a good listener is a good speaker essay

Essay on Be a Good Listener

Students are often asked to write an essay on Be a Good Listener in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Be a Good Listener

Understanding good listening.

Good listening is more than just hearing. It’s about understanding and showing respect for the speaker. It involves paying full attention, not interrupting, and responding appropriately.

Benefits of Good Listening

Good listening helps in learning, building relationships, and solving problems. It makes you more understanding and compassionate. It also improves your communication skills.

How to Be a Good Listener

To be a good listener, you need to focus on the speaker, avoid distractions, and show empathy. Don’t rush to respond. Instead, take time to understand what’s being said. Remember, patience is key.

Good listening is a skill that everyone should learn. It not only makes us better communicators but also better human beings.

250 Words Essay on Be a Good Listener

The art of listening, the importance of being a good listener.

Being a good listener fosters meaningful relationships, promotes understanding, and encourages the sharing of ideas. It is a cornerstone of effective communication, and its importance extends beyond personal relationships to academic and professional settings.

Becoming a good listener involves several key attributes. Firstly, it requires attention. This means not only hearing the words spoken but also understanding the underlying emotions and ideas. It involves observing non-verbal cues such as body language and tone of voice.

Secondly, it necessitates patience. It is about allowing the speaker to express their thoughts without interruption, even if it takes them a while to articulate their ideas.

Thirdly, empathy is pivotal. It involves acknowledging the speaker’s feelings and perspectives, even if they differ from your own.

Benefits of Being a Good Listener

Being a good listener has numerous benefits. It enhances learning, fosters empathy, and promotes trust. It can lead to more profound insights and understanding, not only of others but also of oneself.

500 Words Essay on Be a Good Listener

Introduction.

Listening is an essential part of communication, often overlooked in favor of its more expressive counterpart, speaking. However, the art of being a good listener is a powerful tool in any interpersonal relationship, be it professional or personal. It fosters understanding, empathy, and connection, and is a skill that can be honed with conscious effort.

The Importance of Good Listening

Good listening goes beyond merely hearing the words spoken to us. It involves understanding the speaker’s perspective, emotions, and intentions. It is the cornerstone of effective communication, enabling us to respond appropriately and build stronger relationships. In a world increasingly dominated by digital communication, the importance of good listening cannot be overstated. It is the key to bridging gaps in understanding and fostering genuine human connections.

Characteristics of a Good Listener

The role of empathy in listening.

Empathy plays a crucial role in effective listening. By putting ourselves in the speaker’s shoes, we can better understand their feelings and perspectives. Empathetic listening can foster deeper connections, as it demonstrates respect and validation for the speaker’s experiences. It also encourages open and honest communication, as the speaker feels safe and understood.

The benefits of being a good listener are manifold. In a professional setting, it can lead to improved teamwork, problem-solving, and decision-making, as everyone’s ideas are heard and understood. On a personal level, it can strengthen relationships, as it fosters mutual respect and understanding. Moreover, good listening skills can enhance our learning and growth, as we open ourselves up to new perspectives and ideas.

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Husband and Wife (detail, 1945) by Milton Avery. Gift of Mr and Mrs Roy R Neuberger. Photo by Allen Phillips/ Wadsworth Atheneum

The art of listening

To listen well is not only a kindness to others but also, as the psychologist carl rogers made clear, a gift to ourselves.

by M M Owen   + BIO

Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realisation crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people. I never listen.

Perhaps never was a little strong – but certainly my listening often occurred through a fog of distraction and self-regard. On my worst days, this could make me a shallow, solipsistic presence. Haltingly, I began to try to reach inside my own mental machinery, marshal my attention differently, listen better. I wasn’t sure what I was doing; but I had crossed paths with a few people who, as a habit, gave others their full attention – and it was powerful. It felt rare, it felt real; I wanted them around.

As a culture, we treat listening as an automatic process about which there is not a lot to say: in the same category as digestion, or blinking. When the concept of listening is addressed at any length, it is in the context of professional communication; something to be honed by leaders and mentors, but a specialisation that everyone else can happily ignore. This neglect is a shame. Listening well, it took me too long to discover, is a sort of magic trick: both parties soften, blossom, they are less alone.

Along the way, I discovered that Carl Rogers, one of the 20th century’s most eminent psychologists, had put a name to this underrated skill: ‘active listening’. And though Rogers’s work was focused initially on the therapeutic setting, he drew no distinction between this and everyday life: ‘Whatever I have learned,’ he wrote, ‘is applicable to all of my human relationships.’ What Rogers learnt was that listening well – which necessarily involves conversing well and questioning well – is one of the most accessible and most powerful forms of connection we have.

