essay on being a good listener

Essay on Be a Good Listener

Students are often asked to write an essay on Be a Good Listener in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Be a Good Listener

Understanding good listening.

Good listening is more than just hearing. It’s about understanding and showing respect for the speaker. It involves paying full attention, not interrupting, and responding appropriately.

Benefits of Good Listening

Good listening helps in learning, building relationships, and solving problems. It makes you more understanding and compassionate. It also improves your communication skills.

How to Be a Good Listener

To be a good listener, you need to focus on the speaker, avoid distractions, and show empathy. Don’t rush to respond. Instead, take time to understand what’s being said. Remember, patience is key.

Good listening is a skill that everyone should learn. It not only makes us better communicators but also better human beings.

250 Words Essay on Be a Good Listener

The art of listening, the importance of being a good listener.

Being a good listener fosters meaningful relationships, promotes understanding, and encourages the sharing of ideas. It is a cornerstone of effective communication, and its importance extends beyond personal relationships to academic and professional settings.

Becoming a good listener involves several key attributes. Firstly, it requires attention. This means not only hearing the words spoken but also understanding the underlying emotions and ideas. It involves observing non-verbal cues such as body language and tone of voice.

Secondly, it necessitates patience. It is about allowing the speaker to express their thoughts without interruption, even if it takes them a while to articulate their ideas.

Thirdly, empathy is pivotal. It involves acknowledging the speaker’s feelings and perspectives, even if they differ from your own.

Benefits of Being a Good Listener

Being a good listener has numerous benefits. It enhances learning, fosters empathy, and promotes trust. It can lead to more profound insights and understanding, not only of others but also of oneself.

500 Words Essay on Be a Good Listener

Introduction.

Listening is an essential part of communication, often overlooked in favor of its more expressive counterpart, speaking. However, the art of being a good listener is a powerful tool in any interpersonal relationship, be it professional or personal. It fosters understanding, empathy, and connection, and is a skill that can be honed with conscious effort.

The Importance of Good Listening

Good listening goes beyond merely hearing the words spoken to us. It involves understanding the speaker’s perspective, emotions, and intentions. It is the cornerstone of effective communication, enabling us to respond appropriately and build stronger relationships. In a world increasingly dominated by digital communication, the importance of good listening cannot be overstated. It is the key to bridging gaps in understanding and fostering genuine human connections.

Characteristics of a Good Listener

The role of empathy in listening.

Empathy plays a crucial role in effective listening. By putting ourselves in the speaker’s shoes, we can better understand their feelings and perspectives. Empathetic listening can foster deeper connections, as it demonstrates respect and validation for the speaker’s experiences. It also encourages open and honest communication, as the speaker feels safe and understood.

The benefits of being a good listener are manifold. In a professional setting, it can lead to improved teamwork, problem-solving, and decision-making, as everyone’s ideas are heard and understood. On a personal level, it can strengthen relationships, as it fosters mutual respect and understanding. Moreover, good listening skills can enhance our learning and growth, as we open ourselves up to new perspectives and ideas.

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Effective Listening Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Importance of listening, barriers to effective listening, strategies for effective listening, reference list.

Listening is an important element in the process of communication. Communication is basically about sending and receiving information. The most basic thing in communicating is ensuring the right message is received exactly as intended.

Both sender and receiver have to take proactive measures to ensure they send and receive the right messages. People use different media to communicate.

However, whether on the telephone or any other media, I am personally convinced that listening is necessary for any two people to understand each other.

This is a reflective paper in which I am going to share views on the importance of listening in communication, barriers to listening, and strategies of perfecting listening skills.

Many mistakes happen in individual’s lives just because they did not listen effectively. When it comes to business, getting exactly what the client, customer or supervisor is saying is very poignant. It is only through listening and getting the information right that one can respond appropriately.

Relationships are built on reciprocity in communication. A true interpersonal relationship is one in which people react and respond to each other appropriately.

Therefore, listening is important in personal communication, for success at work and in building interpersonal relationships (Battell, 2006, p. 2).

Language use could be very intriguing if one took the time to think about words and their usage. I realize that due to equivocal qualities of given words; one can say one thing and mean completely a different thing.

Unless the context of words is well understood, words can seriously affect communication. Apart from equivocal words, there are words with similar sounds, e.g., cap and cab. I had a cousin who had many fights with his dad due to mishearing the words used.

Uncle would send him for the gardener, and my cousin would come back with a kitten. The issue was not with his ears; my cousin was just hyperactive and never listened enough.

Due to not listening keenly, he would often respond wrongly, and people around him interpreted it for mischief. However, he was a simple obedient boy who just had too many things going at every one given time.

Good interpersonal relationships are built on effective listening to each other. Sometimes, a relationship can go on for years simply because one of the parties is a good listener. The moment he or she also chooses to give up on listening, such relationships end.

I once had a very close friend. We did many things together and enjoyed each other’s company. We never argued much, but on the few occasions we would disagree, she would say to me “the only problem is that you never listen.”

To this, I would retort with more angry words to the effect that I listen but cannot entertain crap in the name of listening. This friendship died years back but going through literature on listening; I have learned a lot that would have made my time with the friend even more awesome.

I realize that most arguments between us resulted from lack of effective listening on my part. My friend was somehow submissive, and I now notice that the relationship worked only as long as she was submissive and took in all my crap.

