can be equally so.

If you improve your listening skills, you’ll probably never win an award for it or make it into the history books for being a great listener. But that’s OK. Good listeners don’t listen because they want a pat on the back. They recognize that the benefits of listening well are much greater. As columnist and editor Doug Larson said, "Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk."

Despite the benefits that good listening offers, however, many people struggle with truly listening when others are speaking. To build a better foundation for personal and professional success, master the art of listening with the tips below.

Why Listening Takes Work

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply

Stephen R. Covey

How many times have you walked into a meeting or conference and thought, "Oh good, I can relax now because I only have to listen?" Or maybe someone thanked you for letting them talk, and you responded with something like "No problem, all I did was listen."

We mistake listening as easy because it looks passive and instinctive, but in reality it’s hard work. Really listening (and not just appearing to listen) requires intense concentration and a good deal of mental energy.

Evaluate: You judge what someone is saying and agree or disagree.

Probe: You ask questions from your own frame of reference.

Advise: You give counsel, advice, and solutions to problems.

Interpret: You analyze others' motives and behaviors based on your own experiences.

"If you're like most people, you probably seek first to be understood," Covey writes. "You want to get your point across. And in doing so, you may ignore the other person completely, pretend that you're listening, selectively hear only certain parts of the conversation, or attentively focus on only the words being said, but miss the meaning entirely."

The good news is, anyone can learn to become a better listener.

What Makes a Great Listener?

Great listeners share a few important qualities:

They ask great questions

I used to have a teacher who loved to say, "The word listen has the same letters as the word silent." Silence is indeed a part of listening, but good listeners don’t have to be completely quiet.

Good questions act as evidence that you’re listening and show that you’re interested in building on what you heard. And beyond mere perceptions, those questions might help you learn more from what the speaker is saying.

They pay attention to more than what’s being said

How someone says something (Are their arms crossed? Brow furrowed? Pitch higher than normal?) is just as important as the words they say.

They don’t take word-for-word notes

If you spend all your mental energy trying to capture what someone says word-for-word, it’s harder to be an engaged listener.

They listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to respond

As Stephen Covey wrote in our section-opening quote, "Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."

Good listeners instead focus on understanding what’s being said, rather than thinking of what they want to say next.

They make people feel heard

They follow up on what matters.

It feels really good when someone remembers something you said and brings it up with you later. Good listeners make a point to circle back around to follow up on key points or important issues.

How to Practice and Sharpen Your Listening Skills

Good listening skills can be learned and improved, and there are plenty of opportunities every day to practice.

Here are a few things you can do to improve:

Practice mindfulness

Part of being a good listener is being able to be fully present and aware.

1 . Sit comfortably 2 . Close your eyes (it will be easier if you withdraw the other senses) 3 . Listen to the sounds that are furthest away from you. 4 . Listen to the sounds that are closest to you. 5 . Now listen to the sounds that are somewhere in between.

Dean says you should be able to sit comfortably for 20 minutes without:

- Fidgeting - Your mind wandering & losing concentration - Hearing the sound of your own voice inside your head - Having a conversation with yourself - Waiting for this exercise to end - Labelling all of the sounds individually - Effort

The exercise might be difficult at first, but the more you do it, the easier it’ll get.

Treat it like a test

This might be a bit tortuous for one-on-one conversations, but if you’re in a large meeting or at a conference, this could help you retain a lot of more of what’s said. That frame of mind will help you pay better attention and think about the right questions to ask.

Mind the gap

To make up for that gap, as you’re listening, review and summarize the speaker's main points. Then, when they are finished, you can restate the points and ask the speaker if you've understood the message by saying things like, "What I hear you saying is..." or "When you say that, do you mean...?"

Clarify and paraphrase to better process information and make people feel heard—and to force yourself to pay more attention to what they mean.

Try just one day

Becoming a great listener will make others enjoy being around you more and help you learn more from them. With some attention and practice, you can learn how to be a better listener and apply those skills in so much of your work and everyday life.