T he paucity of my listening powers dawned on me as a byproduct of starting to meditate. This is not to make some claim to faux enlightenment – simply to say that meditation is the practice of noticing what you notice, and meditators tend to carry this mindset beyond the yoga mat, and begin to see their own mind more clearly. Among a smorgasbord of other patterns and quirks, what I saw was a self that, too often, didn’t listen.

The younger me enjoyed conversation. But a low, steady egoism meant that what I really enjoyed was talking. When it was someone else’s turn to talk, the listening could often feel like a chore. I might be passively absorbing whatever was being said – but a greater part of me would be daydreaming, reminiscing, making plans. I had a habit of interrupting, in the rather masculine belief that, whatever others had to say, I could say better for them. Sometimes, I would zone out and tune back in to realise that I’d been asked a question. I had a horrible habit, I saw, of sitting in silent linguistic craftsmanship, shaping my answer for when my turn came around – and only half-listening to what I’d actually be responding to.

The exceptions to this state of affairs, I began to see, were situations where there existed self-interest. If the subject was me, or material that might be of benefit to me, my attention would automatically sharpen. It was very easy to listen to someone explaining what steps I needed to take to ace a test or make some money. It was easy to listen to juicy gossip, particularly of the kind that made me feel fortunate or superior. It was easy to listen to debates on topics where I had a burning desire to be right. It was easy to listen to attractive women.

Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them

On bad days, this attentional autopilot constricted me. On topics of politics or philosophy, this made me a bore and a bully. People avoided disagreeing with me on anything, even trivial points, because they knew it would balloon into annoyance and a failure to listen to their reasoning. In my personal life, too often, I could forget to support or lift up those around me. The flipside of not listening is not questioning – because, when you don’t want to listen, the last thing you want to do is trigger the exact scenario in which you are most expected to listen. And so I didn’t ask my friends serious questions often enough. I liked jokes, and I liked gossip; but I’d forget to ask them the real stuff. Or I’d ask them things they’d already told me a week ago. Or forget to ask about their recent job interview or break-up.

This is where bad listening does the most damage: it signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them, or you do but only in a skittish, flickering sort of a way. And so people become wary of opening up, or asking for advice, or leaning on you in the way that we lean on those people we truly believe to be big of heart.

All of the above makes for rather a glum picture, I know. I don’t want to overstate things. I wasn’t a monster. I cared for people and, when I concentrated, I could show it. I was liked, I made my way in the world, I apparently possessed what we call charisma. Plenty of the time, I listened fine. But this may be precisely the point: you can coast along in life as a bad listener. We tend to forgive it, because it’s common.

Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening (2020), frames modern life as particularly antagonistic to good listening:

[W]e are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.

Why do we accept bad listening? Because, I think, listening well is hard, and we all know it. Like all forms of self-improvement, breaking this carapace requires intention, and ideally guidance.

W hen I discovered Rogers’s writings on listening, it was confirmation that, in many conversations, I had been getting it all wrong. When listening well, wrote Rogers and his co-author Richard Evans Farson in 1957, the listener ‘does not passively absorb the words which are spoken to him. He actively tries to grasp the facts and the feelings in what he hears, and he tries, by his listening, to help the speaker work out his own problems.’ This was exactly the stance I had only rarely adopted.

Born in 1902 – in the same suburb of Chicago as Hemingway, three years earlier – Rogers had a strict religious upbringing. As a young man, he seemed destined for the ministry. But in 1926, he crossed the road from Union Theological Seminary to Columbia University, and committed himself to psychology. (At this time, psychology was a field so new and so in vogue that, in 1919, during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, Sigmund Freud had secretly advised Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador in Paris.)

Rogers’s early work was focused on what were then called ‘delinquent’ children; but, by the 1940s, he was developing a new approach to psychotherapy, which came to be termed ‘humanistic’ and ‘person-centred’. Unlike Freud, Rogers believed that all of us possess ‘strongly positive directional tendencies’. Unhappy people, he believed, were not broken; they were blocked. And as opposed to the then-dominant modes of psychotherapy – psychoanalysis and behaviourism – Rogers believed that a therapist should be less a problem-solver, and more a sort of skilled midwife, drawing out solutions that already existed in the client. All people possess a deep urge to ‘self-actualise’, he believed, and it is the therapist’s job to nurture this urge. They were there to ‘release and strengthen the individual, rather than to intervene in his life’. Key to achieving this goal was careful, focused, ‘active’ listening.

That this perspective doesn’t seem particularly radical today is a testament to Rogers’s legacy. As one of his biographers, David Cohen, writes , Rogers’s therapeutic philosophy ‘has become part of the fabric of therapy’. Today, in the West, many of us believe that going to therapy can be an empowering and positive move, rather than an indicator of crisis or sickness. This shift owes a great deal to Rogers. So too does the expectation that a therapist will allow themselves to enter into our thinking, and express a careful but tangible empathy. Where Freud focused on the mind in isolation, Rogers valued more of a merging of minds – boundaried, but intimate.

On bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle

Active listening, for Rogers, was essential to creating the conditions for growth. It was one of the key ingredients in making another person feel less alone, less stuck, and more capable of self-insight.

Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view , just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyse it, categorise it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard. As a teenager, I was a passionate atheist and a passionate Leftist. I saw things as very simple: all believers are gullible, and all conservatives are psychopaths, or at minimum heartless. I could hold to my Manichean view precisely because I had made no effort to grasp anyone else’s viewpoint.

Another of my old mental blocks, also flagged by Rogers, is the instinct that anyone I’m talking to is likely dumber than me. This arrogance is terrible for any attempt at listening, as Rogers recognises: ‘Until we can demonstrate a spirit which genuinely respects the potential worth of an individual,’ he writes, we won’t be good listeners. Previously, on bad days, I would wait hawk-like for things I could correct or belittle. I would look for clues that this person was wrong, and could be made to feel wrong. But as Rogers writes, to listen well, we ‘must create a climate which is neither critical, evaluative, nor moralising’.

‘Our emotions are often our own worst enemies when we try to become listeners,’ he wrote. In short, a great deal of bad listening comes down to lack of self-control. Other people animate us, associations fly, we are pricked by ideas. (This is why we have built careful social systems around not discussing such things as religion or politics at dinner parties.) When I was 21, if someone suggested that some pop music was pretty good, or capitalism had some redeeming features, I was incapable of not reacting. This made it very hard for me to listen to anyone’s opinion but my own. Which is why, Rogers says, one of the first skills to learn is non-intervention. Patience. ‘To listen to oneself,’ he wrote, ‘is a prerequisite to listening to others.’ Here, the analogy with meditation is clear: don’t chase every thought, don’t react to every internal event, stay centred. Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.

And when we do intervene, following Rogers, we must resist the ever-present urge to drag the focus of the conversation back to ourselves. Sociologists call this urge ‘the shift response’. When a friend tells me they’d love to visit Thailand, I must resist the selfish pull to leap in with Oh yeah, Thailand is great, I spent Christmas in Koh Lanta once, did I ever tell you about the Muay Thai class I did? Instead, I must stay with them: where exactly do they want to go, and why? Sociologists call this ‘the support response’. To listen well is to step back, keep the focus with someone else.

A nice example of Rogers’s approach, taken from his career, is his experience during the Second World War. Rogers was asked by the US Air Force to assess the psychological health of gunners, among whom morale appeared low. By being patient, and nonjudgmental, and gentle with his attention, Rogers discovered that the gunners had been bottling up one of their chief complaints: they resented civilians. Returning to his hometown and attending a football game, reported one pilot, ‘all that life and gaiety and luxury – it makes you so mad’. Rogers didn’t suggest any drastic intervention, or push any change in view. He recommended that the men be allowed to be honest about their anger, and process it openly, without shame. Their interlocutors, Rogers said, should begin by simply listening to them – for as long as it took, until they were unburdened. Only then should they respond.

Much like meditating, listening in this way takes work. It may take even more work outside the therapy room, in the absence of professional expectation. At all times, for almost all of us, our internal monologue is running, and it is desperate to spill from our brain onto our tongue. Stemming the flow requires intention. This is necessary because, even when we think an intervention is positive, it may be self-centred. We might not feel it, Rogers says, but, typically, when we offer our interpretation or input, ‘we are usually responding to our own needs to see the world in certain ways’. When I first began to observe myself as a listener, I saw how difficult I found it to simply let people finish their sentences. I noticed the infinite wave of impatience on which my attention rode. I noticed the slippery temptation of asking questions that were not really questions at all, but impositions of opinion disguised as questions. The better road, I began to see, was to stay silent. To wait.

The active listener’s job is to simply be there, to focus on ‘thinking with people instead of for or about them’. This thinking with requires listening for what Rogers calls ‘total meaning’. This means registering both the content of what they are saying, and (more subtly) the ‘ feeling or attitude underlying this content’. Often, the feeling is the real thing being expressed, and the content a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy. Capturing this feeling involves real concentration, especially as nonverbal cues – hesitation, mumbling, changes in posture – are crucial. Zone out, half-listen, and the ‘total meaning’ will entirely elude us.

Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists?

And though the bad listener loves to internally multitask while someone else is talking, faking it won’t work. As Rogers writes, people are alert to the mere ‘pretence of interest’, resenting it as ‘empty and sterile’. To sincerely listen means to marshal a mixture of agency, compassion, attention and commitment. This ‘demands practice’, Rogers said, and ‘may require changes in our own basic attitudes’.

