Active Listening: Why Is It Important and How to Improve It

Good communication, whether you work with a team or independently, is the key to professional success. It not only helps you advance your career but also makes you a more thoughtful and mature person. And at the heart of effective communication, lies active listening.

You might have heard of the term active listening while looking at resume samples online, interview tips or career development advice. But what exactly is active listening? How do you become a better listener? How to actively listen to others? Keep on reading to find out the answers to these questions.

Active listening, by definition, is a soft skill that allows you to effectively gain information from a conversation and respond to the information in a thoughtful manner. You can thus identify and solve a problem at work or in daily life. Active listening is not an easy skill to master as it involves a wide range of different skills, which we will explore later in this article, and requires you to make a conscious effort.

Active listening is important to use because it helps us in many ways other than listening to understand and gain critical information.

1. Build trust

Trust is the foundation of any relationship. Whether you want to develop rapport with a coworker, supervisor, subordinate, or client, you want them to be able to trust you (and vice versa). One of the easiest ways to earn others’ trust is to show that you care about them, which you can easily do with active listening skills. If you listen to people attentively, you will know their problems and be able to show that you understand and care about them. 

2. Show empathy

To show empathy, you first need to understand what other people are feeling or going through. It is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve when you are not listening attentively. You can better understand others’ emotions when you listen actively to them and then think of ways to show their feelings and emotions are acknowledged.

3. Show respect

A major part of being respectful to others is to take others seriously. You can show people that they are taken into consideration without correctly receiving the message they want to get across. This is where active listening comes into play. The person you are talking to will know that you respect them when you show that you understand their concerns.

4. Identify issues

More than often, people talk to others in hope of getting help to solve a problem. To solve a problem, you will have to understand the problem properly. Active listening helps you to understand something more thoroughly and thus find out where the problem lies.

5. Expand your knowledge

Last but not least, active listening helps you to learn more effectively. Learning is a process of internalizing information. Listening is one of the two ways that you can learn information.

Active listening may sound simple, as listening comes so naturally to us, but it actually involves many different useful and equally important soft skills.

1. Paying Attention

The first step towards active listening and effective communication is to pay attention to what other people are saying. It sounds easy but it is not. Our attention spans can be rather limited, especially when we are tasked to do something we are not particularly enthusiastic about.

2. Withholding Judgment

This might be the hardest part of active listening. We can all agree that listening is important in communication, but we all want our voices heard and our opinions noted. That’s why active listening is so difficult because if everyone wants to talk, who is listening? So, one of the core skills of active listening is to stop yourself from talking or interrupting people and telling them what you think. 

Being interrupted is bad enough; if you interrupt others just to let them know you disagree with them or tell them you think they are wrong, the conversation is not going to end well. Giving constructive feedback is one thing. Being judgmental is another. To encourage others to talk, which will, in turn, help you learn more, don’t pass judgment.

3. Reflecting

Another important aspect of active listening is reflection. Go over what was said. After you receive information from others, spend some time digesting the information. Ask yourself if you completely understand what was said. To make sure you properly understand the information given to you, think about who, what, where, when, why and how that is involved in the conversation.

Thinking of what you have been informed carefully can facilitate effective communication.

4. Clarifying

Language is a funny thing. People don’t always mean the same thing when they use the same term or phrase. There are also multiple ways to interpret a sentence. So it’s important to make sure that you are not confused about what you’ve just been told and the words the other person used.

If you feel uncertain about something, bring it up in the conversation. You can do so by saying things like “I didn’t quite follow you” or “are you saying that…”. To engage in active listening better, you can ask the person you’re talking to with questions such as “can you tell me more about…” and “can you explain that in detail…”.

5. Summarizing

Summarizing serves a similar purpose as clarifying, which is a part of the active listening process. They are both important active listening tools that help you get rid of misunderstandings. While clarifying focuses more on dissolving confusion, the act of summarizing brings your attention to the way you interpret their words is the same as the way they intend their message to be understood. Summarizing helps make sure you and the person you are talking to are on the same page. 

Quickly recap your conversation and ask the other person to confirm if the main points you got are indeed what they wanted you to focus on. You can start with sentences such as “Let me summarize…” and “To check my understanding, let me recap what you said…”. To facilitate effective communication, you need to let the person you’re talking with know that you’ve been listening to them attentively and understand their point of view.

Active listening is for sure an important skill to have in and out of the workplace. But to improve active listening skills might not be so easy. Like many other soft skills, it can’t be easily measured and you might thus not know if you’re making progress with your active listening skills. However, here we have gathered some tips to help you become a better communicator and listen more attentively.

Showing non-verbal cues

Our brains are not wired to focus on something for long. To help you concentrate on the conservation, you can try to actively engage yourself in it. Show some cues to remind yourself that you need to actively pay attention and let the other person know you are listening attentively.

Taking notes

Another tip for better active listening is to take notes. Write down things you consider important so you 1) don’t forget about them and 2) can more effectively summarize the main points later. 

Other than these two, writing down things also helps keep your mind from wandering too far from the conversation. If you are having a face-to-face conversation, the other person would know you take what they say seriously and feel respected when they see that you care about it enough to make an effort to, albeit a small one, take out a pen and paper. Taking notes can improve your active listening skills on so many levels.

Paraphrasing and summarizing

As we discussed earlier, summarizing is a good tool to make sure that your understanding matches the speaker’s and understanding is at the heart of active listening. So when you are having an important conversation with someone else, try to summarize the information you’ve been given or use different words to repeat it. This involves identifying the key points of a message. Suppose your manager wants you to fix a system issue, focus on what problem the issue is causing and what your manager would like the system to do. 

Getting into the habit of recapping the main points at the end of an exchange can also help remind you that you need to pay attention and practice active listening. To be able to do that, you will have to force yourself to focus on the content.

Asking questions

Asking questions, whether they are open-ended questions or specific questions, is another good way to improve your active listening skills. These questions encourage the speaker to share more information with you. You will then be able to gather more information and better prepare for your task. However, don’t simply ask questions that can be answered with a “yes” or “no”. They are less effective in helping you have a thorough understanding of a situation.

If you want to succeed at work, you need to master active listening as it ensures effective communication. It helps you build better relationships, allows you to show empathy and respect, and, most importantly, makes you better informed and solve problems effectively.

To listen attentively and effectively, follow the following tips:

1. Showing non-verbal cues
2. Taking notes
3. Paraphrasing and summarizing
4. Asking questions

--- Originally written by Yin-Hsuan Liang ---