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Genevieve Colman

Genevieve Colman is a User Experience Manager who enjoys uncomplicating complex language and finding the perfect GIF for every situation.

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The New York Times

The learning network | are we losing the art of listening.

Are We Losing the Art of Listening?

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

• See all Student Opinion »

Listening, like other skills, can be developed through practice, or lost if not used regularly. Good listeners focus on what they are hearing. They pause to think about what they’ve heard before responding. They ask questions because they want to know the answers, not just to keep the conversation going. Do you often find yourself in the company of good listeners? Would you describe yourself as a good listener? Why or why not? In the op-ed piece “The Art of Listening,” Henning Mankell writes about what he has learned from living a “straddled existence, with one foot in African sand and the other in European snow”:

The simplest way to explain what I’ve learned from my life in Africa is through a parable about why human beings have two ears but only one tongue. Why is this? Probably so that we have to listen twice as much as we speak. In Africa listening is a guiding principle. It’s a principle that’s been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else. From my own experience, I’ve noticed how much faster I have to answer a question during a TV interview than I did 10, maybe even 5, years ago. It’s as if we have completely lost the ability to listen. We talk and talk, and we end up frightened by silence, the refuge of those who are at a loss for an answer. … Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening. So if I am right that we are storytelling creatures, and as long as we permit ourselves to be quiet for a while now and then, the eternal narrative will continue.

Students: Give us your take on these observations about listening. Like Mr. Mankell, do you feel pressure to respond more quickly than you’d like? Do you find silence frustrating? Have you noticed that you have to repeat things in talking to others, or that you easily forget what they tell you? What about the African proverb that says we have one mouth and two ears so that we talk half as much as we listen–is that good advice, wishful thinking or something else?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Sometimes I can feel pressure but a lot of the time I do not, the times I do are when it is deciding for one thing over the other. Silence has never frustrated me, it more helps then makes me frustrated. I do notice that i repeat myself more then ounce and have to repeat. I think that advice is true but isn’t in place today.

I do not feel pressured to talk more in class. Naturally i find myself answering questions and being the top student in my class. I guess i was just born a genius or something. I believe the way school is run is perfect.

Give us your take on these observations about listening. Like Mr. Mankell, do you feel pressure to respond more quickly than you’d like? Do you find silence frustrating? Have you noticed that you have to repeat things in talking to others, or that you easily forget what they tell you? What about the African proverb that says we have one mouth and two ears so that we talk half as much as we listen–is that good advice, wishful thinking or something else?

Yes I do feel like teachers want you to respond quicker then we’d like to. Some people take a little longer to raise their hand or write down the answer then other people do. Sometimes I do forget what people tell me right after they say it, sometimes it’s because they say things to fast and other times it’s because I wasn’t paying attention.

Don’t find it very pressuring. Silence is frustrating its just to quiet need loud noises. I forget things that everyone tells me I need to pay more attention. Also i don’t agree with this proverb because in size are mouth is slightly bigger than are ears combine well mine is anyway.

I think the observations about listening are accurate. I do feel the pressure to respond more quickly than I’d like because I feel as if the person is waiting too long for an answer. Silence isn’t frustrating to me unless I asked a question to someone and they didn’t respond. I do have to repeat things to others and they sometimes have to repeat things to me because either I forget or I need to hear it one more time to interpret it. I do think that the African proverb is wishful thinking.

I believe that some people have lost the art of listening but other people still have it, I notice when some one takes time to think about what you said while also planning what they will say.

I do not feel pressured to answer more quickly than i’d like. I talk when I have something to say. I only feel pressured if i’m speaking in front of a class or a high ranking person(s).

To Mr. Mankell, Listening to a speaker’s or teacher’s guidance on a subject fills our brain with knowledge. But not all have the potential or focus to sit down and listen to what a wise one has to say.