Rogers’s theories were developed in a context where one person is attempting, explicitly, to help another person heal and grow. But Rogers was always explicit about the fact that his work was ‘about life’. Of his theories, he said that ‘the same lawfulness governs all human relationships’.

I think I started off from a lower point; by nature, I think my brain tends toward distraction and self-regard. But one would not need to be a bad listener to benefit from Rogers’s ideas. Even someone whose autopilot is an empathetic, interested listener can find much in his work. Rogers did more than anyone else to explore listening, systemise its dynamics, and record his professional explorations.

Certainly, being a good listener had an impact on Rogers’s own life. As another of his biographers, Howard Kirschenbaum, told me, Rogers discovered that ‘listening empathically to others was enormously healing and freeing, in both therapy and other relationships’. At his 80th birthday party, a cabaret was staged in which two Carl Rogers impersonators listened to one another in poses of exaggerated empathy. The well-meaning gag was a compliment; in a somewhat rare case of intellectuals actually embodying the ideas they espouse, Rogers was remembered as an excellent listener by everyone who knew him. Despite the kind of foibles that can weigh down any life – a reliance on alcohol, a frustration with monogamy – Rogers appears to have been a decent man: warm, open, and never cruel.

That he was able to carry his theories into his life should give encouragement, even to those of us who aren’t world-famous psychologists. Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists? Why else does all seduction start with riveted attention? Consider your own experience, and you will likely find a direct correlation between the people you feel love you, and the people who actually listen to the things you say. The people who never ask us a thing are the people we drift away from. The people who listen so hard that they pull new things out of us – who hear things we didn’t even say – are the ones we grab on to for life.

P erhaps above all, Rogers understood the stakes involved in listening well. All of us, when we are our best selves, want to bring growth to the people we choose to give our time to. We want to help them unlock themselves, stand taller, think better. The dynamic may not be as direct as with a therapist; there is more of an equal footing – but when our relationships are healthy, we want those around us to thrive. Listening well, Rogers showed, is the simplest route there. Be with people in the right way, and they become ‘enriched in courage and self-confidence’. They feel the releasing glow of attention, and develop an ‘underlying confidence in themselves’. If we don’t want this for our friends, then we are not their friends.

Indeed, such is the generosity of active listening that one can view the practice as one that borders on the spiritual. Though Rogers traded theology for psychology in his early 20s, he always maintained an interest in spirituality. He enjoyed the work of Søren Kierkegaard , an existentialist Christian; and, over the years, he had public discussions with the theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber . In successful therapy sessions, said Rogers, both therapist and client can find themselves in ‘a trance-like feeling’ where ‘there is, to borrow Buber’s phrase, a real “I-Thou” relationship’. Of his relationship to his clients, Rogers said: ‘I would like to go with him on the fearful journey into himself.’

Perhaps this is a bit rich for you; perhaps you would rather frame active listening as simply good manners, or a neat interpersonal hack. The point is: really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing. Only rarely will people notice, let alone thank you, for your efforts. Yet this generosity of attention is what people deserve.

And lest this all sound a bit pious – active listening is not pure altruism. Listening well, as Rogers said, is ‘a growth experience’. It allows us to get the best of others. The carousel of souls is endless. People have deeply felt and fascinating lives, and they can enfranchise us to worlds we would never otherwise know. If we truly listen, we expand our own intelligence, emotional range, and sense that the world remains open to discovery. Active listening is a kindness to others but, as Rogers was always quick to make clear, it is also a gift to ourselves.

Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel

Rogers became a hero of the 1960s counterculture . He admired their utopian dreams of psychic liberation and uninhibited communication; late in life, he was drawn to the New Age writings of Carlos Castañeda. All of this speaks to one of the key critiques of Rogers’s philosophy, both during his lifetime and today: that he was too optimistic. Rogers recognised himself that he was, in Cohen’s words, ‘incorrigibly positive’. His critics called him a sort of Pollyanna of the mind, and thought him naive for believing that such simple interventions as empathy and listening could trigger transformation in people. (Perhaps certain readers will harbour similar critiques about my own beliefs as expressed here.)

Those inclined to agree with this assessment of Rogers will probably think that I have overstated the case. Listening as love? Listening as spiritual practice? But in my own life, a renewed approach to listening has improved how I relate to others, and I now believe listening is absurdly under-discussed. Good listening is complex, subtle, slippery – but it is also right here, it lives in us, and we can work on it every day. Unlike the abstractions of so much of ethics and so much of philosophy, our listening is there to be honed, every day. Like a muscle, it can be trained. Like an intellect, it can be tested. In the very same moment, it can spur both our own growth and the growth of others. Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I couldn’t write nonfiction that anyone else actually wanted to read until I began trying to truly listen.

