3 Levels of Active Listening: Step-by-Step Masterclass for Better Conversations

In this episode, Simon Goode breaks down active listening into three levels: building initial connection through body language and basic responses, using coregulation and summarizing to help others feel truly heard, and practicing genuine curiosity to foster reciprocal change in conversations. He shares practical tips, like using open and closed questions, mirroring, and mindful summaries, to improve everyday listening skills. Simon also emphasizes the power of approaching conversations with an open, nonjudgmental mindset to deepen understanding and drive positive change in conflict situations.

---------------

TIMESTAMPS: 

00:00 Improving Listening Skills Strategies

05:48 Effective Distress Listening Techniques

08:48 Effective Listening with Open Questions

10:58 Effective Communication Through Mirroring

13:10 Summary Options: Short or Long

18:49 Embracing Subjective Narratives in Conflict

20:14 Levels of Active Listening Skills

Transcript

0:07

Hello, and welcome back to the Conflict Skills Podcast. I'm your host, professional mediator, Simon Goode. I set up this podcast to provide free resources and tools for dealing with conflict, so if that sounds like the kind of thing that's useful for you, please consider pressing subscribe. In the episode today, I'm going to be talking about how to improve your listening skills, and I've put quite a bit of time into the preparation of this episode actually. What I've eventually landed on is talking about listening, this empathetic active listening, the process of helping someone to feel heard, but thinking about it in three different levels. I sometimes, when I'm doing training in something like listening skills, spend quite a bit of time thinking about the participant group that I'm going to be working with and where's their baseline effectively. And so level one, I'm going to be talking about the fundamental skills that we can use to create a connection. So these are the elements of body language, tone of voice, the types of questions that we might ask. I'll explain some tools like mirroring and reflecting and more or less giving a coherent response. So that, I think, is the level one. And for people new in their career, that might be something that they're working on, or even in the conversation itself when you're short on time or there's a lot of pressure, that might be as far as you get. It's just a reasonably brief response, like, wow, that sounds really full on. Level two is where I'm going to explain some options for coregulation. These are the ways that we can help somebody else to feel heard and understood. I'll explain the different types of summary that we can use and some of the principles that we can apply there. And then finally, I'm going to be talking about what I call reciprocal change skills. The way that we can have a genuine curiosity by actually having a genuinely open attitude. And I'll talk about some of the reasons why from a very scientific perspective, there's a there's good justification for us to hold off on jumping the gun and making a decision about something. And I'm going to talk about the difference that it makes when you can approach listening from a genuinely curious place as opposed to already thinking that you know the answer or you know the story or that kind of thing. So I've designed it so that it's applicable for different levels of experience and across a range of different sectors. But I would love to know your feedback. If there's any questions that come up or thoughts that are percolating away, please leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify or YouTube or one of those platforms where commenting is easy. And if you'd like to get in touch with me, the best email address to use is podcast@simongoode.com. Alright. Let's get into that first topic of the connection skills level one. I've begun to really like thinking about the beginning of a process of listening as creating a connection. I spend a lot of time trying to improve my own listening skills, and I listen a lot to kids. My son is eight years old at the moment, so I listen to a lot of stories about what's going on with him and his friends and all that kind of thing. The different news that they like to come and report and tell me about of what they've been doing or what's happening in their family or that kind of thing. But in my workshops that I run, I'm also often listening to people who are in there as participants. And I think one of the reasons why people often walk away feeling quite inspired after these kind of workshops is just because they have an experience of being listened to. And a lot of us don't get that very often. Our partner might not be a very good listener. Sometimes our boss and our colleagues are not particularly great listeners. Our kids, our eight year olds are often not very good listeners. And sometimes our family aren't the best listeners either. So it can make a real difference to somebody when you do give them that experience of being effectively listened to. And I think the starting point is that sense of connection. From a neurobiological perspective, I'm sure that there are different neurons that wire when we're engaging in conversation with someone else. But the way that I think about it is that it's almost like a chance for our brains to connect. If you can talk to me about what you're thinking or what's going on for you, it really does give me some insight into what's going on in your neural processing at this stage, how your memories are being encoded, what your perception's focused on, and that kind of thing. So I find that quite interesting. And then when we're able to respond in what I call a coherent kind of way, it gives the other person that same sense of joining. It's meeting in the middle. It's a sense of, at least at a very initial stage, being understood. So the types of body language that we can use to create that open ended sense of connection is to just be curious. You don't wanna cross your arms in front of your body. Use an open kind of posture would work better. Limit the amount of movement, the amount of gestures, just slow down a little bit. The facial