Personally, I feel responding to a question is an easy task, something to stay consistent and fast with. In certain cases, many people enjoy telling “Little Lies” to weave themselves out of telling the truth, knowing it may hurt, and are drained by the awkward silence.

Speaking refers to stating a topic with knowledge, listening to wisdom before reciting it. Talking about something you know nothing about leads you to looking like “the fool.”

My opinion is nitic cases that show major accidents and much more and the Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge.

I don’t really agree with what Mr. Mankell is saying. Sure, we don’t take the time to listen to questions before we give answers but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we aren’t listening. That just means that we are smart enough to know the answer from just the first few words. I do feel pressured to answer before the question is finished because I know what is coming up. Good deduction skills are needed mostly, not listening skills. I often tend to think better in the silence. I think it is a good adverb; we have one mouth and two ears so that we talk half as much as we listen because we listen and then talk.

the fact that Mr.Mankell has learned is right. we do not give any one time to listen to what we say and we expect an answer straight away. we are rushed and are rushing even in schools. the speeds are to high and we are loosing our pace.

I find myself very pressured to answer more quickly than I’d like to. Silence is always very awkward though. Listeners feel awkward in silence for the lack of something to listen to. Talkers feel awkward for their lack of talking in this fast moving ever- changing world we as Americans know, can be too fast sometimes. I wish we had more time to listen and think.

I think people do talk more than they listen. I do feel that i am pressured to respond more quickly than I’d like, because i would say something quickly and than regret what i said later, or i would think of something better to say. I find silence aqua ward.

No, I do not feel pressure to respond more quickly than I would like. I don’t find silence that frustrating but after a while it gets quite annoying. I usually have to say things only once. I do think that people talk more then they speak. I think that the African proverb is helpful because it might help us to listen more carefully to directions and then speak only when we need to.

I think peoples listening skills have lessened. I feel like teachers do make you have to respond quickly to questions. I do feel like the African proverb should be true it make a lot of sense. I do find silence awkward sometimes it depends on the situation though.

I believe that people really do talk more than they listen. People never stop to think about things before resuming the conversation, therefore I feel like they are never truly listening. I do sometimes find that I need to repeat things to others but I don’t usually forget what others tell me, as I try to be a good listener. I think the African proverb is good advice to listen to people instead of only hearing them.

Yes, I do feel pressure to respond quickly. Also, I feel as though silence is awkward and I do not like to be silent. I always have to have some sort of music in the background or be talking to some one all the time. I do honestly forget what people say to me some times but I am trying to work on that so I will be able to ingest further knowledge. I believe that the African proverb is relevant but doesn’t really apply to teenagers such as myself because we most definitely talk more than we listen.

I don’t feel pressured to talk more in class mostly because the teachers normally just call kids at random. My brother always told me that god gave us on tongue and two ears just so we would have to exercise the tongue more often. Silence is super annoying to me, I always have to have some sort of music going in the background when I do my homework.

I found that I’m always being asked to respond more quickly than I am comfortable with. Silence makes me very frustrated because I am used to the constant noise in my house, but at the same time I enjoy the quiet. When talking to others I have noticed that I have to repeat myself several times and I never hear what people say 100%. I think the African proverb is good advice, but many people do not take the time to listen because everyone wants to be heard. Due to this, young adults in the United States have already lost their ability to listen.

I don’t think that I have ever really felt pressure to respond quicker than I like. I’m a good listener and unlike most people I wait until someone is done talking before I interrupt them.

I personally do believe that listening is slowing becoming an unused art, as most people would rather be listened to than listen themselves. And no, I do not feel pressured to answer quickly, as long as I take my time and speak accurately, than there is no reason I should be rushed. Becoming a more refined listener has become a more valuable trait in today’s society, having more and more people talking than learning about others, and more people talking over each other.