‘The greatest compliment that was ever paid me,’ said Henry David Thoreau, ‘was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.’ Left on autopilot, I can still be a bad listener. I’ll interrupt, finish sentences, chivvy people along. I suspect many of the people I know still find me to be, on balance, an average listener. But I try! With anyone I can impact – and especially those whose souls I can help to light up – I follow Rogers; I offer as much ‘of safety, of warmth, of empathic understanding, as I can genuinely find in myself to give.’ And I open myself to whatever I can learn. I fail in my attentions, again and again. But I tune back in, again and again. I believe it is working.

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Biography and memoir

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Global history

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Husserl’s well-tended archive has given him a rich afterlife, while Nietzsche’s was distorted by his axe-grinding sister

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How to Become a Better Listener

• Robin Abrahams
• Boris Groysberg

Sharpen these seven skills.

Listening is a skill that’s vitally important, sadly undertaught, and physically and mentally taxing. In the aftermath of Covid-19, particularly with the shift to remote work and the red-hot job market, it’s never been more important — or more difficult — for leaders to be good listeners. This article offers nine tips to help leaders become more active listeners, and a breakdown of the subskills involved in listening and how you can improve in them.

It’s never been more important — or more difficult — for leaders to be good listeners. Job switching is rampant, and remote work means we don’t get the nonverbal cues we’d pick up from an in-person conversation. Employers who fail to listen and thoughtfully respond to their people’s concerns will see greater turnover. And given that the highest rates of turnover are among top performers who can take clients and projects with them, and the frontline employees responsible for the customer experience, the risk is clear.

• Robin Abrahams is a research associate at Harvard Business School.
• BG Boris Groysberg is a professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate at the school’s Race, Gender & Equity Initiative. He is the coauthor, with Colleen Ammerman, of Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021). bgroysberg

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Why Listening Matters for Leaders

By  Sarah Bray , C. K. Gunsalus , Elizabeth A. Luckman , Nicholas C. Burbules and Sebastian Wraight

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Effective leaders are good listeners. When leaders first assume a position of responsibility, taking the time to hear and understand the people who make up a unit can help them build rapport and credibility from the get-go.

One effective practice among influential and successful leaders is to embark on a listening and learning exercise when they first take over: making the time to visit, speak with and -- most important -- listen to the people within the units or divisions they oversee. Another focal point for listening and learning can be to conduct an assessment of your unit’s strengths and shortcomings. You can then use the results as the basis for a group conversation or individual interviews. Faculty or staff members may all agree that a particular issue is a problem, but they might have very different ideas about what is causing that problem or how best to deal with it. The Academic Unit Diagnostic Tool (AUDiT) dashboard , which we have discussed in previous columns , can be a useful resource in such initial assays.

Beyond a specific tour and assessment, ongoing and continuous listening as a leader can help build a healthy and productive unit in at least three significant ways.

No. 1. Listening shows respect and regard for the people you work with. It helps to build rapport and demonstrates that you care about others and what they have to say. Listening is reciprocal, and leaders can model this behavior; when you are a good listener, people will tend to listen more carefully to you, as well. Thus, listening is a powerful tool for increasing influence and improving relationships at work. The best listeners in an organization are also frequently the biggest influencers.

No. 2. Listening builds a broader sense of trust and community. Most people -- and especially those in academe -- generally have something to say, and it can feel good to know that others consider those insights important enough to seek them out. Listening to the people who work with and for you is an invaluable skill in leadership -- and an essential duty. It demonstrates that you value the members of your group as well as your external and internal stakeholders. Together, such manifestations can improve effectiveness in your work and interactions.

No. 3. Listening broadens your perspective and helps you accumulate important information and reduce misunderstandings. If your work colleagues are comfortable bringing their ideas, concerns and issues to you, they will generally be more satisfied and more productive, and you will be aware of potential problems before they can grow. To capture a comprehensive view of the unit, it is useful to speak not just with the faculty but also with administrators and staff. Listening is fundamental to innovation and problem solving. When the leader is a good listener, everyone becomes more capable of providing value in their work.

Active vs. Passive Listening

There are different kinds of listening, and they are best suited to different kinds of interactions. Sometimes it is enough for people to simply feel they’ve been heard; other times you’ll need to invest more actively in the conversation to glean more details and confirm facts. In still other situations, you will be receiving a complaint or grievance upon which you must act as an authority figure, which requires still a different set of listening tools .

Active listening requires full engagement in the conversation with the other person. A key aspect of active listening is to ask questions rooted in curiosity to draw out further details and to paraphrase the statements of others in order to confirm your understanding. Another aspect of active listening is to demonstrate that you are paying attention and hearing the other person through your body language (like eye contact) and affirmation (like nodding your head).

Passive listening is more relevant when others simply need to vent frustrations or think through their own issues out loud. Passive listening is less about seeking to understand and more about ensuring that the other person feels heard.

