Bonus Distillation: How to Improve Your Active Listening Skills

This bonus distillation is a follow up to newsletter on having deeper conversations.

Let’s go over some quick tips on how to become a better listener, learn more from our conversations and work together to become better people.

1. Allow the person you’re in conversation with to finish sentences. Often times we get so excited to offer advice, tell our own story, or simply agree, we often forget to let the person who is speaking finish their thought. Next time you catch yourself doing this, stop, apologize and say please continue. Most of us do this subconsciously without ever realizing.

2. Summarize before continuing. Part of the way that we form long-term memories comes from the ability to find morals in our experiences. By helping to summarize the story of the speaker after we listen, we remove the burden from the speaker to analyze the meandering paths in their story and find the important conclusion.

3. Do you want validation or solutions? I, along with most other men that I know, are guilty of giving unsolicited advice. Especially to our partners. Sometimes all the other person needs, is to know that you're listening. Simply asking at the start of a conversation, if the person looking for affirmation or solutions, can fix this problem before it begins. This is one I've started trying to practice myself.

4. Put away your distractions. For the love of god, stop putting your phone on the table face down. By doing this you are silently signalling to the other person, that at any time, this object could become more important than you. Our brains have the ability to comprehend up to 400 words per minute. The average human talks at a speed of 125 to 160 words per minute. This means your brain is going to spend up to 70% of the time that you're listening searching for a distraction. This makes your phone an easy one.

5. Ask better questions. "How did you get into that?" or "Why do you do that?" or "Why is that important for you?" or "What is stopping you?" or "Who do I know that could help you?" Everyone knows that asking open-ended questions will help move conversation along better than closed-ended ones. But, not all of these questions are created equal. Focus — when it makes sense — on asking questions related to emotions. People are often scared of their own emotions while narrating stories. This is because they are worried the listener may have a different emotional reaction than their own. We receive a release of dopamine when simultaneously experiencing the same emotions as others. Directly prompting these emotion-based questions makes someone more likely to answer them.

6. A tip for disagreements. Next time you're in an argument with someone, you are only allowed to state your own position after first accurately summarizing the position of the other party. Here's the catch: they have to agree with your summarization. This will stop the occurrence of a strawman, a huge problem with most disagreements.