I have found in talking with others that they either don’t hear me the first time, or they forget what I said right after. I have also found that I forget what people have said, and only half listen to them on occasion. I do not find silence frustrating or awkward, but rather I enjoy silence once in a while. Silence gives time to think through actions and conversations and gives time to collect your thoughts. The African Proverb is good advice, but if everyone talked half as much as they listened the world would be silent. A proverb from the Bible that I like to live by is “knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.”

I feel that we’ve greatly lost hearing in the youths of today. With such modernization, the self-centered aspect of the world has increased. People today are far too involved with themselves to listen to others. Though if they were to listen the only thing they would hear would be the self involvement the rest of their peers drown in. The silence of today has been forced upon many, yet they talk so much about that with no importance.

Yes, in a sense I do feel the pressure to respond depending strictly on whomever I ma talking to. I do sometimes find silence frustrating in some situations where in other situations I welcome it. I do find myself having to repeat things a lot and other people not understanding me simply because they aren’t listening. I think the African proverb is very good advice and people should start to listen more than they talk, myself included. I also believe that although the art of listening is being lost, the art of eavesdropping is a completely different story and is not lost nor will it ever be.

I feel that I can be a good listener if the conversation is right, If someone is talking about something I’m interested in, I will be more intent on listening and adding in what I think unlike when it’s something that I have no interest in the conversation. I’m more likely to just nod my head and wait for the conversation to be over and walk away.

What's Next

• Books & Audio
• The Art of Listening

It is through this creative process that we at once love and are loved.

by Brenda Ueland Sunday, October 25, 1992 San Jose Mercury News

I WANT to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don’t listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all — which is so important, too — to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.

This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good. Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself. When we listen to people there is an alternating current that recharges us so we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.  

When people listen, creative waters flow  

Now, there are brilliant people who cannot listen much. They have no ingoing wires on their apparatus. They are entertaining, but exhausting, too. I think it is because these lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to talk, do not let this little creative fountain inside us that begins to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom. That is why, when someone has listened to you, you go home rested and lighthearted. Now this little creative fountain is in us all. It is the spirit, or the intelligence, or the imagination — whatever you want to call it. If you are very tired, strained, have no solitude, run too many errands, talk to too many people, drink too many cocktails, this little fountain is muddied over and covered with a lot of debris. The result is you stop living from the center, the creative fountain, and you live from the periphery, from externals. That is, you go along on mere willpower without imagination. It is when people really listen to us, with quiet, fascinated attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way. I discovered all this about three years ago, and truly it made a revolutionary change in my life. Before that, when I went to a party, I would think anxiously: “Now try hard. Be lively. Say bright things. Talk. Don’t let down.” And when tired, I would have to drink a lot of coffee to keep this up. Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk; to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject. Sometimes, of course, I cannot listen as well as others. But when I have this listening power, people crowd around and their heads keep turning to me as though irresistibly pulled. By listening I have started up their creative fountain. I do them good. Now why does it do them good? I have a kind of mystical notion about this. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too — you can tear them up afterward — for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.

Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know.

Women listen better

I think women have this listening faculty more than men. It is not the fault of men. They lose it because of their long habit of striving in business, of self-assertion. And the more forceful men are, the less they can listen as they grow older. And that is why women in general are more fun than men, more restful and inspiriting.