Whether you engage in active or passive listening depends largely on what you perceive to be the other person’s goals. Is this a discussion in which you need to learn something? Perhaps gather more information or perspectives regarding an incident? Are you having a conversation where someone is upset about something? Maybe the person just needs to vent, or perhaps they are just seeking your moral support or sympathy. Or is the person bringing a complaint to you, as an authority figure, for you to act on? Taking a moment to understand the purpose of the conversation can help you to identify which listening skills to employ.

Using Questions Effectively

Just as you should consider different forms of listening, different kinds of questions can elicit new information. Open-ended questions can help uncover additional dimensions of what is being presented. Asking “Why?” or “How would that work?” or saying, “Tell me more about …” provides space for the responding person to share relevant information and often elicits information you would not have known about or pursued. In contrast, when your queries are leading, you may find you wind up hearing what you want to hear rather than what the person is really trying to say. For example, asking someone “Will you do x ?” is seeking a yes or no answer, not requesting an opinion or input on the matter.

Take care not to “weaponize” your questions. Other people often experience skeptical or openly adversarial questions as an attack or “gotcha!” moment. Strive to be genuinely curious in the way you ask questions. For example: “I’m trying to understand how we got here; can you walk me through these events?” is a way to gather information neutrally, without making accusations. Asking, “What were you thinking when you did x ?” immediately puts the person on the defensive.

Asking follow-up questions, rather than just reacting to what you are hearing, can encourage effective conversation. They can be a good way to keep a conversation steady and avoid escalation in difficult discussions. Questions like “And then what happened?” or “Can you tell me more about that?” serve not only to elicit more information; they also acknowledge your engagement and presence in the moment with the speaker.

Some people carry an innate aversion against asking “too many” questions -- perhaps because they don’t want to seem annoying or fear looking foolish. While we can all appreciate those concerns, assuming you have enough information and don’t need to ask any further questions can be a recipe for disaster at the other extreme.

Indeed, a fatal error that leaders sometimes commit is to assume that their experience and knowledge have fully prepared them to handle whatever challenges await them in a new situation. They assume they already know the layout, and that what worked before, or in other settings, will work here. Remember, just because the symptoms might look familiar does not mean the underlying problem is the same.

Nonverbal Aspects of Listening

As we noted, body language and facial expressions play an important role in conversations, and they are often overlooked because they operate subconsciously or habitually. In a surprisingly short time span, body language can aid in establishing rapport and trust with another person -- or antagonize them without your even realizing it.

One of the simplest ways to establish rapport with your body language is to mirror your partner’s posture. That doesn’t mean mimicking their every move; it means adopting similar sitting positions, angling your head the same way or using shared styles of speech. Two people in rapport will often exhibit those similarities unconsciously.

The orientation of your shoulders and how your body is positioned can telegraph your level of engagement in a conversation. Are you facing the other person? Angling to the side can give the impression you are not fully focused, not truly listening or perhaps don’t care about the situation. Similarly, your posture signals your level of interest. Slouching and leaning back can make you seem unconcerned or aloof, whereas leaning in too far can come off as intrusive, aggressive or irritated. Crossed arms are often perceived as aloofness and disinterest -- and disagreement.

Not all conversations call for the same body language. For example, if you are discussing data or examining materials, orienting yourself toward them rather than the person you are with can help to keep the conversation on point or de-escalate it when things get tense. Particularly in moments of potential conflict, emphasizing that you and the other person are both interacting with a shared resource can help create a “we/us” as opposed to a “me/you” dynamic.

Finally, your tone of voice signals your mood and attitude. Most of us do not pay enough attention to what we are telegraphing when we speak, and tone of voice is easily misconstrued. Take care to monitor your own tone of voice, particularly when discussions are growing contentious, and recognize its effect on others. Maintaining a calm, steady and rhythmic cadence can help to keep conversations focused, productive and professional.

When you see a colleague in the hallway, practice asking open-ended questions and reflecting back what you hear. The topic doesn’t really matter -- it could be a recent vacation, project idea or a kid off to college. When you are working with colleagues, ask substantive follow-up questions to help you understand their points of view. When someone starts to vent frustrations, practice passive listening; offer support instead of rushing toward a solution. Take time to reflect on your interactions and consider the role your body language and expressions played.

Even people who identify the same issues may have very different views and understandings of their significance and cause. The power of informally and regularly listening, as well as conducting a more formal audit , lies in opening further conversations and the perspectives that can be uncovered through them. You only get that by asking questions, listening carefully when others speak and taking the appropriate follow-up actions when necessary.

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Sociability

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Sociability  • Communication

How to Be a Good Listener

Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting life-skills anyone can have. Yet, few of us know how to do it, not because we are evil, but because no one has taught us how and – a related point – few have listened sufficiently well to us. So we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others, but reluctant to hear them. Friendship degenerates into a socialised egoism.