I never listened to her seriously because whenever she would raise a concern, I always had a hand-offish response ready. Therefore, we were in a friendship but, in essence, I did not relate to her. I simply never gave a chance to her perspective.

I was always the one with plans, and she only followed and supported me. This kind of arrangement fed my ego and made me feel like the controller of sorts.

Having learned from the described cases, I realize how critical listening is in families, marriages and at the workplace. Listening to each other at the workplace is crucial for several reasons. The people we meet at the workplace come from very different backgrounds.

Their way of self-expression or generally how they speak may be somehow different from what we are used to. Organizations are about customer delight to make profits.

Customer delight is built on internal synergy in the organization. Internal synergy is only achieved through good communication among employees. Successful companies know how to rally their employees into powerful teams that deliver on organizational objectives.

At the heart of any effort at rallying people is persuasion. Persuasion requires recognition of specific needs that information should address. For managers to understand employees under them, they have to learn to listen (Adair, 2009, p. 158).

Some employees may be good at technical work but very poor when it comes to self-expression; only patient listening can help such employees to tell exactly what they want or need.

Through active listening to employees, managers can create programs that optimize the usage of human resource in the organization.

Apart from internal synergy, successful organizations are those that manage to form lasting relations with customers, suppliers and other partners (Adair, 2009, p. 211). Once again, to connect with a customer, one has to identify the real need of the customer.

I once witnessed a very amusing case in a certain customer care center. I entered the care center, and one customer care agent was in a heated engagement with an enraged customer. Realizing, he was not going to find the help he needed; the customer made to leave.

But then some other customer agent motioned to the customer to go to his desk. After a few minutes, I overheard the customer saying “that is all that I wanted,” and he was smiling. I also smiled knowing too well what had happened.

In my opinion, the first customer care agent did not listen to the customer and did not identify where the problem was. If the customer had gone with the unresolved problem, most likely he would have switched product providers or badmouthed the company.

There are two major categories of barriers to effective listening, i.e., an individual’s disposition and distractions in the external environment (Brown, 2010). While writing about effective listening, I thought seriously about my interaction with friends.

I notice that some of my friends are better listeners than others. I also notice that in some instances I have been a better listener than others. Thinking about it all, I tend to think that personal insecurities are the biggest inhibitor to effective listening.

In most cases, we argue with our friends because we want to prove that our point of view is right (Brown, 2010). On their part, they also argue vehemently, because they want to prove that their point of view is right.

On close inspection, it is clear that arguments are often not about the rightness of view per se but something to do with me as a person is right.

Given an individual’s we are often too keen on being right, we focus on what we are saying to others and forget completely about what others are saying to us.

It is very interesting to be a bystander in a heated debate. In often cases, the heat is not about the rightness of views or ideas but the people themselves; they desire to appear superior or more right in themselves.

The second barrier to effective listening is distractions. In the world of today, people want to do a hundred things at the same time.

They are sharing serious issues with a friend while at the same time they are fully concentrated on a computer game or busy chatting on facebook or some other social network. Multitasking is a good skill, but it has to be managed properly.

The environment matters a lot when it comes to listening. If two people have to talk seriously, a noisy environment will bar proper communication.

There are two major barriers to effective listening i.e. a person’s disposition and distractions in the external environment; therefore, strategies employed for effective listening have to address both.

Secondly, although it is often assumed that only the receiver should listen, effective listening should be mutual between sender and receiver.

People’s attitude or disposition matters a lot when it comes to how they interact with others (Battell, 2006, p. 3). As indicated, personal insecurities and desire to win arguments often make individuals focus on what they are saying and forget what the other party is saying.

In actual sense, even before someone completes explaining what he or she is saying, the other will already be busy formulating his or her next line of attack. In arguments with friends, I have often found myself very frustrated.

And in some other cases, after a real heated argument, I find myself laughing when it is all over. Post-argument analysis often reveals that each of us had his or her position. We both tried to help each other see a point and how right it is.

Along the way, there was excruciating evidence showing that either all positions are right or one is more right than the other, but we all hold our ground because of deep-seated desire to be the right one; to win.

From the communication literature, I have read, it is clear that interpersonal interactions should not be about winning and losing. Rather, they are opportunities for mutual improvement through learning from one another.

Even in situations when one is outrightly wrong, and the other is outrightly right, the one with the right perspective should be able to learn from the wrongness of the other (Cohen, 2002, p. 96).

Communication should be about persuading others while at the same time giving them a chance to persuade you. Therefore, the right disposition should be assertiveness and humility as opposed to aggressiveness or boisterousness.

This approach to communication is well illustrated in the process of bargaining in business. There are people who approach negotiating or bargaining in business as aggressors while others approach the process as consensus seekers (Cohen, 2002, p. 84).

The two approaches merit in given situations. However, cohesive seeking negotiations or bargaining helps build more long term relationships.

A cohesive approach means that both parties state their terms and they amicably, on a win-win basis, seek the position that is mutually satisfying. Whenever any party adopts a defensive position, the chances of listening to each other become compromised.

Effective listening requires that the parties be interested in what the other is saying. When something is interesting, e.g., when an interesting soap opera is on air, we normally switch off everything else to concentrate.

Therefore, if we are truly interested in what others have to say to us, we have to switch off everything else and focus. By doing this, we are more likely to hear exactly what they have to say to us and even note how they say it. Concentration is a very important element in listening.

The purpose of listening is to get what the other means; as he or she says it. This can only be achieved through proper preparation to concentrate and listen.

