In our everyday life, we continually verbally and non-verbally interact with those in our surroundings both in our personal and professional lives. We do this by means of encoding and decoding different chunks of information that have to be well-crafted enough to be well-perceived by the listeners. The listeners on their part have to have strong skills in processing the perceived information transmitted by the speaking partner.
While communicating with one another, we are constantly changing our roles from being a speaker to being a listener. We do this by means of transmitting different pieces of information through various verbal (e.g. words, phrases, idioms and proverbs, utterances, speech acts, etc.) and non-verbal tokens (e.g. facial expressions, mimics, gestures, bodily postures, eye contact, etc.). The non-verbal markers are there to assist the verbal communication in terms of expressing our ideas, thoughts, and feelings that are non-transmittable only through verbal expressions, which actually also have the greatest potential of enhancing emotionally our speech (Rostomyan, 2022).
The above comes to suggest that when speaking of active listening skills, we should not only focus on the articulated words and expressions, phrases and utterances of our speaking partners, but should also pay closer attention to their non-verbal communication cues as well, which factually sometimes have more information to entail than the mere words. Hence, to be a skilled communicator, we have to pay closer attention both to the verbal and non-verbal signs that are to be detected in the process of interpersonal communication. Furthermore, in the times of digitalization, when engaging in online communication, we have to be agile in reading diverse emojis alongside verbal expressions. Moreover, we should also be able to hear the words underneath the silence of our communicators (both in the digital and real worlds).
Effective communication consists of both speaking and listening. Active listening is a way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding, attention, and respect. It is an important first step to show interest in and empathy towards the other person, as well as to together look for various ways to find mutually accepted solutions to diverse questions and problems.
Here are a couple of vital steps towards better skills in active listening:
- Be attentive.
- Look for emotional cues.
- Ask open-ended questions.
- Repeat what the other has just said.
- Request clarification if not understood well.
- Show empathy towards the other through your speech.
- Look for ways to find common ground with the other person.
To sum up, if we are endowed with the ability to incorporate active listening in our daily agenda and pay closer attention to what our communicating partners have to communicate with us, we will resultantly become much more agile communicators. Moreover, by being an active listener we gain the ultimate chance of being better able to process the perceived information, which will better be stored in our memory. Furthermore, if the transmitted information encompasses emotionally charged pieces, by means of active listening, we will be better apt in understanding the transmitted emotions, which will resultantly better be conceived by our higher cognitive processes and the creation of a stronger emotional bond with the target audience.