Like most things, the answer lies in education. Our civilisation is full of great books on how to speak – Cicero’s Orator and Aristotle’s Rhetoric were two of the greatest in the ancient world – but sadly no one has ever written a book called ‘The Listener’. There are a range of things that the good listener is doing that makes it so nice to spend time in their company.   

Without necessarily quite realising it, we’re often propelled into conversation by something that feels both urgent and somehow undefined. We’re bothered at work, we’re toying with more ambitious career moves, we’re not sure if so and so is right for us; a relationship is in difficulties; we’re fretting about something or feeling a bit low about life in general (without being able to put a finger on exactly what’s wrong); or perhaps we’re very excited and enthusiastic about something – though the reasons for our passion are tricky to pin down.

At heart, all these are issues in search of elucidation. The good listener knows that we’d ideally move – via conversation with another person – from a confused agitated state of mind to one that was more focused and (hopefully) more serene. Together with them we’d work out what us really at stake. But, in reality, this tends not to happen because there isn’t enough of an awareness of the desire and need for clarification within conversation. There aren’t enough good listeners. So people tend to assert rather than analyse. They restate in many different ways the fact that they are worried, excited, sad or hopeful, and their interlocutor listens but doesn’t assist them to discover more.

Good listeners fight against this with a range of conversational gambits. They hover as the other speaks: they offer encouraging little remarks of support, they make gentle positive gestures: a sigh of sympathy, a nod of encouragement, a strategic ‘hmm’ of interest. All the time they are egging the other to go deeper into issues. They love saying: ‘tell me more about …’; ‘I was fascinated when you said ..’; ‘why did that happen, do you think?’ or ‘how did you feel about that?’

The good listener takes it for granted that they will encounter vagueness in the conversation of others. But they don’t condemn, rush or get impatient, because they see vagueness as a universal and highly significant trouble of the mind that it is the task of a true friend to help with. The good listener never forgets how hard – and how important – it is to know our own minds. Often, we’re in the vicinity of something, but we can’t quite close in on what’s really bothering or exciting us. The good listener knows we hugely benefit from encouragement to elaborate, to go into greater detail, to push a little further. We need someone who, rather than launch forth, will simply say two magic rare words: Go on…

You mention a sibling and they want to know a bit more. What was the relationship like in childhood, how has it changed over time. They’re curious where our concerns and excitements come from. They ask thing like: why did that particularly bother you? Why was that such a big thing for you? They keep our histories in mind, they might refer back to something we said before and we feel they’re building up a deeper base of engagement.

It’s fatally easy to say vague things: we simply mention that something is lovely or terrible, nice or annoying. But we don’t really explore why we feel this way. The good listener has a productive, friendly suspicion of some of our own first statements and is after the deeper attitudes that are lurking in the background. They take things we say like ‘I’m fed up with my job’ or ‘My partner and I are having a lot of rows…’ and help us to concentrate on what it really is about the job we don’t like or what the rows might deep down be about.

They’re bringing to listening an ambition to clear up underlying issues. They don’t just see conversation as the swapping of anecdotes. They are reconnecting the chat you’re having over pizza with the philosophical ambitions of Socrates, whose dialogues are records of his attempts to help his fellow Athenians understand and examine their own underlying ideas and values.

A key move of the good listener is not always to follow every byway or sub-plot that the speaker introduces, for they may be getting lost and further from their own point than they would themselves wish. The good listener is helpfully suspicious, knowing that their purpose is to focus the fundamental themes of the speaker, rather than veering off with them into every side road. They are always looking to take the speaker back to their last reasonable point – saying, ‘Yes, yes, but you were saying just a moment ago..’. Or, ‘So ultimately, what do you think it was about…’ The good listener (paradoxically) is a skilled interrupter. But they don’t (as most people do) interrupt to intrude their own ideas; they interrupt to help the other get back to their original more sincere, yet elusive concerns.

The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness. They know how insane we all are. That’s why others can feel comfortable being heard by them. They give the impression they recognise and accept our follies; they don’t flinch when we mention a particular desire. They reassure us they’re not going to shred our dignity. A big worry in a competitive world is that we feel we can’t afford to be honest about how distressed or obsessed we are. Saying one feels like a failure or a pervert could mean being dropped. The good listener signals early and clearly that they don’t see us in these terms. Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than are appalled by. It is only too easy to end up experiencing ourselves as strangely cursed and exceptionally deviant or uniquely incapable. But the good listener makes their own strategic confessions, so as to set the record straight about the meaning of being a normal (that is very muddled and radically imperfect) human being. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover, a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.

When we’re in the company of people who listen well, we experience a very powerful pleasure, but too often, we don’t really realise what it is about what this person is doing that is so nice. By paying strategic attention to our feelings of satisfaction, we can learn to magnify them and offer them to others, who will notice, heal – and repay the favour in turn. Listening deserves discovery as one of the keys to a good society.