Now this non-listening of able men is the cause of one of the saddest things in the world — the loneliness of fathers, of those quietly sad men who move along with their grown children like remote ghosts. When my father was over 70, he was a fiery, humorous, admirable man, a scholar, a man of great force. But he was deep in the loneliness of old age and another generation. He was so fond of me. But he could not hear me — not one word I said, really. I was just audience. I would walk around the lake with him on a beautiful afternoon and he would talk to me about Darwin and Huxley and higher criticism of the Bible. “Yes, I see, I see,” I kept saying and tried to keep my mind pinned to it, but I was restive and bored. There was a feeling of helplessness because he could not hear what I had to say about it. When I spoke I found myself shouting, as one does to a foreigner, and in a kind of despair that he could not hear me. After the walk I would feel that I had worked off my duty and I was anxious to get him settled and reading in his Morris chair, so that I could go out and have a livelier time with other people. And he would sigh and look after me absentmindedly with perplexed loneliness. For years afterward I have thought with real suffering about my father’s loneliness. Such a wonderful man, and reaching out to me and wanting to know me! But he could not. He could not listen. But now I think that if only I had known as much about listening then as I do now, I could have bridged the chasm between us. To given an example: Recently, a man I had not seen for 20 years wrote me. He was an unusually forceful man and had made a great deal of money. But he had lost his ability to listen. He talked rapidly and told wonderful stories and it was just fascinating to hear them. But when I spoke — restlessness: “Just hand me that, will you?… Where is my pipe?” It was just a habit. He read countless books and was eager to take in ideas, but he just could not listen to people.

Listened patiently

Well, this is what I did. I was more patient — I did not resist his non-listening talk as I did my father’s. I listened and listened to him, not once pressing against him, even in thought, with my own self-assertion.

I said to myself: “He has been under a driving pressure for years. His family has grown to resist his talk. But now, by listening, I will pull it all out of him. He must talk freely and on and on. When he has been really listened to enough, he will grow tranquil. He will begin to want to hear me.” And he did, after a few days. He began asking me questions. And presently I was saying gently: “You see, it has become hard for you to listen.” He stopped dead and stared at me. And it was because I had listened with such complete, absorbed, uncritical sympathy, without one flaw of boredom or impatience, that he now believed and trusted me, although he did not know this. “Now talk,” he said. “Tell me about that. Tell me all about that.” Well, we walked back and forth across the lawn and I told him my ideas about it. “You love your children, but probably don’t let them in. Unless you listen, you can’t know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.” Well, I don’t think I would have written this article if my notions had not had such an extraordinary effect on this man. For he says they have changed his whole life. He wrote me that his children at once came closer; he was astonished to see what they are; how original, independent, courageous. His wife seemed really to care about him again, and they were actually talking about all kinds of things and making each other laugh.  

Family tragedies

For just as the tragedy of parents and children is not listening, so it is of husbands and wives. If they disagree they begin to shout louder and louder — if not actually, at least inwardly — hanging fiercely and deafly onto their own ideas, instead of listening and becoming quieter and more comprehending. But the most serious result of not listening is that worst thing in the world, boredom; for it is really the death of love. It seals people off from each other more than any other thing. Now, how to listen. It is harder than you think. Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don’t love you just when you are nice; they love all of you. In order to listen, here are some suggestions: Try to learn tranquility, to live in the present a part of the time every day. Sometimes say to yourself: “Now. What is happening now? This friend is talking. I am quiet. There is endless time. I hear it, every word.” Then suddenly you begin to hear not only what people are saying, but also what they are trying to say, and you sense the whole truth about them. And you sense existence, not piecemeal, not this object and that, but as a translucent whole. Then watch your self-assertiveness. And give it up. Remember, it is not enough just to will to listen to people. One must really listen. Only then does the magic begin. We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don’t, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good.

Brenda Ueland, a prolific Minnesota author and columnist, died in 1985. A collection of her essays, “Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings by Brenda Ueland” was released earlier this month. Copyright © 1992 by The Estate of Brenda Ueland. Reprinted by permission of HolyCow! Press, Box 3170, Mt. Royal Station, Duluth, Minn. 55803.

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The Art of Listening

Awareness | 3 comments

“It is through this creative process that we love and are loved…”

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don’t listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all – which is so important, too – to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.

This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good.

Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice?

Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know.

It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself. When we listen to people there is an alternating current that recharges us so we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created. Now, there are brilliant people who cannot listen much. They have no ingoing wires on their apparatus. They are entertaining, but exhausting, too. I think it is because these lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to talk, do not let this little creative fountain inside us begin to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom. That is why, when someone has listened to you, you go home rested and lighthearted.

