5 Listening Skills That Will Improve All of Your Relationships

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“The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.”

I want to use this quote, which has been attributed both to Richard Moss and Sir John Templeton, as a starting point for this post. Attention has become one of our scarcest resources, and when I think about all of the relationships we have in our lives — from the person we buy our coffee from, to our neighbors and coworkers, to the people we’ve chosen to spend our lives with — the quality of those relationships is influenced heavily by the quality of attention we’re able to give each other. And by attention, what I’m primarily talking about here is listening.

On this site we usually talk about teaching, for teachers, but this article really is for anyone, no matter who you are, because it’s information that can help you in just about any area of your life. 

As a student at Penn State, I took a three-credit course on counseling skills, a requirement for becoming a campus student counselor. I had no aspirations to become a professional therapist, but something about the program appealed to me, so I took the course and became a counselor for my last two years of college.

It was in that course that I learned a set of listening skills that I have used for over three decades since, specific techniques that will encourage any person you’re talking to to go a little more in-depth, share a little bit more, and most importantly, feel seen, heard, and understood. These skills can help you as a parent to listen more fully to your child, they can help you deepen your friendships, communicate better with your partner, be more present as a daughter or son, a sister or brother, a colleague, a caretaker, a service provider, and of course, as a teacher. They are also indispensable when it comes to solving interpersonal problems in a healthy, productive way and avoiding toxic conflicts. I use them on this podcast quite often. And while I occasionally see these skills come up in conversations, more often than not, I notice people not using them at times when they would be so helpful. 

Finally it dawned on me that I should just go ahead and share what I learned here. So that’s what I have to offer in this episode: five specific techniques that will help you become a more active listener. I encourage you to share these with other people in your life, including your students, because these skills are easy to understand and they truly would help just about anyone improve how they communicate with all the people in their lives.

The Skills

1. Backchanneling 

We’re starting with the easiest one: Backchanneling messages are the small, subtle things you do to show someone that you are engaged, that you’re processing and understanding what they’re saying, and that you want to hear more. (The term backchanneling was coined by a linguistics professor named Victor Yngve in 1970). Backchanneling messages can be verbal or non-verbal. Here are some examples: 

• Eye contact and nodding: It seems obvious, but it’s important to look at the person when they’re talking and make eye contact with them. Nodding occasionally can also signal that you’re following. Ideally, your eye contact will be natural — not where you’re staring them down intently, but where you look them in the eye while they’re talking and take breaks when the speaker takes their own breaks, like if they look away to think for a moment. 
• Small verbal prompts: Making sounds like mmhmm, uh-huh, yeah, wow, ok, and so on can go a long way toward showing the person you’re engaged and encouraging them to keep going. 
• Silence: Rather than jumping in to fill silence when the person has just said something significant, it can encourage them to keep going if you just stay silent while showing with your nonverbals (eye contact, interested facial expression) that you’re still focusing on them. 

For some people these come naturally, but if you’ve ever been told that you could use some work on your listening skills, this is a good place to start. If you don’t tend to do some of these things, there’s a small risk of seeming mechanical at first, where you’re maybe aggressively trying to maintain eye contact or saying “uh-huh” in every single pause. One way to make doing these things more natural is to not try too hard to do them in large quantities, but to put just a little more effort into them and focus most of your energy on really hearing what the person is saying.

2. Asking Open-Ended Questions

Asking questions is a great way to show your interest and refine your understanding. Ideally, these will be open-ended questions that require the person to give you some detail back, not closed-ended questions that only need a yes or no answer. 

