Activate your compassion through active listening

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There are days, so many days these days, where precious little communication happens. Sure, people talk. They talk and talk, tweet their takes, Instagram their insta-opinions, post their perspectives to their Facebook friends and LinkedIn loyalists. Ticking away the hours while tocking broadcasts in 30-second bursts. Acres of egos eager for our attention. But none of that, not one minute of it, is genuine communication. This is why we all feel so hollow; We are starved of real conversations. Because real conversations aren’t just filled with talking. Real conversations, rather, blend talking and listening into a wonderful mixture of meaning. Feedback loops of inputs and outputs, circuits of information proffered and perceived.  

We’ve spent the past year together exploring the complexities of communication, whether it was emotional barriers, communication overload, asking effective questions, communicating with the c-suite, communicating with clarity, communicating with crowds versus colleagues, understanding your communication style, nonverbal communication, and how to communicate compassion in your interactions with others. With 2025 ending, it is important to acknowledge a foundational communication-related power skill that undergirds all these other types of communication. That is a foundation of active listening, a power skill you have to master in order to succeed in your professional and personal lives.   

What is active listening?   

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, offers a great primer on active listening. It describes it as “making a conscious effort to hear and understand someone else ... demonstrating concern, limiting interruptions, and asking open-ended questions … committing all attention to the speaker and establishing an environment of trust and judgment-free engagement.”

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Active listening may start with your ears, but it is a full body activity. Eye contact illustrates your attentiveness and interest in the person speaking. Is your eye contact communicating that you want to be part of this conversation or that you want to be anywhere else than in this conversation? How you position your body, your arms and hands can communicate your openness or disinterest in what you are hearing. Crossing your arms, sticking your hands under your armpits is a classic defensive position, communicating that you are closed off to what is being said to you.  

The most crucial full body component of active listening is what your mind is doing while listening to your conversation partner. It is so easy to connect with something someone says and immediately start to generate your response in your mind. Once you start that generative process, you have actively stopped listening to what continues to be said.  Active listening demands that you listen fully and completely before you begin the process of thinking through your response to what your conversation partner has shared.

Do an experiment, perhaps in your personal life, to determine the different experiences between inactive and active listening. In one conversation, look at your phone the whole time while the other person is talking. Don’t look them in the eye. Interrupt them at all possible opportunities. If you do give the speaker eye contact, silently say over and over in your head while you’re doing it, “What you are saying is stupid.” Then have another conversation with that same person, hopefully later that day. Give them extensive eye contact as they talk about how rude you were earlier. Wait to speak until the person is done describing how awful you made them feel. When you give the speaker eye contact, silently say over and over in your head, “I’m sorry. I was such a jerk.”

Why is active listening important?

Let’s get the business out of the way. Active listening is one of the most cost-effective approaches to getting more out of your team. Even if you are a sole proprietor, you cannot accomplish your goals without the help of your team members, whether they are internal or external to your organization. In an October 2024 article, Carey Musburger at Washington State University outlines the role active listening plays in achieving success. Musburger outlines four strengths active listening brings to team efforts:

• Building trust. Active listening shows respect for others’ thoughts and feelings, which builds trust and rapport. In a team setting, this trust enhances collaboration and encourages open communication.
• Improving problem solving. By truly listening and empathizing with others’ perspectives, you gain deeper insights that help in generating innovative solutions to problems.
• Enhancing leadership. Empathy allows leaders to understand the emotions and needs of their teams, leading to better decision-making and more supportive leadership.
• Increasing productivity. Teams that listen to one another and feel heard tend to be more engaged, resulting in higher productivity and satisfaction in the workplace.

Before you spend money on team retreats or consultants, spend time practicing active listening. Devote time during team meetings to introduce the components of active listening and devote time to practicing together. Trust breeds engagement. Engagement breeds productivity. Productivity breeds bottom-line results.

Now let’s talk about our shared humanity. We have evolved over thousands and thousands of years to be in communion with one another. We evolved to communicate joy to others, to communicate danger, to communicate anger and appreciation. Ineffective communication back in our tribal past meant the potential for banishment and a quick death to follow. We most literally could not survive without others. That. Is. Still. True. Today.

