The Power and Impact of Good Listening

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“Listening is not the act of hearing the words spoken; it is the art of understanding the meaning behind those words.” –Simon Sinek

Speaking is a critical life skill that we’re taught from birth. In fact, effective speaking and communication skills are so highly valued in our society that there are thousands of courses on the topic as well as myriad opportunities to earn degrees in communications, all the way up to a Ph.D., with a focus on critical thinking, public speaking, media, and writing skills to prepare students for careers in influential industries such as journalism, law, public relations, speechwriting, and all forms of administration (Bouchrika, 2024; Hamilton, 2023).

But what about the skill of listening? Where and when is that taught? The unfortunate answer is that listening, although arguably even more critical to effective and productive interpersonal, organizational, political, and global communication, is rarely taught. Absent possibly a few therapy-related graduate courses, you’ll be hard-pressed to find courses on the topic of listening, nor is it a skill that most parents or educators encourage children to practice as they’re learning to navigate the nuances of communication and relationships. Yet, how can we expect to think critically and make the best-informed decisions if we don't really know how to listen?

Listening Is Not the Same as Hearing

While listening is often viewed as something that just naturally occurs through the simple act of hearing spoken words, in reality there is nothing simple about good listening. It’s an acquired skill that requires daily practice and discipline, although well worth the time and effort because good listening helps us effectively examine, accept, or challenge the information we hear, thereby improving our decision-making. Equally important, active listening helps us better understand other positions, provides a path to finding common ground; builds trust, rapport, and connections in our communication with others; and increases our chance of being heard ourselves (Ury, 2015).

What Constitutes Good Listening?

Listening is a fluid process that involves five stages: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding (DeVito, 2000). Within all of these stages, there are internal and external factors that can either interfere with or enhance good listening. The key is to engage in practices that reduce or eliminate disruptive factors and actively seek out situations and practice skills that advance good listening.

• Receiving. This first stage is the literal “hearing” part of listening, when your ears do their job and isolate incoming audible information without the interference of competing sounds. However, with the multitude of distractions almost constantly intruding into our awareness, this is easier said than done. As William Ury, expert negotiator and co-founder of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, points out, “We live in an age that we call the Age of Communication, but how much listening can there really be with so much interruption and distraction?” (2015). Good listeners focus on what a speaker is saying and ignore distractions. If the listening environment contains too many distractions or has loud competing sounds, it’s best to relocate to a quieter location, or postpone important conversations to another time.
• Understanding. Here is where our brains get involved as we attempt to process the meaning of the sounds we’re receiving. At this stage, good listeners zero in on what the speaker is generally trying to say and seek clarification or ask the speaker to repeat anything they can’t understand. Understanding can be negatively affected when a speaker is speaking too fast, providing great detail, or has an accent that makes it difficult for the listener to understand what is being said. This is not the time for a good listener to comment on the content of what is being said; the focus here should be on understanding.
• Remembering. This is when our brains process the information we’re hearing well enough to recall it for as long as we need to work with it. There are a multitude of factors that can interfere with memory, but for active listeners, the most common interferences are distractions, intermittent loss of focus, the amount of information being shared, and the complexity of the information being shared. To reduce these risks, good listeners must be keenly focused on the speaker’s verbal and nonverbal communications and actively stay engaged in the process of listening.
• Evaluating. This is the most dangerous stage for all listeners, even the most skilled ones, because it's the stage where there's the highest risk of consciously or unconsciously assigning some sort of value or weight to the information being shared. This often takes the form of a positive or negative “judgment” that we make, utilizing life experiences that are personal to us, and therefore often biased. These judgments can be based on a wide range of variables, such as the “type” of person delivering the message or the content of the message. For example, factors such as gender, race, culture, or political party may influence our judgment of a message. Content that doesn’t align with our values or beliefs can do the same. While we all have opinions and biases, good listeners are self-aware enough to recognize their biases and purposefully move past them to give speakers a safe space to express themselves. Rather than judge what they're hearing, good listeners try to understand and empathize with the meaning behind the words and encourage speakers to share everything they’re feeling using neutral prompts, such as “go on” or “tell me more.” As Simon Sinek (2021) explains, when we replace judgment with curiosity or genuine interest, we create a safe space for someone to "empty their bucket," which then makes it more likely they'll be interested in hearing what you have to say.
• Responding. The final stage of listening is responding, verbally and nonverbally, to shared information with respect, even if in the end, we disagree with what the speaker is saying or how they’re handling a situation. Good listening doesn’t mean that you should abandon your personal views or not be honest in your communications with others. It means that while you’re actively listening, you create an environment in which the speaker feels heard, understood, and respected, so that when you do respond, your own message is more likely to be received in the same way.

Good listening also encompasses behaviors that throughout these stages of listening convey interest and attention, such as eye contact, head-nodding, leaning toward the speaker, and encouraging facial expressions. However, good listeners aren't necessarily passive absorbers of information; some research suggests that the best listeners engage in the process by asking clarifying questions, restating what they've heard to make sure they're understanding it correctly, supportively suggesting alternative paths, and validating the speaker's feelings using supportive, nonjudgmental words and gestures (Zenger & Folkman, 2016).

At the same time, it's important to pack your patience and curb bad habits during these stages. For instance, most of us have been taught throughout our lives to hear and then immediately respond to what we heard. Therefore, it's common for listeners to begin preparing a response to what they’re hearing while they’re hearing it, which means they’re not fully listening to what is being said or giving safe space to the person saying it. While this urge to comment early and often is difficult to suppress, with practice and patience, good listeners learn to do it. This not only helps the speaker feel heard and understood, it also provides the listener with the entire picture, which ultimately allows for better responses and decision-making in interpersonal and organizational relationships.