Here are some examples of good open-ended questions: 

• Suppose someone is sharing a memory from their past. They say something like, “I spent last summer working on my uncle’s fishing boat.” You could respond with questions like, What was that like? and What kind of work did you do? As they begin to describe their experience, you could ask more clarifying questions like What kind of training did you have to get for that? And even though it’s technically a closed-ended question, something like Would you do it again if you had the chance? is provocative enough to prompt a longer, more thoughtful answer than a standard yes/no question.
• Or maybe a child mentions that they love their teacher. To learn more about this, you could ask, What do you love about her?, Can you describe her to me?, or What are some fun things you do in her class?
• Another scenario might be that a friend says they had a stressful day. Saying something like What’s going on? would tell them you have a minute to listen, and that would give them permission to blow off a little steam about their day.  
• Finally, asking questions can really help when someone comes to you with a complaint about you. I’ll use an example from my own life: About a year and a half ago, my daughter told me she didn’t really want me to come with her when she drove to her college campus for the start of the school year. She was a transfer student, so this wasn’t her first year, but it was a new school, and I’d just assumed I would be going with her to help her move in. I’m sure I didn’t handle this conversation exactly right, but I do remember noticing that my feelings were hurt and pushing through that to ask her for more information. Fearing her response, I said something like, “What makes you not want me there?” I think it’s important that I reined in my hurt feelings and asked this as gently and with as much curiosity as I could, as opposed to getting defensive. When she told me I was ‘kind of a nightmare’ on road trips, I was able to laugh — even though I didn’t love hearing it — and asked her to tell me more. She explained that I always got stressed about lack of sleep (accurate) and needing food all the time (also accurate), and she went on to share that she was nervous about things going well and didn’t need the extra stress that I would add. I was grateful to her for telling me and said I would leave it up to her. A few weeks later, she told me she’d changed her mind and wanted me there after all, and I promised to do whatever I could to proactively address those issues and not add extra stress to her day. I have absolutely NOT handled all criticisms from my kids this well, but on that day I was able to respond with listening skills instead of emotion, and it worked pretty nicely.

Use Caution with “Why” Questions: While these are not absolutely taboo, asking a person why they did something or why they feel a certain way can make them feel defensive, as if you’re challenging the validity of the feeling or action. Although some ‘why’ questions are necessary to get the information you need to understand, try to be careful not to make the person feel put on the spot.

3. Reflecting the Content

As the person is telling their story or explaining something, it can be really helpful to reflect the content back to them to make sure you understand what they’re saying. It’s important to do this in a neutral way, if possible; you’re seeking clarification and confirming your understanding as you go along, not judging what they’re saying. Some examples:

• A student shows up in your class on a day when you’re giving a test and says, “I better do well on this test. I have never studied so hard.” After you prompt them with a very small, “Oh yeah?”, they explain that they studied two hours every night for five nights in a row, using flashcards, rewriting their notes, and even making up a fake quiz for themselves. To reflect that content, you could say something really simple like, “Five nights!” or “You put in a lot of time!” Saying either or both of these things emphasizes the effort they put in and lets them know you understand the weight of this test.
• A friend who works in a restaurant mentions that she doesn’t like it. After you ask something like, “What don’t you like about it?”, she elaborates with stories about rude customers, but you notice she says nothing about her coworkers or the kind of work she has to do. You could reflect this back to her by saying, “It sounds like it’s really the customers that make it suck, yeah?” The reason this kind of reflection is so helpful is that it creates an opportunity for the person talking to add more information if your reflection is inaccurate or incomplete. It can also help the person more clearly define the problem for themselves. If what you said is true, it might help her realize that she doesn’t actually dislike the job, just some of the customers. On the other hand, if there are other problems apart from the customers, this is her chance to add those to her description and get a more complete understanding of why she doesn’t like her job, and this could ultimately lead her to some kind of solution.
• In that conversation with my daughter about the college trip, after she explained some of the behaviors of mine that were causing problems, I reflected that back by saying something like, “So the problem is that I have a lot of general travel stress, like being worried about falling asleep on the road or finding food when I’m hungry, and that adds to your anxiety, right?” When she said yes, I followed that up with another question, “Is there anything else?” She then added that I need bathroom breaks more than most people, which further painted the picture of me as “kind of a nightmare” to travel with. What was nice about this exchange for me was that there didn’t seem to be anything serious about my character that was a problem; she wasn’t saying I was hurtful or rude or irritating in any kind of a deep way. I just had these annoying habits that frankly, I could probably do a better job of managing on my own without making them everyone else’s problem.
• Sometimes you might even want to announce to the person that you’re going to paraphrase back to them what they’ve said. I do this a lot on this podcast when I’m interviewing someone and they have just explained a new idea to me. I’ll say something like, “Ok, let me tell you in my own words what I think you’re saying. Let me know if I have this right…” And then I’ll kind of give my own summary of what they’ve said.  