Preparation to listen to starts with choosing the right place and time. This means that for every kind of communication, parties have to know the right where and when.

Choosing to tell someone something very important in a crowded place and expecting the other person to listen is counter-productive. The place has to warranty the possibility of capturing the full attention of the receiver.

The listener has also to know where there are too many distractions and either move away or choose another time when he or she can listen without interference.

When in an interaction, good listening requires that we digest the information from others. Digesting or evaluating takes time; thus one needs to refrain from quick responses or gut reactions to whatsoever others say (Wilson, 1998, p. 17).

However, as we listen and digest, it is advised that we show how alert we are; none verbally. One classic way that people use to show that they are listening is to nod their head or maintain eye contact.

The easiest way to know someone is not listening is by noting nonverbal clues, e.g., playing with things, shifting in the chair uncomfortably or not maintaining eye contact (Wilson, 1998, p. 17).

Secondly, a speaker can know when one is not listening from how fast he or she interjects or cuts others off. Interrupting what others are saying is a sure way of telling them that what they are saying is not of interest.

If it is very necessary that one has to interject, he or she has to explain why he or she is interrupting. Listening requires that once in a while we interrupt the speaker for clarification, to note something, to offer some additional information or to beg for more details (Wilson, 1998, p. 32).

One way of interjecting politely is by first illustrating that what the speaker has just said is clear. Therefore, paraphrasing helps the other to know that you are keenly following everything.

A polite question is also an acceptable way of interrupting a speaker. Great conservationists are good at asking questions. I tried this trick on my friends, and it works just fine.

When I do not have much to say to friends, I realized, the best way to having a great conversation is by asking them about issues that are of real interest.

In interpersonal interactions, individuals are always eager to get their views and arguments out; they seek to be understood. What many of us do not realize is that others can only understand us if we are also keen on understanding them.

To understand others, i.e., what they mean to say, we have to listen to them. Listening is an art that is developed with practice. The first step to listening is appreciating that what others are saying to us is of value.

Showing interest or being interested and encouraging others to say what they want to say is critical to understanding them.

From my observations, I realize that when we show interest and understanding to others, they are more likely to reciprocate by also showing interest or trying to understand what we say to them. Therefore, in whatsoever context, listening is pivotal for any meaningful interpersonal interaction.

Adair, J. (2009). Effective Communication: The Most Important Management Skill of All Sydney: Pan Macmillan.

Battell, C. (2006). Effective Listening . Chicago: ASTD Press.

Brown, J. (2010). Ten Obstacles to Empathic Communication . Center for Non-Violent Communication. Web.

Cohen, S. (2002). Negotiating Skills for Managers. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional.

Wilson, D. (1998). Listening Skills. Illinois: Mark Twain Media Publishing Inc.

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• Relationships

16 Ways to Become a Better Listener

Attentiveness, communication competence, and more..

Updated January 29, 2024 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

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• Listening is a vital life skill, helping to build relationships in ways that you might not even realize.
• A new paper shows the essential ingredients that make up the 16 qualities of good listeners.
• Knowing what qualities make for a good listener can help you foster better and more fulfilling relationships.

The fact that communication is a two-way street is something that everyone accepts, but not everyone keeps in mind.

Perhaps you’ve become frustrated with one of your friends, who never seems able to stay on track in the conversation. You can tell that their mind wanders almost as soon as you start talking. They ask you a question that literally would involve a restatement of what you’ve just said. Even in a conversation as mundane as deciding how to get to someone’s house, you find yourself repeating the same information at least twice.

Communication researchers have long emphasized the importance of good listening. Within counseling and psychotherapy , teaching the ability to listen is a mainstay of all training programs. Various methods exist to train students to become expert listeners, as it’s known that without this skill, it’s almost impossible to help someone in need.

Apart from the professional need to be good at listening, the ability not just to “hear” but comprehend what someone else is saying is fundamental to good relationships. Your friend may be your friend no matter what, but wouldn’t it be great if they could engage with you in a way that shows they put value in the words that come out of your mouth?

The Science of Listening

According to the University of Mississippi’s Graham Bodie (2023), in a contribution to an entire journal on “Listening and Responsiveness,” “competent listening is defined as attending to all available information in a way that best preserves the content of a message (what was said) and its relational intent (what was meant)” (p. 2). Several “affective precursors” (mood-related) factors can help improve the ability to listen well, including mindfulness , or conversational sensitivity.

In other words, you need to be able to clear your mind of your own emotions and instead zero in on what someone is actually saying. This means being “in the moment,” as the expression goes, and not letting your thoughts stray.

There is also a cognitive component to good listening, where you pay attention to facts and details. To do this, you need to set your own emotions aside.

Putting these two components of listening into concrete terms means that you want to be sensitive to the conversation as a relational tool, and also to the details you need to be able to offer a response. However, as informed by previous research, Bodie argues additionally that if you’re going to be a “high quality” listener, it helps to express a positive intention toward the other person. Feeling and understanding the other person can help them feel better about themselves, making this an important relationship-building technique.

Unpacking the 16 Behaviors of Good Listening

Research in the field of communication science goes beyond setting up these desired features of good listening to identifying the specific behaviors that constitute good listening. Use these 16 to see how you measure up.

Number one on the list is attentiveness . Just pay attention to what is unfolding in a conversation, a behavior that you can put into action with such cues as making eye contact, paraphrasing what someone said, and asking clarifying questions. Now the other person knows you’re engaged and not letting your mind drift off to someplace you’d rather be at the moment.

