Good active listening skills will help you win friends and become successful in any career.
Active listening is about showing you care, empathizing with the person you’re listening to, and building productive relationships with people.
Here’s how being a good listener can help you:
You need to be able to listen for less obvious cues such as tone, the speaker’s mood, or implied messages that are not always communicated directly.
All of these will influence how you decide to understand any given sentence. Being a good listener will help you do it accurately.
If you’re a language blogger or making your own way in the language learning world, you need to listen to your audience and identify the concerns and questions they have.
This will help you create blog posts and products that solve problems and bring success to your business.
How to develop your listening skills
Learn to take a genuine interest in other people. Ask questions more than you talk about yourself. Listen to understand, not just to reply.
Some people have a tendency to formulate counter-arguments in their head while the other person is speaking. This means that they’re not being fully present or focusing on the other person.
Good listeners listen carefully, try to find out the details of what the other person is saying, and ask ‘how’ and ‘why’ before jumping in with their own two cents.
Don’t make up your mind before you’ve properly heard what the other person has to say.
Practise having conversations whose sole purpose is for you to find out about somebody else’s point of view.
Treat it as an educational activity – you never know what you will learn!
Paraphrase what you’ve heard. Being able to do that is a useful skill that will show your conversation partner that you’ve heard what they said and that you’d like to find out more.
You can say, for example, ‘So what you’re saying is … – how does that make you feel?’ or ‘What I’m hearing from you is that … – can you tell me a bit more about that?’.
Try not to offer solutions unless it’s clear your conversation partner is looking for one.
This can be done even if you’re a language learner – when your partner asks you a difficult question, ask them what they think the answer should be.
They might be interested in giving you just that, and if they do, they’ll be more likely to remember the conversation and be ready to converse with you again in the future.
Use body language that helps you establish a connection with your conversation partner. Maintain eye contact, lean in to show you’re listening, nod to show understanding. Consider learning about the body language in the culture whose language you’re speaking or the culture your conversation partner is from.