4. Reflecting Feelings

With this one, we let the person know that we’re listening not just for content, but for how they are feeling about the content, which is a really important part of making them feel heard and understood. You can reflect feelings with phrases like “You sound…” or “It sounds like you feel….” or “That must make you feel…”

Examples:

• Your neighbor approaches you one day to let you know that the party you had the night before kept them from going to sleep when they needed to. While there’s nothing you can do about something that happened in the past, you can help this conversation go as well as possible by reflecting and validating his feelings with something like, “I’m so sorry. That must have been really frustrating.” Just this acknowledgement of his feelings could go a long way toward turning down the temperature on his frustration and moving you toward a solution. (By the way, I have a whole other post on validation here.)
• A friend tells you he just got chosen for a role in a play that he tried out for. You could say something like, “You sound so excited! I know how much you wanted this part!”
• It can be really helpful to combine reflection of feeling with reflection of content. With the student who studied for five straight nights, you could say, “Five nights! You put in a lot of time; this must be pretty important to you.” Although there is no specific emotion labeled here, describing the test as important to the student still recognizes the emotional weight of it. If you wanted to add a more specific emotional word to your reflection, it would depend on the student’s behavior. If they seem anxious about the test, you could add that they seem anxious. On the other hand, they might actually appear more excited about showing what they’ve learned on the test; in that case, you might say something like, “Looks like you’re ready to take this on!”

Reflecting Instead of Minimizing

Here’s one more example that illustrates why reflecting feelings is so important, and a common habit that it replaces: When a person expresses an emotion, often a negative one, some people feel the need to rush in and comfort the person by saying something like “Don’t feel that way” or “You shouldn’t feel like that!” Although the intention is to provide solace, this often has the effect of minimizing or invalidating the person’s feelings. 

Sometimes this minimizing looks like trying to cheer someone up. We can see this in a scene from the movie Inside Out: The character Bing Bong has just watched a rocket he once played with the main character, Riley, get pushed off a cliff into the Memory Dump. Two other characters — Joy and Sadness — watch this play out and see Bing Bong’s devastation. 

First Joy attempts to cheer him up. “Hey, it’s gonna be ok,” she says. “We can fix this!” She then attempts a series of antics to cheer him up, making faces and tickling him, all to no avail. 

After Joy scampers away trying unsuccessfully to get Bing Bong to follow her, Sadness quietly approaches Bing Bong, sits beside him and says, “I’m sorry they took your rocket. They took something that you loved. It’s gone forever.”

Joy tries to cut her off: “Sadness! Don’t make him feel worse!”

But Sadness’s words actually get Bing Bong to talk about his feelings: “It’s all I had left of Riley.”

Showing how thoughtfully she’s listening, Sadness expands on this by saying: “I bet you and Riley had great adventures.”

This gets Bing Bong talking about one particular nice memory he has of one of those adventures, finishing by saying tearfully, “We were best friends.”

Sadness puts her hand on his and says, “Yeah. It’s sad.”

This prompts more tears from Bing Bong, and he hugs her, which seems to really distress Joy. She seems to think more sadness is a bad thing. But moments later, Bing Bong straightens up, wipes his tears, and says, “I’m okay now.”

