Often, when I’m having a conversation with loved ones, I feel like I’m doing a boring, empty “polite listener” routine. They tell me things about their life, and I don’t feel any internal reaction. I know what they’re saying is important to them, but I just don’t have an emotional response to it. I let them talk, and I ask them followup questions, and I wait until they’re out of words to say. This is pretty dreadful, but I’ve had a hard time knowing what else to do to connect more authentically.
Recently, I’ve found a tweak that seems to be helping. I thought I’d post it here to get some opinions, and get my thoughts out in writing.
Here’s how it works:
When the person I’m talking to starts talking about their day, I listen until the moment when I get the main point of what they’re saying, and what their perception of the situation they’re describing is.
Then I interject to echo that perception back at them, in a supportive way.
I’ll write out the sort of monologue that I might sit back and listen to with my old “passive listening” style, then show how I might add some “active listening” interjections to change the flow.
It’s going to be in the style of a phone conversation:
**Them:** I spent the whole day being lazy and not working on my homework. I’m gonna read two articles for my report tonight, though, after I make dinner. I’m just so tired after school! There was a looot of traffic on the way home. \[Sigh\] I just need to do some laundry now. I have some fresh artichokes from the farmer’s market I was thinking of cooking for dinner tonight. I found a recipe on the New York Times that looks good…
**Me:** Oh nice, what’s the recipe?
**Them:** It’s a pretty simple Mediterranean-style recipe, you just road the artichoke, add some feta cheese and honey. But I think I’m not going to use too much honey, that seems kind of excessive. I have some wine one of my friends brought over for me the other day, and I was thinking of having that too. It seems like a pretty good bottle…
**Me:** What kind of wine is it?
Etc. etc. etc. As you can see, I’m not really engaged, and there isn’t really any kind of process of figuring out a mutually interesting topic happening here. At some point, it might flip and I’d be the one going on monologues. But doesn’t feel like a good conversation, no matter who’s doing the talking.
When I switch to “active listening” mode, it goes something like this:
**Them:** I spent the whole day being lazy and not working on my homework.
**Me \[having seen where this sentence was going from the word “lazy,” interjecting right when they say the word “homework”\]:** Noo! You have to get those papers read!
**Them:** I knoooow! It’s just been so hard to get motivated lately for some reason!
**Me \[seeing where this is going from the words “to get,” interjecting on “some reason”\]:** Ah, I know you’ll get it done. It seems like the papers you’ve been reading are pretty interesting though, right?
**Them:** Yeah, my advisor’s pretty excited about this topic actually…
**Me \[knowing they have more to say, but knowing as soon as they say “advisor” that they’re about to say their advisor’s excited, because of their tone of voice, and interjecting on the word “topic”\]:** That’s awesome, what do they like about it?
**Them:** Well, there’s actually not that much research on this topic out there right now! There’s lots written on how to help parents care for babies that have sensory dysfunctions, but not much on how to help parents of newborns when the *parents* are the ones with the sensory dysfunctions.
**Me \[seeing where this is going from “to help parents of newborns,” overlapping on “dysfunctions”\]:** Oh yeah, that does seem like a really interesting topic, what have the papers had to say about it so far?
And the dialog goes from there. This method seems to be pretty good at showing my conversation partner that I’m listening and engaged. And it keeps the conversation going somewhere. There’s a much tighter back-and-forth than in the original “passive listening” approach.
This cuts against a lot of “how to be a good listener” advice: don’t interrupt, don’t be thinking of your reply while your conversation partner’s still talking, don’t finish other people’s thoughts for them. But I think that advice is addressing a different set of conversational problems. In my case, it feels like it’s adding connection to the conversation.
Hope this is helpful to somebody!