When people listen, creative waters flow

Now this little creative fountain is in us all. It is the spirit, or the intelligence, or the imagination – whatever you want to call it. If you are very tired, strained, have no solitude, run too many errands, talk to too many people, drink too many cocktails, this little fountain is muddied over and covered with a lot of debris. The result is you stop living from the center, the creative fountain, and you live from the periphery, from externals. That is, you go along on mere willpower without imagination.

It is when people really listen to us, with quiet, fascinated attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way. I discovered all this about three years ago, and truly it made a revolutionary change in my life. Before that, when I went to a party, I would think anxiously: “Now try hard. Be lively. Say bright things. Talk. Don’t let down.” And when tired, I would have to drink a lot of coffee to keep this up. Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk; to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject.

Sometimes, of course, I cannot listen as well as others. But when I have this listening power, people crowd around and their heads keep turning to me as though irresistibly pulled. By listening I have started up their creative fountain. I do them good. Now why does it do them good? I have a kind of mystical notion about this. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too – you can tear them up afterward – for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.

Women listen better

I think women have this listening faculty more than men. It is not the fault of men. They lose it because of their long habit of striving in business, of self-assertion. And the more forceful men are, the less they can listen as they grow older. And that is why women in general are more fun than men, more restful and inspiriting. Now this non-listening of able men is the cause of one of the saddest things in the world – the loneliness of fathers, of those quietly sad men who move along with their grown children like remote ghosts.

When my father was over 70, he was a fiery, humorous, admirable man, a scholar, a man of great force. But he was deep in the loneliness of old age and another generation. He was so fond of me. But he could not hear me – not one word I said, really. I was just audience. I would walk around the lake with him on a beautiful afternoon and he would talk to me about Darwin and Huxley and higher criticism of the Bible. “Yes, I see, I see,” I kept saying and tried to keep my mind pinned to it, but I was restive and bored. There was a feeling of helplessness because he could not hear what I had to say about it. When I spoke I found myself shouting, as one does to a foreigner, and in a kind of despair that he could not hear me. After the walk I would feel that I had worked off my duty and I was anxious to get him settled and reading in his Morris chair, so that I could go out and have a livelier time with other people. And he would sigh and look after me absentmindedly with perplexed loneliness. For years afterward I have thought with real suffering about my father’s loneliness. Such a wonderful man, and reaching out to me and wanting to know me! But he could not. He could not listen.

But now I think that if only I had known as much about listening then as I do now, I could have bridged the chasm between us. To give an example: Recently, a man I had not seen for 20 years wrote me. He was an unusually forceful man and had made a great deal of money. But he had lost his ability to listen. He talked rapidly and told wonderful stories and it was just fascinating to hear them. But when I spoke – restlessness: “Just hand me that, will you? … Where is my pipe?” It was just a habit. He read countless books and was eager to take in ideas, but he just could not listen to people.

Patient listening

Well, this is what I did. I was more patient – I did not resist his non-listening talk as I did my father’s. I listened and listened to him, not once pressing against him, even in thought, with my own self-assertion. I said to myself: “He has been under a driving pressure for years. His family has grown to resist his talk. But now, by listening, I will pull it all out of him. He must talk freely and on and on. When he has been really listened to enough, he will grow tranquil. He will begin to want to hear me.”

And he did, after a few days. He began asking me questions. And presently I was saying gently: “You see, it has become hard for you to listen.” He stopped dead and stared at me. And it was because I had listened with such complete, absorbed, uncritical sympathy, without one flaw of boredom or impatience, that he now believed and trusted me, although he did not know this. “Now talk,” he said. “Tell me about that. Tell me all about that.” Well, we walked back and forth across the lawn and I told him my ideas about it. “You love your children, but probably don’t let them in. Unless you listen, you can’t know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.”

Well, I don’t think I would have written this article if my notions had not had such an extraordinary effect on this man. For he says they have changed his whole life.

