How to Be a Good Listener
I believe good listening is healing. There have been times when all I really needed was someone who was willing and able to hold space, listen and have a little empathy. It helped me feel seen and supported, and restores a sense of self, well-being and wholeness.
It takes energy, presence, intention and skill to hold space for someone. It may sound simple, but I have personally found good listeners hard to come by.
I’m sharing a few of my own guidelines below with the intention of supporting better listening. In practice, conversation is fluid. Every listening container is a little different so it only makes sense to consider each situation individually.
First, the Agreement
Establish consent. Is there explicit consent to hold space? It’s not helpful for a listening container to be established if the listener is not willing and able to provide support. Being forced to listen to a long monologue can feel violating, and could also hurt the speaker if the listener responds in a way that is unexpected or unhelpful.
Understand needs and boundaries. What are the needs and boundaries of both speaker and listener? Does that include advice or sharing your own experience? Are there time constraints or triggering topics? If venting is needed, explicitly name this as this can be emotionally charged and intense.
It’s also important to allow needs, boundaries and consent to change during the conversation.
How to Listen Well
Focus on the other person’s story and perspective. Actually listen. This means you respond to what’s important to them, not your priorities.
Accept their experience as valid. If three people experience the same event together, there are three different experiences. How we perceive things is shaped by a lifetime of experience, not a singular event.
Offer support and empathy. In a world built around external validation, many of us need support from others to feel like our perspective and feelings matter. Our emotional literacy is so low as a culture that we often need help just to articulate and acknowledge our experience, to hear someone say that our feelings are valid, that it’s okay to ask for what we need, that we are still worthy of love and care even if we made mistakes.
Be curious, ask questions. This supports understanding and can help the speaker process something that happened and returning to a state of internal balance and equilibrium.
Acknowledge and leverage the person’s own wisdom, creativity and resilience. If problem-solving help is requested, I try to ask questions to help the speaker find their own solution. This is a technique used in coaching, using powerful questions to invite a fresh perspective and get the client to create a way forward that makes sense for them. (E.g. What do you really want? What’s most important for you here?)
Read the room to understand what they need from you, or ask if you’re not sure. This especially applies when sharing your own story or giving advice.
“What do you need from me?”
“I experienced something similar, can I share?”
“May I give you some advice?”
“If none of this resonates, feel free to disregard, I know our experiences may be different.”
Be Mindful Of …
Frequent interruptions and long digressions about your own experience. It’s not really the place for the listener to re-live their pain and vent. If there is an insight you wish to offer through your story, be clear and specific. If something is triggering for you, gently extract yourself from the conversation.
Stay grounded in yourself and speak in a calm voice. There is a big difference between compassionately sharing someone’s frustration, and escalating emotional distress by adding your own rant to the conversation. It also protects you from feeling drained and exhausted, helping to maintain healthy personal boundaries.
Avoid imposing your own values, bias and model of reality on others. I have been guilty of this myself, but telling someone to take a specific approach just because it’s what you would do is simply not helpful and can create frustration. Imposing scarcity, worry or fear-based beliefs can also create more harm.
To be able to feel seen and supported is healing. I offer a 1:1 Women’s Healing Container to provide some of this kind of support. This is a service I wish I had, and I believe more of this is needed in our communities. I offer a free 30-minute chat to explore if we’re a good fit, book a session here.