No matter how many screens we put up to separate ourselves from each other, no matter how many usernames and anonymous trolling we surround ourselves with in this unnervingly fast-changing world. We need to communicate effectively with one another to survive and to thrive. We feel better when we are connected with others. Active listening is an act of love. It communicates both verbally and nonverbally that we cherish the person we are speaking with. Our empathy is then mirrored back to us, closing a loop of care, even if the content of the conversation is contentious. There is no tenet of active listening that requires agreement. The only request active listening presents to us is to appreciate the humanity of our conversation partner.    

How can I improve my active listening skills?

Knowing you want to improve your active listening skills is the place where growth can begin. Knowing how to do so is the next step. Psychotherapist Natacha Duke, MA, RPH from the Cleveland Clinic offers some suggestions in a May 2023 article “7 Ways to Improve Your Active Listening Skills.”  Here are their suggestions and thoughts on the importance of each of these activities toward improving your active listening skills:

1. Set an intention, and frame your interaction

Know your goal for the conversation while still allowing for the conversation to be open-ended in its approach. “Instead of saying, ‘I want to prove that I’m right,’ for example, you might say, ‘I want to better understand why my colleague disagrees with me.’”

2. Mindful presence

Be there in both body and spirit for the conversation. “I think the very first thing that I would do is get rid of your phone and other distractions. Even if you’re listening, having your phone in front of you communicates to the other person that what they’re saying is not important to you. So, make sure that you’re setting yourself up for successful active listening and that the person really has your full attention. Mindful presence involves coming back to the moment, time and time again. Because our minds will wander. We’re human.”

3. Ask questions

This is a key component to activating the feedback loop effective communication represents. “When we’re asking questions, we’re really communicating with the other person that we understand enough to ask insightful questions. In demonstrating our understanding, we might even bring up feelings or thoughts for them that they didn’t know they had. So, you’re creating a deeper rapport.”

4. Don’t focus on your response

Stop trying to plan out what you are going to say before the other person is done talking. “Part of active listening is ridding yourself of that pressure — the pressure of needing to come up with some brilliant response. If you’re thinking about your response, you can’t be listening. Not having a prepared response shows that you’re a learner, that you’re vulnerable, that you may not know the answer and that you’re also willing to learn.”

5. Be nonjudgmental

This one is difficult but rewarding. It also connects back with the framing advice Duke provided is Step 1. “Instead of saying, ‘I want to prove that I’m right,’ for example, you might say, ‘I want to better understand why my colleague disagrees with me.’” Proving that you are right positions you to judge the other person as wrong, leading to perception bias deficits when communicating with them. Seeking to understand why someone disagrees with you is an investigation, a mystery to explore, for which prejudgment will make it impossible to solve.

6. Your posture tells a story

“Having a welcoming posture and body language shows that you’re open to receiving what the other person is saying and that you are taking a nonjudgmental, noncritical stance,”

Duke goes on to suggest the following nonverbal cues:

• Maintain eye contact
• Adopt open body language
• Respond physically to what you hear
• Notice your conversation partner’s nonverbal cues

7. Take notes

In a work setting, taking notes is crucial to communicating to your conversation partner that you care about their thoughts, that you want to consider them outside of the conversation, and that you want to make sure that you don’t miss or misremember key points from the conversation.

Active listening is an act of compassion

In this age of unreality and increasing isolation, it is easy to forget that communication, at its core, is about connecting people together in thought and in deed. It helps one understand where you are coming from, and allows you to understand the same about them. Thus closing the gap between our lonely synapses, separate heartbeats and unique lived experiences, whether in the workplace or in our homes, neighborhoods or our cities, and at our places of worship or at those places where others worship. 

Active listening is a ritual of compassion, one that illustrates a desire to appreciate the thoughts of another, even if we don’t necessarily agree with them. Our collective future, in the country and around the world, is dependent on a critical mass of people embracing this compassion ritual, to employ active listening in their personal and professional lives, to be a beacon of beatitude in the experience of communication with others.  Now, more than ever, you must be active in your active listening.   

 Adam Bazer, MPD, senior director of thought product development, ASHE.