He wrote me that his children at once came closer; he was astonished to see what they are; how original, independent, courageous. His wife seemed really to care about him again, and they were actually talking about all kinds of things and making each other laugh.

Family tragedies

For just as the tragedy of parents and children is not listening, so it is of husbands and wives. If they disagree they begin to shout louder and louder – if not actually, at least inwardly – hanging fiercely and deafly onto their own ideas, instead of listening and becoming quieter and more comprehending. But the most serious result of not listening is that worst thing in the world, boredom; for it is really the death of love. It seals people off from each other more than any other thing.

Now, how to listen. It is harder than you think. Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad- tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don’t love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.

In order to listen, here are some suggestions: Try to learn tranquility, to live in the present a part of the time every day. Sometimes say to yourself: “Now. What is happening now? This friend is talking. I am quiet. There is endless time. I hear it, every word.” Then suddenly you begin to hear not only what people are saying, but also what they are trying to say, and you sense the whole truth about them. And you sense existence, not piecemeal, not this object and that, but as a translucent whole. Then watch your self-assertiveness. And give it up. Remember, it is not enough just to will to listen to people. One must really listen. Only then does the magic begin.

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good.

And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don’t, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.

Brenda Ueland

Brenda Ueland, a prolific Minnesota author and columnist, died in 1985 at the age of 93. Her father was a lawyer and judge, her mother a suffrage leader.

Copyright ©1992 by The Estate of Brenda Ueland. Reprinted on Zen Moments by kind permission of: Holy Cow! Press , Box 3170, Mt. Royal Station, Duluth, Minn. 55803. Phone/Fax: 218-724-1653

Photo: Cats – by Ferran Jordà

“The Art of Listening” is from a collection of Brenda Ueland’s essays:

“Strength To Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings”

“The Old Friend You’ve Never Met”

“Reading Brenda Ueland’s essays are like chatting with an old friend. Her description, enthusiasm, and sheer enjoyment of writing permeate every page of this charming book. Each essay is short – between 2 and 4 pages – and deals with a single topic, making it possible to skip between topics rather than read from page one.

Her characters are colorful and wonderfully drawn – you will feel as if you were sitting in the park with her, listening to this marvelous woman telling tales of her amazing life!” Amazon Books – Customer Review

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Beautiful article & so true. Thanks for sharing.

You had me at the kittens.

A wonderful thought provoking article!! Thank you!

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The Art of Listening

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• Erik van de Loo  

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Listening is a basic human activity, and one of the most important determining factors for the quality of interpersonal and professional relationships. Skill at listening enables us to better understand and respond to situations and to others. So, in order to be an effective educator, coach, consultant, manager, or leader, we must master the art of listening.

Listening is not done by the ears, but by the mind. We hear sounds, but we listen to meanings. W. Meissner

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Bandura, A. (1994). “Self-efficacy” in Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (vol. 4), V.S. Ramachandran (Ed.). New York, Academic Press, pp. 71–81.

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van de Loo, E. (2016). The Art of Listening. In: de Vries, M.F.R.K., Korotov, K., Florent-Treacy, E., Rook, C. (eds) Coach and Couch. INSEAD Business Press. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56161-9_8

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The Field Grade Leader

Organizational leadership in the us army, the art of listening, a guest post by nate player.

Successful officers are good listeners. They use effective listening skills to gain perspective from their subordinates and listen to their Soldiers to build a foundation of trust. Officers who do this are more effective in leading their teams than those who do not. This essay will enable better understanding by discussing three topics: listening to gain perspective on assigned missions or tasks; listening to build trust in the team and; some tips for improving listening skills.

June 24, 2015 – Photo by U.S. Army Maj. Randy Stillinger U.S. Army Sgt. Troy Lord, a CH-47 Flight Engineer with the Texas National Guard’s 2-149th General Support Aviation Battalion, guides a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, as Soldiers from 1st Battalion, 133rd Field Artillery, hook up a 105mm Howitzer during an air assault exercise on Fort Hood.