expressions that tend to work quite well for listening is somewhat neutral and a little bit curious. So you might raise your eyebrows a little bit. Your eyes should be focused on the other person roughly 70%, although that does differ by cultural norms and values in terms of expectations. But what I tend to suggest is you want to convey the impression of being neutral, open, and curious. We want to show that we're engaged. We're responding when the other person says something. We could say, oh, wow. Oh, gosh. Let out a little bit of a paraverbal kind of cue. Raise our eyebrows a little bit. Take in a little bit of a breath. What happened next? These very subtle cues that we often give, it's kind of like we're experiencing the story that you're experiencing as you're telling it to me. It gives that person a real sense of of being in it together. The facial expressions that tend to work best are just generally neutral and curious. And then in terms of the tone of voice, a lower tone, slower speed, lower volume tends to work better if our goal is to calm the other person down. So especially if we're engaging in listening skills in a situation where the other person's a bit distressed, that low tone, slower speed, lower volume would all be very helpful principles to apply. We could then think about the kinds of questions that we ask, and open and closed ended questions can both be quite useful. Closed ended questions are yes or no kind of questions or at least questions with a limited number of responses. Did you receive a reply when you sent them that email? When you say that they didn't get back to you, did you receive any message at all, or was it absolutely nothing? These are yes or no or a limited number of fixed choice kind of questions. And sometimes we don't wanna ask too many closed ended questions in a row. It can begin to feel a bit like an interrogation at times, like, when did that happen? Did they write a reply to you? Alright. Did you respond to that? It's like, yes. Yes. Yes. Fine. Come on. This sense of pressure might gradually feel like it's building. So you don't wanna probably ask too many closed ended questions in a row. But closed ended questions are reasonably easy to answer, either when the other person's feeling a sense of escalation or when there's a sense of vulnerability about the topic. I've learned this a lot trying to talk to teenagers. All of my early jobs were in youth crisis centers and adolescent drug and alcohol and violence programs and that kind of thing. And, of course, teenagers are the classic. They just did not wanna talk at all. They'll give you those monosyllabic, single word responses wherever possible. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Do you have a good day? I don't know. What's your friend do? I don't know. Did they end up doing this? I don't know. And so one of the techniques that works for opening teenagers up, actually, is to start with closed ended questions instead. I actually made a little fun worksheet at one stage when I was working with kids that were in their early teenage years. Just a series of yes or no questions. Like, do you like Coke or Pepsi better? Do you like, Apple or Samsung better? Do you like, you know, whatever it would be. Yamaha or KTX motorbikes better. And so I would force them to choose these things, but they were relatively easy to answer, like, do you like Coke or Pepsi better? It's a good question because there's literally nothing at stake there, probably not very much at stake anyway. And so I do the same thing with my son when he's finished school. I might say something like, did you end up having maths today? Or I know you thought that you might not need all of your lunch. Did you end up feeling hungry at the end, or was it enough? Like, these are reasonably easy questions to answer. Did you eat all of your lunch or did or maybe not if he feels like he's been in trouble for eating lunch in the past. But my point is that they're just very shallow, low detail. They don't take a lot of executive functioning, and he's not likely to be worried about me judging him for his response. And was this person there again? I know they're off sick. Are they back yet? Is it still your teacher there? Did you have have you do you ever have casuals at your new school? Like, these kind of closed ended questions can work well, but then we probably want to ask an open ended question after a minute or two. So open ended questions are ones that have multiple possible responses. Goode listening questions often begin with what and how. How did that play out? What happened? How did you respond? What was that like for you? What was going through your head at the time? What needs to happen now? How can I help? You know, what needs what options are there at this stage. Like, these kind of questions are really good because the other person's in charge of how much detail to share, what's important in terms of the story, but it also encourages them to tell the replaying of the events in a bit of a narrative form. It usually is like this, then this, then this, or this, then this because of this. And that in itself can be quite helpful for you to enlighten you about what's going on. But also if our goal is, as a listener, is to help them to process what's what experiences they've been having, then encouraging them to present the information in a narrative kind of way can be one of the things that's quite helpful for that. So again, you probably don't wanna ask too many even open ended questions in a row. It might feel like a bit of an interrogation. You could intersperse the other listening techniques like mirroring or reflecting. This is where we basically repeat back a few of the words that the other person said. You could do it strategically. You might repeat back the final words that they said, if that's something that's likely to encourage them to keep talking, or you could repeat back the change words in what they said. Like, if they said, you know, everyone keeps telling me that I need to get everyone keeps telling me that I need to give up drinking, but they've got no idea what it's like for me. Like, we could reflect back the the fact that other people have told them that they