Next, you can move into what Bodie calls “communication competence,” which is what enhances good listening to improve relationships even further. These behaviors include being:

2. Expressive

3. Persuasive

4. Open and direct

5. Assertive

6. Intelligent

7. Organized

8. Unbiased

Finally, the seemingly elusive quality of being “ socially skilled ” includes a set of these 8 attributes, making up the total now of 16:

9. Friendly

10. Other-oriented

11. Helpful

12. Outgoing

13. Enjoy new people

14. Accepting

15. High in self-esteem

16. Not nervous

You might recognize some of these qualities as similar to personality traits, specifically such Five Factor attributes as being low in neuroticism and high in extraversion , agreeableness , and openness to new experiences. Some people are naturally socially skilled if they have these qualities. If you’re not, knowing how important they are to good communication could provide you with a set of qualities you can try to develop.

Putting Good Listening in the Context of Relationships

There are many situations in which good listening can serve to help you fulfill your life goals given, as Bodie notes, that “listening is an essential life skill” (p. 3). Whatever the situation, though, communication researchers have found that listeners construct shared realities with their conversational partners. The minute you open your mouth, you’ve started to create that reality.

A friendly “Hi!” can make all the difference in the world, but a grumpy “Oh, you?” can lead to the opposite outcome. Words themselves create relationships in the moment.

When you’re a good listener, you use that context to your advantage. In active listening, you move the narrative along in a way that allows the other person to elaborate on their thoughts and feelings, helping them gain greater insight and self-awareness. The insights you express, based on what the other person communicated to you, can create a positive relationship bubble in which the two of you feel intimately connected.

This set of developments certainly needn’t apply to all of your interactions. If you’re waiting in a long line at checkout and the person in front of you comments on your shared predicament, it doesn’t mean you need to start building an intense connection. However, at least acknowledging the other person’s expression of the reality you’re both in can create, for a moment, a sense of shared understanding.

To sum up , listening is indeed an essential skill to success in life, and it is also one you can develop if it’s not your strong suit. Research will continue to advance the academic understanding of this valuable attribute but in the meantime, you can advance your own ability to use it to build your own life’s path toward fulfillment.

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Bodie, G. D. (2023). Listening as a positive communication process. Current Opinion in Psychology , 53 . doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101681

Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.

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How to Become a Better Listener

• Robin Abrahams
• Boris Groysberg

Sharpen these seven skills.

Listening is a skill that’s vitally important, sadly undertaught, and physically and mentally taxing. In the aftermath of Covid-19, particularly with the shift to remote work and the red-hot job market, it’s never been more important — or more difficult — for leaders to be good listeners. This article offers nine tips to help leaders become more active listeners, and a breakdown of the subskills involved in listening and how you can improve in them.

It’s never been more important — or more difficult — for leaders to be good listeners. Job switching is rampant, and remote work means we don’t get the nonverbal cues we’d pick up from an in-person conversation. Employers who fail to listen and thoughtfully respond to their people’s concerns will see greater turnover. And given that the highest rates of turnover are among top performers who can take clients and projects with them, and the frontline employees responsible for the customer experience, the risk is clear.

• Robin Abrahams is a research associate at Harvard Business School.
• BG Boris Groysberg is a professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate at the school’s Race, Gender & Equity Initiative. He is the coauthor, with Colleen Ammerman, of Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021). bgroysberg

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The art of listening

To listen well is not only a kindness to others but also, as the psychologist carl rogers made clear, a gift to ourselves.

by M M Owen   + BIO

Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realisation crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people. I never listen.

Perhaps never was a little strong – but certainly my listening often occurred through a fog of distraction and self-regard. On my worst days, this could make me a shallow, solipsistic presence. Haltingly, I began to try to reach inside my own mental machinery, marshal my attention differently, listen better. I wasn’t sure what I was doing; but I had crossed paths with a few people who, as a habit, gave others their full attention – and it was powerful. It felt rare, it felt real; I wanted them around.

As a culture, we treat listening as an automatic process about which there is not a lot to say: in the same category as digestion, or blinking. When the concept of listening is addressed at any length, it is in the context of professional communication; something to be honed by leaders and mentors, but a specialisation that everyone else can happily ignore. This neglect is a shame. Listening well, it took me too long to discover, is a sort of magic trick: both parties soften, blossom, they are less alone.

Along the way, I discovered that Carl Rogers, one of the 20th century’s most eminent psychologists, had put a name to this underrated skill: ‘active listening’. And though Rogers’s work was focused initially on the therapeutic setting, he drew no distinction between this and everyday life: ‘Whatever I have learned,’ he wrote, ‘is applicable to all of my human relationships.’ What Rogers learnt was that listening well – which necessarily involves conversing well and questioning well – is one of the most accessible and most powerful forms of connection we have.

T he paucity of my listening powers dawned on me as a byproduct of starting to meditate. This is not to make some claim to faux enlightenment – simply to say that meditation is the practice of noticing what you notice, and meditators tend to carry this mindset beyond the yoga mat, and begin to see their own mind more clearly. Among a smorgasbord of other patterns and quirks, what I saw was a self that, too often, didn’t listen.