“Keep an open mind and seek advice. Every team has experienced members that are an extremely valuable resource. These team members can provide historical examples of past issues and help guide your decisions. But first, you must be approachable and willing to listen.”

 Listening to gain perspective on assigned missions or tasks

An officer who demonstrates by their actions an attitude of willingness to listen will have a more cohesive team and greater mission accomplishment. Because it is up to the officer to make the final decision at their level, listening does not necessarily mean you must follow all given counsel. However, those who keep an open mind and seek advice will likely succeed in mission planning and execution ahead of their peers.

Effective listeners are humble and teachable. Remember, the rank you hold requires that your orders be followed, but does not necessarily mean your idea is the best one. Before you make any final decisions on a course of action, ask for feedback and consider the counsel offered with an open mind. Officers should not be emotionally attached to their ideas. If a better one comes along it should be embraced enthusiastically.

Listening means getting out of your office and spending time with your team. Today’s officer corps often feel tethered to their computers and email. To combat this, an officer should have time dedicated in their personal battle rhythm to being out and moving around. Try not to be the officer who nobody sees all day. That is a recipe for disaster.

Listening to build trust in the team

Perhaps more importantly, officers who are approachable professionally are by extension showing themselves to be approachable personally. Consequently, they will be much more effective in their role of leading Soldiers. You cannot lead those who do not trust you, and one of the best ways to build trust is by listening to and caring about your team.

Officers should remember that feeling heard is one of the most important desires people have emotionally and that Soldiers are human beings under their uniforms. The officer NCO relationship is in many ways like a marriage. If your NCO counterpart feels like their opinion is sought and valued, they will move mountains for you. By the same token, if they feel as if you are not interested in their experience or opinion, your partnership will quickly fall apart.

Soldiers only bring their problems to leaders who have shown through their actions that they care and are willing to listen. Make it a point to give your Soldiers an opportunity to talk to you. This can be accomplished through formal counseling sessions or by simply taking the opportunity to ask them how they are doing. Follow up questions are also important. Don’t just ask “how was your weekend” and walk away. Find out what they did and with whom. Learn the names of spouses and children. Approaching your Soldiers in this manner will work wonders in the difficult moments when you must ask a little bit more from your team. Those moments come both on the battlefield and in the garrison. If your team knows you listen and knows you care, they will follow you wherever you lead them.

Some tips for improving listening skills

So how does one become an effective listener? For starters, it takes lots of practice. Effective leaders master the art of “listening to understand” as opposed to “listening to respond.” A concerted effort is required to hone this skill. For starters, try to focus on what someone is saying overall before you formulate a response. Let them finish their thought and then take some time to think through your answer. In other words, don’t be afraid of a few moments of silence. Be careful with knee-jerk reactions to what you are hearing. The tradition of “holding questions until the end of a brief” stems from the fact that many questions are answered in due course if we allow others time to fully explain their ideas.

It is also important to use active listening skills. That means communicating back to the person you are speaking with that you understand what they have been saying. For example, if a Soldier comes to you with a problem, after listening to all they have to say, repeat back to them a summary of the problem as you heard them communicate it. This gives them the opportunity to clarify or confirm your understanding. Once you have reached a point of mutual understanding, you can begin to come up with a solution to the problem together.

Not everyone starts out as a good listener. Officers should not expect to be immediately proficient at the techniques and efforts discussed here. More leaders are made than born. Remember that fact and keep moving forward.  As you strive to humble yourself and improve your skills at active listening your team will support you with counsel and follow your orders no matter how difficult the circumstance.

Enjoy the article? This is part of Nate Player’s series on success as an officer in the Army. Read more HERE

Major Nathan Player is currently a student at the Superior School of War in Bogota Colombia. He is assigned to 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg following graduation. He has 13 years of combined enlisted and officer service, has commanded at the O3 Level, and served in various joint staff and professional education assignments.