should probably consider changing their habits. Other people have mentioned something. Or we could talk about the bit of their statement that was solution focused or future focused. So those are the three options that I tend to to choose between what do I mirror and what do I reflect. The last bit of what they said, the most important bit of what they said, the change bit of what they said, or the future focused solution focused bit. So if you've got a staff member and you're a team leader, maybe they're coming to you complaining about somebody else on the team. They're not pulling their weight. I keep hearing stories about how they're making all of these mistakes. I'm so sick of it. They're being treated differently. It's not fair on the rest of us. So a reflecting or a mirroring would be something like you don't feel like it's fair or you it's impacting on the rest of you, or you feel like they're being treated differently, or you've tried to talk about it with them, but you haven't been able to get to an outcome, or it sounds like you're aware that other people are being affected as well. So we put a bit of an upward inflection on the end of our sentence, kind of like the classic Australian caricature, the way that we talk with an upward inflection when we're just saying something, but it's not really a question. So we would deliberately do that even if you're an inadvertent end of sentence riser as an Aussie, because it is. It's a bit of a question mark. It's like, other people have been affected? Sorry. You feel like they've been treated differently? And if the person doesn't speak, you could say something like, how so? But I find that very, very rarely do you have to do that. Just repeating back a few of the words that the person said is a lovely organic way of getting them to keep speaking. So if we intersperse those closed ended questions, the open ended questions, with that reflecting or mirroring, it tends to mean that it comes across as somewhat organic and genuine, at least in our initial efforts to create that connection. The other thing that you want to focus on are what I call coherent responses. If the person's saying something that's really exciting, like, you should be act a little bit excited, like a facial expression that's very slightly excited or saying something like, oh, wow. And if they're talking about something that's really hard for them or a real struggle, you're saying something like, yeah, I I get where you're coming from. I I really appreciate all of those different events that you've been through and and just how much impact that's had, not just on yourself, but on the other members of the team. Like, that coherent response, I'm matching the affect, the feelings, the emotions that you're kind of bringing to the story. You have to tread a little bit carefully if you're in a management or leadership role because you probably don't want to imply that you agree with them. But you could say something like, well, look, I can certainly see that from where you sit, this is how you're seeing things. Level two are the different options that we've got for coregulation and helping the other person to begin to feel heard. Now I think the two options that work for this are longer and shorter summaries. The shorter summaries that we might include is something like an accurate summary of their thinking, their feelings, and their behaviors through the story. So we could say something like, gosh, that sounds really frustrating, and it's not like it's just a one off. It's actually been a pattern that you've been dealing with for quite a long time now. So it's a shorter kind of summary, but I'm touching on this has been really difficult for you, and here's one of the important elements of the story that you just said. That sounds really challenging and not just for you, or that sounds really difficult. And it's particularly frustrating given the fact that you've done everything that you could to prevent this problem from coming up, and yet you're still sitting here now in the mess that other people have created, and it's your job to fix it. The longest summary that we could create is where we play back quite a bit of the detail in what they shared with us. You wouldn't just say something like, that sounds really full on. That sounds really difficult. Gosh. That sounds really challenging. We would say something like, let me just check I understood what you've told me so far. So it actually feels like since you begun in this new role, you feel you've been wondering if maybe you had enough support. You've been looking around at other people in different roles and seeing the way that they were treated in terms of KPIs, and it certainly felt from your perspective, like, for some reason, your team is being unfairly treated. You've tried to raise this with your line manager, but it sounds like you haven't been able to get any resolution. And, obviously, that's what's prompted you to set up this meeting with myself. Have I got that right so far? So I'm not implying agreeing or disagreeing at this stage. It's just a long summary of everything that they've told you. Especially if you disagree or you think they've got some information wrong, it can be quite challenging to bite your tongue and do this. But that is often laying the scaffold, laying the foundation that we need to build on the next level of the active listening conversation. So the principles that we would apply here is we would show them that we're not certain. We're still open to new information. We want to provide them with autonomy. Look. Ultimately, it's up to you. I guess you've got this or this as choices. Which way are you leaning? We don't want to imply judgment. If my son tells me that he didn't eat his lunch today, I obviously don't want to jump down his neck straight away and say, well, for goodness sakes, do you understand how much lettuce costs at the moment from the supermarket or something? We wanna be solution focused and future focused. So So even if in our longer summary, we talk about the problems and the hurdles and the setbacks that they've had, at the end of it, we probably want to focus on the future and on the solutions by saying something like, so it sounds