“Are You Really Listening?” A Guide to Active Listening for Students in Charleston South Carolina
Are you a good listener, or just avoiding conflict?
Are you a great listener? This might be your sweet spot! Do you avoid conflict? This might be where you’re getting stuck! Do you move fast and like to take charge? This might be where you struggle. Listening is a powerful tool to help strengthen relationships, connections, and decision making. The receiving/ listening zone of communication is incredibly valuable as it helps to understand others’ points of view. It can open your mind and give you more clarity. Even if you see something very differently from someone else, opening your ears and mind to a different perspective can help you see a bigger picture.
It’s important to distinguish between active and passive listening. Active listening is an effective and transformative tool, whereas passive listening inspires little change or meaningful connection. Active listening includes inquiry, to get to know someone’s experience better, and empathic responses that demonstrate connection and understanding of the information being shared. Active listening allows the other person to feel seen and heard without judgement. This can be both healing and effective for relationship building and can help aid the talking party to feel more clear in their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
Passive communication may feel more disconnected and one sided. Passive communication describes one person expressing something while the other is standing silently as the information passes by them. Passive communication might look like no eye contact with little to no responses. Passive communication might look like nodding and saying yes to appease the other person with no meaning or changes taken from the conversation. Passive communication may be a response of feeling afraid of connecting, wanting to just appease someone rather than be active in the situation, or feeling too stressed and overwhelmed to fully engage.
Active listening includes strong eye contact, mirroring body language, and verbal and non-verbal responses that encourage the talking party and demonstrate understanding. Understanding doesn’t have to mean agreeing, but hearing and respecting. This is a key skill in many conflicts to help disarm, heal, and move forward. This is what your partner is talking about when they say they want to be “seen and heard.”
A key detail in active listening is that you aren’t listening to jump in and speak unless the other person is asking for you to do so. Your responses are very instead to demonstrate understanding and encourage more sharing. One of the most effective ways to do this is by providing reflections or paraphrasing. Reflections demonstrate empathy of the other person’s experience. You are mirroring back what you’re hearing.
Active Listening is not the same as staying quiet. It involves:
Asking thoughtful questions
Responding with empathy
Showing you’re present through eye contact, nodding, and engaged body language
Imagine being a student learning about a topic that interests you. This is how you can approach listening to someone else to demonstrate active listening. They are the expert on their life and perspective and you are the student learning.
Passive Communication, by contrast, looks like:
No eye contact
Staying silent to avoid conflict
Withdrawing or “going along” to keep peace
Active Listening Skills:
Verbal reflections:
“That sounds really tough.”
“It seems like this has been weighing on you.”
“You’ve been thinking a lot about this.”
Encouraging questions:
“Tell me more about that.”
“How was that for you?”
“What led you to that decision?”
Non-verbal cues:
Nodding
Eye contact
Responsive facial expressions
Putting away distractions (like your phone)
Listening deeply is one of the most powerful tools for building trust, connection, and resolution, especially in conflict. Slowing down and listening to someone else can also help you learn more about yourself and the world around you. We all have our own unique perspectives, ideas, and thoughts. One person doesn’t know it all. Taking time to listen and learn from someone else, can only help us to keep growing.