The younger me enjoyed conversation. But a low, steady egoism meant that what I really enjoyed was talking. When it was someone else’s turn to talk, the listening could often feel like a chore. I might be passively absorbing whatever was being said – but a greater part of me would be daydreaming, reminiscing, making plans. I had a habit of interrupting, in the rather masculine belief that, whatever others had to say, I could say better for them. Sometimes, I would zone out and tune back in to realise that I’d been asked a question. I had a horrible habit, I saw, of sitting in silent linguistic craftsmanship, shaping my answer for when my turn came around – and only half-listening to what I’d actually be responding to.

The exceptions to this state of affairs, I began to see, were situations where there existed self-interest. If the subject was me, or material that might be of benefit to me, my attention would automatically sharpen. It was very easy to listen to someone explaining what steps I needed to take to ace a test or make some money. It was easy to listen to juicy gossip, particularly of the kind that made me feel fortunate or superior. It was easy to listen to debates on topics where I had a burning desire to be right. It was easy to listen to attractive women.

Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them

On bad days, this attentional autopilot constricted me. On topics of politics or philosophy, this made me a bore and a bully. People avoided disagreeing with me on anything, even trivial points, because they knew it would balloon into annoyance and a failure to listen to their reasoning. In my personal life, too often, I could forget to support or lift up those around me. The flipside of not listening is not questioning – because, when you don’t want to listen, the last thing you want to do is trigger the exact scenario in which you are most expected to listen. And so I didn’t ask my friends serious questions often enough. I liked jokes, and I liked gossip; but I’d forget to ask them the real stuff. Or I’d ask them things they’d already told me a week ago. Or forget to ask about their recent job interview or break-up.

This is where bad listening does the most damage: it signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them, or you do but only in a skittish, flickering sort of a way. And so people become wary of opening up, or asking for advice, or leaning on you in the way that we lean on those people we truly believe to be big of heart.

All of the above makes for rather a glum picture, I know. I don’t want to overstate things. I wasn’t a monster. I cared for people and, when I concentrated, I could show it. I was liked, I made my way in the world, I apparently possessed what we call charisma. Plenty of the time, I listened fine. But this may be precisely the point: you can coast along in life as a bad listener. We tend to forgive it, because it’s common.

Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening (2020), frames modern life as particularly antagonistic to good listening:

[W]e are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.

Why do we accept bad listening? Because, I think, listening well is hard, and we all know it. Like all forms of self-improvement, breaking this carapace requires intention, and ideally guidance.

W hen I discovered Rogers’s writings on listening, it was confirmation that, in many conversations, I had been getting it all wrong. When listening well, wrote Rogers and his co-author Richard Evans Farson in 1957, the listener ‘does not passively absorb the words which are spoken to him. He actively tries to grasp the facts and the feelings in what he hears, and he tries, by his listening, to help the speaker work out his own problems.’ This was exactly the stance I had only rarely adopted.

Born in 1902 – in the same suburb of Chicago as Hemingway, three years earlier – Rogers had a strict religious upbringing. As a young man, he seemed destined for the ministry. But in 1926, he crossed the road from Union Theological Seminary to Columbia University, and committed himself to psychology. (At this time, psychology was a field so new and so in vogue that, in 1919, during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, Sigmund Freud had secretly advised Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador in Paris.)

Rogers’s early work was focused on what were then called ‘delinquent’ children; but, by the 1940s, he was developing a new approach to psychotherapy, which came to be termed ‘humanistic’ and ‘person-centred’. Unlike Freud, Rogers believed that all of us possess ‘strongly positive directional tendencies’. Unhappy people, he believed, were not broken; they were blocked. And as opposed to the then-dominant modes of psychotherapy – psychoanalysis and behaviourism – Rogers believed that a therapist should be less a problem-solver, and more a sort of skilled midwife, drawing out solutions that already existed in the client. All people possess a deep urge to ‘self-actualise’, he believed, and it is the therapist’s job to nurture this urge. They were there to ‘release and strengthen the individual, rather than to intervene in his life’. Key to achieving this goal was careful, focused, ‘active’ listening.

That this perspective doesn’t seem particularly radical today is a testament to Rogers’s legacy. As one of his biographers, David Cohen, writes , Rogers’s therapeutic philosophy ‘has become part of the fabric of therapy’. Today, in the West, many of us believe that going to therapy can be an empowering and positive move, rather than an indicator of crisis or sickness. This shift owes a great deal to Rogers. So too does the expectation that a therapist will allow themselves to enter into our thinking, and express a careful but tangible empathy. Where Freud focused on the mind in isolation, Rogers valued more of a merging of minds – boundaried, but intimate.

On bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle

Active listening, for Rogers, was essential to creating the conditions for growth. It was one of the key ingredients in making another person feel less alone, less stuck, and more capable of self-insight.

Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view , just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyse it, categorise it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard. As a teenager, I was a passionate atheist and a passionate Leftist. I saw things as very simple: all believers are gullible, and all conservatives are psychopaths, or at minimum heartless. I could hold to my Manichean view precisely because I had made no effort to grasp anyone else’s viewpoint.

Another of my old mental blocks, also flagged by Rogers, is the instinct that anyone I’m talking to is likely dumber than me. This arrogance is terrible for any attempt at listening, as Rogers recognises: ‘Until we can demonstrate a spirit which genuinely respects the potential worth of an individual,’ he writes, we won’t be good listeners. Previously, on bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle. I would look for clues that this person was wrong, and could be made to feel wrong. But as Rogers writes, to listen well, we ‘must create a climate which is neither critical, evaluative, nor moralising’.

