Active listening: 5 tips for better communication

What is active listening?

It was psychologist Carl Rogers, author of Active Listening alongside Richard E. Farson, who introduced the concept of active listening in the 1940s, referring to it as a “attempt to absorb everything the speaker is saying, verbally and non-verbally, without adding, removing or modifying the message.

For her part, Kathryn Robertson, in the work Active Listening More Than Just Paying Attention, considers that active listening consists of “offering a uninterrupted and free attention to the speaker”, while Susan Knights, in Reflection: Turning Experience Into Learning She defines it as “putting all of one's attention and awareness at the disposal of another person.”, listening with interest and appreciation without interrupting”.

As Antonio Estanqueiro points out in his book Principles of Interpersonal Communication: How to Treat People, active listening requires “availability, interest in the person, understanding of the message, critical thinking and prudence in advice”.

Therefore, it is about focusing all attention on what the other person is trying to convey to us with their voice, gestures or posture., stripping ourselves of any prejudice or elements that separate us from the original message. How can we achieve this level of listening?

How to improve active listening

Developing active listening is not an easy task, but it is possible and desirable. As Ian McWhinney points out in A Textbook of Family Medicine, «you can learn to be a better listener, but Learning it is not like learning a skill that is added to what we know. It is a shedding of things which interfere with listening, our worries, our fear, of how we can respond to what we hear.

In this regard, the founder of The Sound Agency consultancy, Julian Treasure, proposes that five tips to improve our active listening skills in the TED talk ‘5 ways to listen better’

• Emissions concentration. If we want to listen actively, our interlocutor must be our priority, avoiding external distractions such as looking at our mobile phone, interrupting them to make a comment to someone else, or checking documents while they are speaking. It is important to maintain eye contact to perceive as much information as possible and to focus not only on the words, as non-verbal body language contributes 93%% of the entire message, according to German psychologist Albert Mehrabian.
• Unprejudiced. The key to listening lies in not jumping to subjective or premature conclusions about what the other person is saying. It's about exercising objectivity, eliminating prejudices or assumptions, and analysing only the data we actually have. If we need more, we just need to ask.
• Take advantage of the silences. The absence of words also contains information that can be very valuable to us. Some say more for what they leave unsaid than for what they say, and our mission is to tolerate these silences and understand them. Furthermore, pauses also allow us to reflect on what is being said.
• Paraphrasing. Remaining silent while our interlocutor speaks can cause confusion for the speaker, who will wonder if the listener is actually paying attention to what they are saying. Therefore, Treasure advises introducing an ‘echo’ into the conversation: repeating the last words, nodding, interjecting, rephrasing the message… these are some techniques to contribute to effective listening.  

Avoid self-centredness. It's common to fall into the trap during a conversation of turning the conversation back to ourselves. For example, a colleague explains a problem they're having with their boss, and our reaction is to tell them how we would solve it or to bring up that time the same thing happened to us. Active listening, on the other hand, promotes the opposite; that is, continuing to ask them about themselves: What do you plan to do? How do you feel? Do you think there will be negative consequences?...