How To Listen Well

Listening and loving cannot be separated. Learn critical tips for active listening and offering compassion.

If living a life of love is valuable to you, it is difficult to imagine that developing skills of empathic and active listening would not be high on your list. 

But how do we become good listeners? Are good listeners born or made?

In this article, no matter your personality type, I will suggest two surefire ways to show someone you are listening and, as a result, actually listen and understand others better.

There is a difference between hearing and listening. We’ve all experienced that. We share something with someone, and they nod, “Uh-huh.” But we know the content we’ve shared hasn’t fully sunk in.

This is an example of hearing but not listening.

Listening involves understanding the content, feelings, and meaning of what someone is sharing. It means having a posture that seeks to understand the other person, their experience, and their thoughts or feelings about what they share.

So, what can we do to develop these skills? If you struggle to know where to begin on the journey of empathic listening, consider listening with the intent to notice these two things:

1. Content - Like any story, who are the characters involved? What are these people doing? Where is it taking place? Some of these things seem elementary, but we forget that listening to basic details is the start of good listening.

2. Feelings & Thoughts - What emotions are on the face of the person sharing? What thoughts are coming up for them as they share? Can you pinpoint a feeling they may be experiencing as they share or were feeling during the event?

When you have identified these two things, you have the power to show some excellent listening skills with a compassion statement. A compassion statement is one of the critical responses we can give to show someone we are actively listening to what they are saying.

A compassion statement is constructed of three parts:

1. A tentative statement

2. A feeling reflection

3. Mirrored content of what was shared

Here’s an example. Someone shares:

“I stood in line all day. I had driven 30 miles because they said they had what I needed in stock. But when I finally reached the front, they were out of what I needed.”

The compassion statement is constructed this way:

1. A tentative statement: “It sounds like…” We always allow the person sharing to be the expert. So, we never tell someone how they are feeling. We offer a reflection or comment with a tentative statement, allowing them to change our understanding or correct the feeling we present in response.

2. A feeling reflection: “...such a disappointing and frustrating…” We take what they share and imagine what they might be feeling.

3. Mirror the content of what they shared so they know you were listening: “...experience to go all that way only for them to be sold out.”

The interaction ends up sounding like this:

Them: “I stood in line all day. I had driven 30 miles because they said they had what I needed in stock. But when I finally reached the front, they were out of what I needed.”

You: “It sounds like such a disappointing and frustrating experience to go all that way only for them to be sold out.”

Them: “Yeah. It really was…”

And with that, you allow the person space to be heard, let them know that you were listening, and help them feel like you are with them in their experience.

The next powerful step to becoming an active listener is concrete questions.

This covers the basics: who, what, where, when, and how. You’ll notice I left out “why.” This is on purpose. When we are listening to someone, asking “why” tends to make the listening experience less about learning about the person and what they are sharing and more about finding reasons or solutions—two things that detract from showing someone you are listening intently to them.

Here are some examples of concrete questions that help someone to know you care:

“When did you first start feeling this way?”

“Where were you when that happened?”

“Who would be a safe person for you right now?”

The key to listening well is genuinely being curious about the person you are listening to and their feelings. When we practice empathy through compassion statements and active listening through concrete questions, we offer those around us a genuine gift: being loved, being known, and most of all, not being alone.