‘Our emotions are often our own worst enemies when we try to become listeners,’ he wrote. In short, a great deal of bad listening comes down to lack of self-control. Other people animate us, associations fly, we are pricked by ideas. (This is why we have built careful social systems around not discussing such things as religion or politics at dinner parties.) When I was 21, if someone suggested that some pop music was pretty good, or capitalism had some redeeming features, I was incapable of not reacting. This made it very hard for me to listen to anyone’s opinion but my own. Which is why, Rogers says, one of the first skills to learn is non-intervention. Patience. ‘To listen to oneself,’ he wrote, ‘is a prerequisite to listening to others.’ Here, the analogy with meditation is clear: don’t chase every thought, don’t react to every internal event, stay centred. Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.

And when we do intervene, following Rogers, we must resist the ever-present urge to drag the focus of the conversation back to ourselves. Sociologists call this urge ‘the shift response’. When a friend tells me they’d love to visit Thailand, I must resist the selfish pull to leap in with Oh yeah, Thailand is great, I spent Christmas in Koh Lanta once, did I ever tell you about the Muay Thai class I did? Instead, I must stay with them: where exactly do they want to go, and why? Sociologists call this ‘the support response’. To listen well is to step back, keep the focus with someone else.

A nice example of Rogers’s approach, taken from his career, is his experience during the Second World War. Rogers was asked by the US Air Force to assess the psychological health of gunners, among whom morale appeared low. By being patient, and nonjudgmental, and gentle with his attention, Rogers discovered that the gunners had been bottling up one of their chief complaints: they resented civilians. Returning to his hometown and attending a football game, reported one pilot, ‘all that life and gaiety and luxury – it makes you so mad’. Rogers didn’t suggest any drastic intervention, or push any change in view. He recommended that the men be allowed to be honest about their anger, and process it openly, without shame. Their interlocutors, Rogers said, should begin by simply listening to them – for as long as it took, until they were unburdened. Only then should they respond.

Much like meditating, listening in this way takes work. It may take even more work outside the therapy room, in the absence of professional expectation. At all times, for almost all of us, our internal monologue is running, and it is desperate to spill from our brain onto our tongue. Stemming the flow requires intention. This is necessary because, even when we think an intervention is positive, it may be self-centred. We might not feel it, Rogers says, but, typically, when we offer our interpretation or input, ‘we are usually responding to our own needs to see the world in certain ways’. When I first began to observe myself as a listener, I saw how difficult I found it to simply let people finish their sentences. I noticed the infinite wave of impatience on which my attention rode. I noticed the slippery temptation of asking questions that were not really questions at all, but impositions of opinion disguised as questions. The better road, I began to see, was to stay silent. To wait.

The active listener’s job is to simply be there, to focus on ‘thinking with people instead of for or about them’. This thinking with requires listening for what Rogers calls ‘total meaning’. This means registering both the content of what they are saying, and (more subtly) the ‘ feeling or attitude underlying this content’. Often, the feeling is the real thing being expressed, and the content a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy. Capturing this feeling involves real concentration, especially as nonverbal cues – hesitation, mumbling, changes in posture – are crucial. Zone out, half-listen, and the ‘total meaning’ will entirely elude us.

Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists?

And though the bad listener loves to internally multitask while someone else is talking, faking it won’t work. As Rogers writes, people are alert to the mere ‘pretence of interest’, resenting it as ‘empty and sterile’. To sincerely listen means to marshal a mixture of agency, compassion, attention and commitment. This ‘demands practice’, Rogers said, and ‘may require changes in our own basic attitudes’.

Rogers’s theories were developed in a context where one person is attempting, explicitly, to help another person heal and grow. But Rogers was always explicit about the fact that his work was ‘about life’. Of his theories, he said that ‘the same lawfulness governs all human relationships’.

I think I started off from a lower point; by nature, I think my brain tends toward distraction and self-regard. But one would not need to be a bad listener to benefit from Rogers’s ideas. Even someone whose autopilot is an empathetic, interested listener can find much in his work. Rogers did more than anyone else to explore listening, systemise its dynamics, and record his professional explorations.

Certainly, being a good listener had an impact on Rogers’s own life. As another of his biographers, Howard Kirschenbaum, told me, Rogers discovered that ‘listening empathically to others was enormously healing and freeing, in both therapy and other relationships’. At his 80th birthday party, a cabaret was staged in which two Carl Rogers impersonators listened to one another in poses of exaggerated empathy. The well-meaning gag was a compliment; in a somewhat rare case of intellectuals actually embodying the ideas they espouse, Rogers was remembered as an excellent listener by everyone who knew him. Despite the kind of foibles that can weigh down any life – a reliance on alcohol, a frustration with monogamy – Rogers appears to have been a decent man: warm, open, and never cruel.

That he was able to carry his theories into his life should give encouragement, even to those of us who aren’t world-famous psychologists. Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists? Why else does all seduction start with riveted attention? Consider your own experience, and you will likely find a direct correlation between the people you feel love you, and the people who actually listen to the things you say. The people who never ask us a thing are the people we drift away from. The people who listen so hard that they pull new things out of us – who hear things we didn’t even say – are the ones we grab on to for life.

