How Active Listening Can Improve Your Life

Active listening is a way of conducting a conversation when the one who uses it shows to the other that he hears him and understands him. Thanks to it, trusting or partnership relations are built, conflicts are settled, tension is relieved and a warm, cozy, sincere atmosphere is created.

Types:

This method was invented by Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, but the term itself was introduced into our culture by Julia Gippenreiter, one of the most famous Russian psychologists. She believed that everyone simply had to know him, as a businessman, politician, and an ordinary parent, in order to establish deep contact with the child.

Listening can be:

• Active (reflexive) - the process of finding out the meaning of what was said in order to understand the interlocutor.
• Passive (non-reflexive) - the ability to remain silent, giving space to another to speak out or free himself from accumulated emotions. It lies in the fact that using this method, a person does not interrupt, and occasionally can only insert a couple of words, such as: “Yes, yes”, “I understand” ...
• Empathic - understanding the emotional state of the interlocutor, moreover, sharing the feelings that he experiences.

How effective?

• Helps to raise the other person's self-esteem by showing that what he says is important to us, and we respect his opinion, even if we do not agree with him;
• Helps to identify problems and find ways to solve them;
• Resolves conflict situations;
• Builds relationships with the child and shows him by example how to build relationships with people and how to treat them;
• Structures complex emotional experiences;
• Gives information about what the other feels and what is happening to him, not through conjecture and conjecture, but through direct questions and paraphrasing;

• Provides space for independent search for solutions to the problem, acceptance of responsibility;
• Helps to notice the slightest nuances when there is a discrepancy in words or lies.

Principles:

Non-judgmental judgments. That is, we do not evaluate what the interlocutor tells us, giving him the right to be different, even if we do not agree with something.

A respectful and healthy relationship is when two different people with different views on life and different experiences find ways to be together without destroying, and changing each other in the process.

Therefore, refrain from evaluating, as well as from convincing him or entering into an argument. Using this principle in your life, you will learn to respect yourself and others, build deep and close relationships, because it is the ability to recognize the right or opinion of another that is a clear sign of the manifestation of a person, a mature person.

Positivity. This principle encourages you to remain calm and benevolent. Do not use categorical statements or those that can offend or hurt.

Sincerity and honesty. If you remember, in an article about non-verbal communication, I already said that up to 95% of information is read at the subconscious level, and no matter what you say and what arguments you give, if you are lying, your body will definitely signal this. Therefore, it is important to really want to understand the other person. It happens that you yourself are not in the resource, you are tired and you feel that you have no strength at all, then just say so.

Do not torture yourself and the other, in extreme cases, the conversation can be postponed. Otherwise, it is quite natural if you begin to feel the irritation that occurs when the needs are frustrated. That is, when they are not satisfied. You can read more about them in the article on Maslow's pyramid needs .

Tricks:

1. Pause.

This is exactly the space I was talking about at the beginning of the article. By holding a pause, you give yourself and him the opportunity to realize something, remember, come up with something. Thus, you are a little removed from the influence of emotions on your thoughts and actions, and you become able to see the current situation from a different angle. The ability to pause works wonders. And it is the most complex and simple at the same time.

Not everyone is able to withstand a pause because then they will have to face their thoughts and emotions, from which they had previously escaped with the help of chattering, at a fast pace.

2. Refinement.

These are questions with the help of which it becomes possible to clarify what exactly the interlocutor had in mind. Sometimes it is an emphasis on the inaccuracies of the story, which are also important to clarify. Unfortunately, it often happens that we think for another, believing that everything is obvious and understandable. For example, after all, even such a familiar concept as love is deciphered for each person in different ways. And if a girl declares that a man no longer loves her, you should not immediately support the idea of ​​how bad he is. It’s just with the help of a clarification that you can find out that he cares about her, only in the last week he came home a couple of times and went to bed. And not because of the lack of love, but because the working days have become too intense.

3. Paraphrasing.

This technique allows the listener to get feedback from you and make sure that you understand it, as well as look at the situation a little differently, emotionally moving away from it. In addition, it gives food for thought about how I express myself and look in the eyes of people, how understandable I am for them. You should simply repeat what he said, only briefly and in slightly different words, emphasize the main thing and highlight the meaning that they were trying to convey to you.

4. Development of thought.

Here we try to continue the train of thought if we are convinced that we correctly understood what they wanted to convey to us. You can start with this phrase: "Do you want to say that ...".

5. Feedback.

That is, our impression of the story and the narrator himself, just remember the principle without value judgment. You should not advise anything here, just tell me about your feelings that arose while you were listening, what thoughts visited you, you can cite your own experience as an example if you were in a similar situation.

6. Summary.

That is, summing up the conversation because it cannot last forever. For example: “To sum up what you said, then you ...”, “So, you suggest ...”

Recommendations:

When using the above techniques during communication, be sure to look into the eyes of the interlocutor. This is the very first thing you should do - make eye contact. Smile and nod your head when appropriate. You can read about eye reading in a previously published article.

Ask open-ended questions so that the answers are detailed. And make sure they don't look like an interrogation, remember to pause and insert feedback between answers if you have something to say.

Reread the article on non-verbal communication to explore open postures, gestures, and facial expressions.

Encourage his speech with the help of such words: “Aha”, “I understand”, “yes-yes” ... A method such as “echo” also helps, that is, you should repeat the last or key word after him. He forces the narrator to give a full answer, more understandable and clear and also shows that you are attentive to his words.

Show empathy, or at least state the supposed feelings that he seemed to be experiencing: “I think you are excited about something”, “I am sad to hear this”, “I empathize with you at the moment” ... For this, it is important to be able to put yourself in the place of the narrator, as if figuratively “join” him, and be able to notice changes in your internal state in order to track the feelings that arise.

Intonation also plays an important role. Conduct an experiment and select 20 pronunciations for the question "how are you?". And then you will notice the difference and understand that its meaning changes completely, you just need to slightly change the intonation.

Always listen to the end, not everyone knows how to briefly formulate their thoughts, and sometimes the most important thing is hidden at the end of the speech.

Exercises:

"I speak and I listen." It will help you understand that in order to understand and have a constructive dialogue, you need to be able to pause. To do this, choose a partner for yourself, and for a couple of minutes at the same time tell something to each other, then try to retell what you heard.

Mimic. Remember some situation and tell your partner only with the help of facial expressions and gestures, without using words at all. Then let him tell you what feelings he experienced and assumptions about the story itself. Then switch places. This exercise will teach you to be more attentive, to "read" the emotions and the essence of the story with the help of non-verbal.

"Retelling". Let the partner tell about himself for 5 minutes, for example, what he usually gets angry at and how he shows it, or about his desires, dreams, from which he feels joy ... After the time has passed, retell what you understood. This will help develop the skill of determining the essence of what was said, the meaning, and also develops the ability not only to listen, but to hear.

Conclusion.

Practice, use all kinds of listening, and then you will see how your relationships in the family, with colleagues and friends change for the better, become warmer, closer.