Why do we like being with someone who listens to us? Because feeling heard makes us feel valued, respected, and understood. Be it our friends, family, people at work or someone we met at a party, a good listener always validates the conversation. And it doesn’t take much to become a better listener. Giving a break to a few bad habits is a good place to start.
And because every healthy relationship, whether personal or professional, is as much about listening as getting the space to share your thoughts, active listening becomes an indispensable life skill.
5 Ways To Become A Better Listener
1. Focus on the right thing
Being a good listener works both ways. It makes the other person feel validated, but it also helps us understand them better and so we get to know how to best keep that connection thriving. And to listen effectively, the focus needs to be primarily on the other person, it’s essentially about giving them space to explore their thoughts.
What a good listener essentially does is let the other person find their way through the layers of their thoughts, ideas, emotions, & facts, nudging the conversation back on track when they start branching off, encouraging them to look for a pattern, a meaning. Basically, make sense of things.
That’s why talking to someone who listens feels so good and brings so much clarity to what was dominating our thoughts..
2. A good listener helps stay on track
When someone is telling us something, they’re looking for cues from us to understand our level of interest in the conversation. Research shows that people feel more understood when their & the listener’s gestures match.
So, it’s a good idea to naturally match their level of eye contact, hand movements, and posture. And give the other person our full attention without getting distracted by our phone or what’s happening around. Because think how you would feel talking to someone who is fidgeting, looking at you but you know their thoughts are somewhere else.
It’s important to let the person finish without waiting for our turn. It’s easy to get caught up in what we think about the situation and to keep repeating the response in our head to remember better when it’s our chance to speak. But doing so, our focus shifts to our own thoughts we end up missing a lot of the conversation.
3. Remember your why to become a better listener
Our brain has a default setting called the DMN or the default mental network which fills the time when we aren’t focusing on anything. And it fills this space with thoughts about the past, future, and lots of other things.
So, it’s totally normal to start thinking about our pending tasks, what’s for dinner, or what happened at the party yesterday because we lose focus when someone has been talking for a while.
And so, the key to become a better listener is to remember the reason why we are in this conversation in the first place, how does it matter to us, and why is it even important.
Because when we know something has value in our life, it makes us more likely to stay focused on that thing.
Even when talking to someone we meet for the first time, if we can find the importance of that connection in our life, may be knowing them would make our time there more enjoyable, or they look like an interesting person to know, anything that convinces us of the value of that connection will help us stay focused on the conversation.
And when we give people our full attention, we remember their name, may be even something special about them. And they like us better because we all do like that person who remembers our name or asks about something we talked about last time because when someone remembers things about us, it shows they care and we are important to them.
That’s one of the simplest & most effective ways to connect better with people.
I have shared 2 more very effective practical tips in the video above. Go check it out.