P erhaps above all, Rogers understood the stakes involved in listening well. All of us, when we are our best selves, want to bring growth to the people we choose to give our time to. We want to help them unlock themselves, stand taller, think better. The dynamic may not be as direct as with a therapist; there is more of an equal footing – but when our relationships are healthy, we want those around us to thrive. Listening well, Rogers showed, is the simplest route there. Be with people in the right way, and they become ‘enriched in courage and self-confidence’. They feel the releasing glow of attention, and develop an ‘underlying confidence in themselves’. If we don’t want this for our friends, then we are not their friends.

Indeed, such is the generosity of active listening that one can view the practice as one that borders on the spiritual. Though Rogers traded theology for psychology in his early 20s, he always maintained an interest in spirituality. He enjoyed the work of Søren Kierkegaard , an existentialist Christian; and, over the years, he had public discussions with the theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber . In successful therapy sessions, said Rogers, both therapist and client can find themselves in ‘a trance-like feeling’ where ‘there is, to borrow Buber’s phrase, a real “I-Thou” relationship’. Of his relationship to his clients, Rogers said: ‘I would like to go with him on the fearful journey into himself.’

Perhaps this is a bit rich for you; perhaps you would rather frame active listening as simply good manners, or a neat interpersonal hack. The point is: really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing. Only rarely will people notice, let alone thank you, for your efforts. Yet this generosity of attention is what people deserve.

And lest this all sound a bit pious – active listening is not pure altruism. Listening well, as Rogers said, is ‘a growth experience’. It allows us to get the best of others. The carousel of souls is endless. People have deeply felt and fascinating lives, and they can enfranchise us to worlds we would never otherwise know. If we truly listen, we expand our own intelligence, emotional range, and sense that the world remains open to discovery. Active listening is a kindness to others but, as Rogers was always quick to make clear, it is also a gift to ourselves.

Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel

Rogers became a hero of the 1960s counterculture . He admired their utopian dreams of psychic liberation and uninhibited communication; late in life, he was drawn to the New Age writings of Carlos Castañeda. All of this speaks to one of the key critiques of Rogers’s philosophy, both during his lifetime and today: that he was too optimistic. Rogers recognised himself that he was, in Cohen’s words, ‘incorrigibly positive’. His critics called him a sort of Pollyanna of the mind, and thought him naive for believing that such simple interventions as empathy and listening could trigger transformation in people. (Perhaps certain readers will harbour similar critiques about my own beliefs as expressed here.)

Those inclined to agree with this assessment of Rogers will probably think that I have overstated the case. Listening as love? Listening as spiritual practice? But in my own life, a renewed approach to listening has improved how I relate to others, and I now believe listening is absurdly under-discussed. Good listening is complex, subtle, slippery – but it is also right here, it lives in us, and we can work on it every day. Unlike the abstractions of so much of ethics and so much of philosophy, our listening is there to be honed, every day. Like a muscle, it can be trained. Like an intellect, it can be tested. In the very same moment, it can spur both our own growth and the growth of others. Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I couldn’t write nonfiction that anyone else actually wanted to read until I began trying to truly listen.

‘The greatest compliment that was ever paid me,’ said Henry David Thoreau, ‘was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.’ Left on autopilot, I can still be a bad listener. I’ll interrupt, finish sentences, chivvy people along. I suspect many of the people I know still find me to be, on balance, an average listener. But I try! With anyone I can impact – and especially those whose souls I can help to light up – I follow Rogers; I offer as much ‘of safety, of warmth, of empathic understanding, as I can genuinely find in myself to give.’ And I open myself to whatever I can learn. I fail in my attentions, again and again. But I tune back in, again and again. I believe it is working.

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What Makes a Good Listener — and How to Be a Better One

Adobe Stock / Fairygodboss Staff

We’ve all done it if we’re being honest with ourselves: A friend or family member is talking to us about something important, but there we are scrolling through Instagram (what’s that Beyoncé posted?) or pondering what’s in our fridge to scrounge for dinner later (are there any vegetables left?!) . Maybe they’ve even stopped what they were saying to ask, “Are you even listening to me?”

Being a good listener is an important part of connecting with and learning from others. In the workplace, it can be a particularly useful tool, whether you’re dealing with a tough manager or an organization filled with communication silos.

Lucky for you, you can learn and hone good listening skills over time. Here’s how to be a better listener starting today.

What is a good listener?

Good listeners practice active and empathetic listening .

“Both kinds of listening require giving your full attention to another person in order to better understand them,” Ximena Vengoechea, a workplace expert and the author of Listen Like You Mean it: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connectio n, previously wrote on The Muse .

“Through empathetic listening, you can create a space in which others feel safe being themselves, laying the foundation for open and honest communication between both the speaker and the listener,” she added.

Why is it so important to be a good listener?

Being a bad listener can negatively impact your own and others’ productivity and happiness at work.

On the flip side, being a good listener comes with a lot of perks. “Effective listening helps you to understand others better, allowing you to get your work done on time,” Vengoechea wrote. “It enables you to improve partnerships with your peers and thereby collaborate more effectively. It can even help you shift the balance of your relationship with your manager from head-scratching (what did their feedback mean?) to aligned.”

It can also make you popular at work: When you listen attentively and thoughtfully, people feel seen, heard, and supported, which can increase loyalty among your coworkers and supervisors, Nadia Ibrahim-Taney, a university career coach and lecturer, previously told The Muse . Similarly, it can make you a more attractive candidate in the eyes of recruiters and hiring managers during your next job search. 

Finally, being a good listener is also a crucial step to becoming a great boss: One 2020 study found that when supervisors practice active-empathetic listening, it has a significant positive relationship with employee work engagement.