This scene illustrates how powerful it can be to resist the urge to cheer someone up or minimize what might seem to be unpleasant feelings and just be present for the person who is talking. In this example we’re looking at deep sadness and grief, which are very heavy and prompt many of us to try to make a person feel better, but I think we also often try to do this if a person is feeling anxious or worried about something (“I’m going on a trip tomorrow and I’m scared of flying”), nervous (“My presentation is this afternoon and I’m nervous that I’ll mess up”), guilty, annoyed, stressed, overwhelmed, ashamed, jealous, or angry. It’s not comfortable to be in the presence of someone who is experiencing any of these emotions, and we often resist feeling them ourselves (or judge ourselves for feeling them), so if you get to a point where a person is able to start expressing those feelings, letting them feel what they feel can actually help the person process them better than if they tried to push the feelings away. Saying something as simple as “That’s really hard” can go such a long way toward allowing somebody to just relax into their feelings and let them feel them. And that’s how we support people.

5. Self-Disclosure

When a person is sharing a story or some feelings about something, it can deepen the conversation if you share something from your own experience that relates to it. This can accomplish a few different things:

• Building a stronger connection to the person. If you had a similar experience to the one they are describing, sharing that with them can form a bond between you. It can be something deep and significant — “I also really struggled my freshman year,” or it can be much lighter — “I just started growing tomatoes too!” It can also help them feel like they are not the only person who has ever been in their situation.
• Offering insight that may lead to a solution. Rather than offering direct advice, which is often not what people want, it tends to go over better if you just share your own experiences that may be helpful. For example, if the person is talking about how they’re trying to get more vegetables into their diet, instead of saying “You should just cook veggies in batches on the weekend,” you could say something like, “What worked for me was to cook a few batches of veggies on Sunday and portion them out into containers.” Even though you’re still kind of giving the same advice, by phrasing it in terms of what worked for you, it’s a lot less aggressive, and it just gives the person something to consider rather than a directive.

Self-disclosure can be tricky, because it’s easy to get carried away and shift the focus from the person to you. When that happens you’re no longer listening; you’ve just hijacked the conversation and made it about you. There are a lot of cases where switching to your story might make sense, and sometimes you just get excited and want to talk about your stuff. That’s understandable. Just be aware of what’s going on: If the point is to make the person feel listened to, or to get to know them better, or for them to feel supported in a time of need, whatever you add shouldn’t cause you to lose the thread of where they were originally going. Once they have come to a natural end with their stuff, that might be a good time to switch things up and talk about you, but make sure they actually got to share the thing they started telling you about.

Conversation Should Be a Two-Way Street

One important thing I want to note about all this is that these skills in their purest sense are most useful in an interview-type situation, where one person — such as a counselor, a journalist, a lawyer, a healthcare provider, a teacher, or a parent — is intentionally trying to get another person to talk in order to help them. These are not equal relationships where both people need to feel heard, so really only one person needs to use these skills. 

But real conversations should be a two-way street. In relationships that are more equal, like with friends, coworkers, romantic partners, and family members, there needs to be more room for natural back and forth. Sometimes one person is going to need more attention, and other times that switches; if you can both learn and practice skills like these five, you’ll develop a really wonderful reciprocity that allows you to keep growing together. 

I started this episode with a quote, so I’ll finish with another from Simon Sinek: “The art of listening is creating an environment in which the other person feels heard. I don’t want to know that you heard the words; I want to feel heard. I want to feel seen. I want to feel understood.” 

That feeling — that there is someone who cares enough about you to really listen, to witness your experience in this world — is one of the best gifts you can give someone. I hope I’ve shared something here that will help you give that to the people who matter the most to you. 

Learn more:

• Essential Interviewing: A Programmed Approach to Effective Communication, by David Evans, Margaret Hearn, Max Uhlemann, and Allen Ivey. This is the textbook I learned from in the counseling course. It was the third edition, published in 1989, and you can view the full text through the Internet Archives here.

• The Art of Listening, Simon Sinek (video)