Hear Beyond Words: Mastering the Craft of Active Listening
Trauma Informed Communication Strategies for Active Listening
We have a bonus blog for you this week with no promotions written by Sarah O’Brien, LCSW, featuring Hannah Teplitsky, LMSW. We are so excited to offer this bonus blog to you.
Communication goes far beyond what words are being said. Tone, inflection, facial expression, body language, eye contact, and active listening all play a part in communicating something. In my experience, folks who want to improve communication skills often are focused on what and how they say something to someone else. It doesn’t enter their purview to consider how listening, and reflecting, are skills for effective communication. The listening part may very well be more important than the speaking part of communication.
What kind of listening? Is it just regular listening? Does that mean nodding along as someone shares? Active listening is necessary to engage in human-centered communication. Key word: active. Listening is not a passive process. It requires focus, concentration, and diligence to remain engaged in actively listening to someone else in the present moment. My colleague, Hannah Teplitsky, LMSW, puts it this way, “If you think that active listening only has to do with your ears, you’re wrong. Active listening is a full-body, immersive, textured, and dynamic thing. I call it a thing because it is an experience, yes, but it’s also a practice, and a skill, and a talent. To actively listen is to think about how you are listening while you are listening.”
This last part is so crucial: to consider how you are listening while you are listening. In other words, self-awareness in the moment. Are you aware of how you present or behave when engaging with someone? Are you aware of how others receive you when either you are talking or listening? And to jump back in to last month’s blog, are you open to receiving feedback about how you come across in communicating with others? If your answer to any of the above is ‘no’ then you may have some self-work to do to become more aware of your patterns. To say that you are engaging in any human-centered practices, you have to done your own work first. Why? Because it’s there that you become more self-aware, and that is a basic requirement for any trauma-informed practice. If you are not aware of yourself and how you show up around others, then it will be hard to make adjustments for the sake of someone else, which is necessary for engaging in trauma-informed communication.
Hannah does a great job of describing self-awareness while listening. She says, “I ask myself: What is my face doing? Where are my eyes focused in space? Are they glazed over or alive? What position is my head in? Where in space is my body in relation to the other person’s body? Is my posture open or closed? Am I leaning, and in what direction? What am I doing—physically, verbally, emotionally—to validate what this person is saying? Do I understand, on a basic semantic level, what they are trying to communicate? Do I understand, on an emotional and mental level, what they are trying to communicate? What are my hands doing? Oh no, am I biting my inner cheek again? How are my verbal and non-verbal reactions letting this person know I hear and care about what they are saying?” These are imperative self-reflection questions about how you listen. Would you even consider asking yourself these questions while listening? Have you ever considered these questions for yourself? Do you even know what the answers would be for you?
Active listening requires hearing what someone is saying, and also attuning to their thoughts and feelings. It turns a conversation into an active, non-competitive, two-way interaction. And this non-competitive, two-way interaction increases the likelihood both parties will walk away from the conversation feeling as though they (still) have worth and value. Failure to actively listening could result in feeling unheard, invalidated, or dismissed, which is a pathway towards harm, rather than towards safety. Hannah reminds us, “It can be an overwhelming experience, at least at first. But the more you practice active listening, the more this inner monologue quiets and becomes second nature. This constant process of iteration, calibration, and tracking becomes more fluid, the seams are easier to hide, and you can better replenish between practices. Because I think that’s the key to active listening: it’s a practice.” A trauma-informed practice. Active listening is an applied trauma-informed practice.
Active listening in a human-centered way must take into account 1) how you listen 2) reflection on how you show up to a conversation and 3) increasing self-awareness about how you come across to others. Can they tell you’re listening? How would they know? Active listening skills require empathy, as well as, self-awareness, managing your reaction can be the difference in someone feeling seen and heard vs. dismissed and invalidated.
A review from the Harvard Business School describes three parts to active listening (Hannah touches on each of these aspects in reflection questions to self about how one shows up to listen, too!):
Cognitive: Paying attention to all the information, both explicit and implicit, that you are receiving from the other person, comprehending, and integrating that information
Emotional: Staying calm and compassionate during the conversation, including managing any emotional reactions (annoyance, boredom) you might experience
Behavioral: Conveying interest and comprehension verbally and nonverbally
Other skills necessary to master for effective active listening:
Being fully present and alert in the conversation
Showing interest by practicing good eye contact
Reading non-verbal cues and body language, also using non-verbal cues yourself
Asking open-ended questions to encourage further responses
Paraphrasing and reflecting back what has been said
Intentional listening to understand rather than to respond
Withholding judgment and advice
Being mindful of and controlling your emotional response
Active listening is a skill, and improving any skill requires practice. It’s both a practice and requires practice. If you aren’t good at active listening right now, continue to practice and hone the above-mentioned skills. Consider asking for feedback along the way. As with most human-centered and trauma-informed skills, there is not an endpoint, a final destination. Things evolve, new information surfaces, and we adjust, practice some more and continuously work to integrate the new information over time. To remain human-centered we must humble ourselves and commit to life-long learning. Life-long learning and application of that knowledge in real-time.
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