4 qualities of good listeners

Through their actions, good listeners express and develop these crucial qualities. Good listeners are: 

1. Empathetic.

2. patient..

Patience is a valuable workplace skill in all sorts of ways—and a quality that helps foster good listening. Because good listeners know meaningful conversations and connections happen when people aren’t interrupted, hurried along, or cut off.

3. Curious.

Good listeners are genuinely curious about people and the world around them. They aren’t asking questions or continuing conversations to seem polite—they want answers, and they’re excited about how the speaker will provide them.

4. Lifelong learners.

Good listeners use their curiosity to ensure they never stop learning, don’t assume they know everything, and approach each conversation with the goal of gaining new and valuable insight. This forces them to be fully engaged, ask follow-up questions, and avoid lecturing.

7 expert tips to be a better listener

Every new situation and person will present challenges on your path to becoming a good listener. Apply these expert tips when you attend business meetings, hop on a sales call, or chat with your manager in your weekly one-on-one, and you’ll be sure to show your colleagues you’re someone worth talking to.

1. Be fully present.

Being present means that you’re engaged in the current moment—not anticipating what someone will say next, practicing your own response, or letting your mind wander onto other topics or distractions (this is not the time to be thinking about the latest plot twist on Succession). 

Of course, being fully present is often easier said than done. Try silencing your devices and setting aside a set amount of uninterrupted time to speak with someone to ensure you’re able to be fully focused on the conversation. Practicing meditation is another great way to hone this skill.

Figure out what triggers your distraction, then come up with a way to revert your attention. It can be as simple as telling yourself, “Ah—I’m distracted again, time to refocus,” or noticing that you're always distracted before lunch and rescheduling the meetings you have then.

2. Gauge what people need from you.

Good listeners know that while many conversations come with certain goals or expectations, they should be attentive to the needs and wants of the people they’re talking to.

Let your colleague get some things off their chest, and then assess what they’re looking for from you. If they ask for advice, give it. If they don’t, resist the urge to jump in with your opinion or ideas for “fixing” their situation. 

“If you aren’t sure what’s needed, try asking something like, ‘Would it be helpful to hear my advice on this?’ or, ‘I have some ideas about how to proceed—would you be open to that?’” Vengoechea wrote on The Muse . “If you’re not sure where to even start, asking simply, ‘Would you like me to listen or respond?’ can move the conversation in the right direction.”

3. Avoid interrupting.

We all know how frustrating it can be to have someone constantly interrupt you. Interruptions can come across as disrespectful and derail a conversation or a person’s train of thought. So if you want to be a better listener, avoid interrupting your conversation partner. 

You need to find a healthy balance of not letting someone ramble and go on a 20-minute tangent and allowing your colleague to finish their thoughts. If this is a bad habit of yours, work to be open to a slower pace of conversation. Pauses and silences are your friends. You don’t need to fill every moment with words or cut anyone off. 

Even if you're simply excited about an idea, cutting someone off is a surefire way to give the cue that you’re not a good partner and listener, which undermines your excitement and ambition.

4. Ask follow-up questions.

The best way to show you care about and fully understand someone is to ask relevant follow-up questions. 

“If you’re being asked to take over the planning of an annual work event, for example, you might want to ask about the goals and desired impact of the event as well as the obstacles former planners have run into in the past,” Leah Campbell, who holds a degree in psychology and worked in human resources for years, previously wrote on The Muse .

5. Pay attention to body and vocal cues.

Pay attention to the speaker’s intonation, pace of speech, and overall mood and how it may be different from other interactions you’ve had with them. For example, if a colleague is normally vivacious but changes their tone or gets quiet right after you make a comment, they may have felt shut down. Becoming aware of these cues can teach you better ways to respond (or not respond).

It's also important to pay attention to their body language. While your focus should be on listening to what they’re saying, their facial expressions or hand gestures may not always match their words—and could give you clues as to what’s happening below the surface.

6. Get your body language right.

Although they might not be speaking much during the conversation, good listeners show that they’re engaged by using active body language . This includes maintaining eye contact , nodding, or leaning in to show agreement or encourage the speaker to continue. 

“Listen in a neutral pose that shows you’re engaged, but not presumptuous. Use open body language (i.e., don’t cross your arms), avoid extreme facial expressions (regardless of whether they’re favorable or disapproving), and nix the foot tapping and other fidgety habits that signal impatience,” Lea McLeod, an experienced manager, career consultant, and job search coach, previously wrote on The Muse . “I’ve found that by assuming a neutral body pose, I’m mentally preparing to listen.”

You don’t need to stare them right in the eye for the entire conversation (that might be alarming), but you do need to be actively engaged, focusing your energy and attention on the speaker.

7. Summarize what you’ve heard.

“A great way to verbalize active listening is to summarize and confirm back to the person the subject of what they were trying to communicate,” Ibrahim-Taney told The Muse. 

McLeod suggests repeating what you’ve understood back to them with something like, “So what I hear you saying is _____. Is that right?” or “Let me summarize what I heard you say: _____. Did I miss or misinterpret anything?”

Use this tactic toward the end of a conversation to clarify any points, highlight important moments, or illuminate any outstanding issues—and maybe consider writing it down in a follow-up email for future reference.

What's your no. 1 piece of advice to be a better listener? Share your answer in the comments to help other Fairygodboss members!

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