like you're still trying to decide what your next steps will be. Level three in our active listening skill set is what I think about as reciprocal change skills. What we want to do is to give 51% and give the other person an impression that we are genuinely open to their perspective. We're genuinely curious. We're actually taking what they have to say seriously. And when the other person gets that sense that we really care, they really do feel that, then that often creates the foundation for them to give it back to us. I think so much when I'm doing mediations and, you know, I'm watching debates and that kind of thing online or in person, people don't do a good job of convincing the other person to change their mind. And I think the step that they're often missing is they're obviously never going to be willing to change their own mind. So how on earth could you expect somebody else to be willing to do it just because you give them new information? I mean, you're not gonna change your mind if you get new information. At least that's not my impression. That's not my experience of interacting with you. So this often comes, this genuine curiosity. Like, I mean, we can actually let go of some of the assumptions that we have about the other person or what they've done or their motivations when we understand the way that perception and memory works, it's not an accurate, so to speak, data focused view of the world that we live. All of our perception is internal. It's the way that our brain creates a sense of the desk and the chair and the microphone and the computer and everything else that's in the room with me. So if it's my retinas taking in the bouncing photons that hit my visual cortex and it creates a sense of a computer in front of me, then it's quite possible that the other person sitting looking at the same events playing out are going to interpret it differently. And it's not just that. The way that my brain interprets something like a computer sitting in front of me also depends on my memory. It's all of the experiences that have gone into my learning until this point. So I really like to remind myself that I actually don't know all of the facts here. I actually don't have all of the data. It's perfectly possible that the other person has a very valid perspective, and the way that they're seeing this situation, it makes sense to them. But in a very literal way, it's not like it's wrong. The experiences that they've had are going to impact on the way that they interpret these situations, which ultimately impact on the way that they respond. People do the things that they do because of the things that have happened to them. And I think this can be very helpful for you if you're struggling with something like forgiveness, for example, or empathy about why somebody should could act in a way that's so harmful for others. So we should have an open attitude, attitude, fully appreciating the way that our background has influenced our own perception and our own constraints and cognition, our own blind spots, our own limitations. And it helps us, I think, to then be less judgmental about the other person and why they're wrong or why they're not seeing things as validly as we are. It also informs what you pay attention to because instead of just thinking about conflict and conversation as a factual discussion, you begin to interpret it as more of each person is developing a subjective story here. It's a narrative. The way that the person sees themselves before as well as into the future is going to affect the way that they interpret this current situation. There's a lovely phrase from the bible when an angel meets Hagar and says, where have you come from and where are you going? And I really like those two questions, where have you come from and where are you going, because I think that often influences the way that we interpret this current situation and our own expectations about ourselves and others. And if we can look inward in more of an open ended, more granular, less black and white kind of way, I think that also then helps us to see other people in more of an open ended and genuinely accepting, genuinely curious, genuinely open to what they have to say kind of, approach. And that then, I think, is the ultimate key. You know, those conversations where you walk away and you feel different, like there's something that's changed in you from that experience of being listened to. You've got a higher level of awareness. You've developed some level of insight. I think that reciprocal change, that's often the secret ingredient that that good listeners are able to do, and probably what creates a bit of a ceiling on the less skilled listeners, especially when they're feeling a bit more flustered or stressed or you're just short of time. But what do you think? How does that overview of the level one, creating a sense of connection, level two, the coregulation and some of those longer summary skills, and then level three, creating that reciprocal change through instilling a genuinely open and curious attitude ourselves. How does that resonate with you? Do you think about active listening and empathy in a similar kind of way, or do you have different elements that you tend to focus on? I'd love to hear from you. If it has been useful and you would be willing to leave a positive review, that is incredibly appreciated. It makes a big difference for little podcasts like this. And if you've got an idea for a future topic, a question, a case study that you would like me to talk about, whether it's a workplace conflict situation or conflict outside of work, please feel free to send it through. The email address is podcast@SimonGoode.com. I have started a conflict skills newsletter, so if you'd like to get some conflict resources sent to your inbox, you can sign up at simongoode.com. And I've also got a self access version of my essential foundations for conflict management training. So there's a few little bits and pieces, that might be of interest to a few of the people that are listening, so I just wanted to mention that quickly as well. Thank you very much for listening, and I hope to see you again in a future episode of the Conflict Skills Podcast. Bye for now.