Full Article Index

• 01. Ostracism Anxiety
• 02. The Need For A Modern Monastery
• 03. Why the world can seem so frightening - and how to make it feel less so
• 04. Four Ways of Coping With Anxiety
• 05. Might You Be Hypervigilant? A Sombre Questionnaire
• 06. A Question to Ask Ourselves When We're Feeling Low and Paranoid
• 07. The Importance of Not Knowing
• 08. Why We May Be Addicted to Crises
• 09. The Causes of Obsessive Thinking
• 10. What Our Bodies are Trying to Tell Us
• 11. Anxiety-as-Denial
• 12. Our Anxious Ancestry
• 13. Auditing Our Worries
• 14. Why We May Need a Convalescence
• 15. Don't Hope for the Best; Expect the Worst
• 16. The Age of Agitation
• 17. How to Sleep Better
• 18. How and Why We Catastrophise
• 19. On Being 'Triggered'
• 20. OCD — and How to Overcome It
• 21. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 22. Signs You Might Be Suffering from Complex PTSD
• 23. On Skin Picking
• 24. Stoicism and Tigers Who Come to Tea
• 25. The Seven Most Calming Works of Art in the World
• 26. After the Storm
• 27. Thoughts for the Storm
• 28. Emotional Maturity in a Crisis
• 29. Preparing for Disaster
• 30. How to Stop Being Scared All the Time
• 31. The Ultimate Dark Source of Security
• 32. What Everybody Really Wants
• 33. Simplicity & Anxiety
• 34. A Way Through Panic Attacks
• 35. Self-Hatred & Anxiety
• 36. The Question We Should Ask Ourselves When Anxious
• 37. On Anxiety
• 38. The True Cause of Dread and Anxiety
• 39. On Being Scared All the Time
• 40. The Importance of Having A Breakdown
• 41. On Asking for Help
• 42. The Normality of Anxiety Attacks
• 43. On Panic Attacks
• 01. A Place for Despair
• 02. On Being Gaslit In Our Childhoods
• 03. How to Make It Through
• 04. When Our Battery is Running Low
• 05. The Many Moods We Pass Through
• 06. When I Am Called to Die
• 07. If You Stopped Running, What Would You Need to Feel?
• 08. Can We Live With the Truth?
• 09. Five Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening
• 10. Why Things May Need to Get Worse Before They Can Get Better
• 11. The Limits of the Conscious Mind
• 12. Why Life is Always Difficult
• 13. What is a Transcendental Experience?
• 14. Building the Cathedral
• 15. Rewriting Our Inner Scripts
• 16. What Sleeping Babies Can Teach Us
• 17. How to Endure
• 18. Everything Is So Weird
• 19. Escaping Into History
• 20. The Inevitability of Choice
• 21. What Would Jesus Do?
• 22. Stop Worrying About Your Reputation
• 23. You Still Have Time
• 24. I Will Survive!
• 25. On Trying to Control the Future
• 26. A Few Things Still to Be Grateful For
• 27. No One Knows
• 28. There is No Happily Ever After
• 29. The Catastrophe You Fear Will Happen has Already Happened
• 30. There is Always a Plan B
• 31. The Consolations of History
• 32. The Lessons of Nature
• 33. What Others Think of You - and The Fall of Icarus
• 34. On the Sublime
• 35. Gratitude for the Small Things
• 36. Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters
• 37. On Flowers
• 38. The Valuable Idea Behind the Concept of the Day of Judgement
• 39. The Wisdom of Animals
• 40. The Lottery of Life
• 41. Untranslatable Words
• 42. The Wisdom of Rocks: Gongshi
• 43. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 44. The Faulty Walnut
• 45. Perspectives on Insomnia
• 46. On the Wisdom of Space
• 47. Memento Mori
• 48. On the Wisdom of Cows
• 49. On Calming Places
• 50. Why Small Pleasures Are a Big Deal
• 51. The Consolations of a Bath
• 52. The Importance of Staring out the Window
• 53. Clouds, Trees, Streams
• 54. On Sunshine
• 01. The Ecstatic Joy We Deny Ourselves
• 02. Why Illusions Are Necessary to Achieve Anything
• 03. Preparing for a Decent Night of Sleep
• 04. Returning Anger to Where It Belongs
• 05. Controlling Insomnia – and Life – Through Pessimism
• 06. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 07. Why We Should Refuse to Get into Arguments
• 08. The Perils of Making Predictions
• 09. Making Peace with Life's Mystery
• 10. The Promise of an Unblemished Life
• 11. Daring to Be Simple
• 12. Haikus and Appreciation
• 13. The Call of Calm
• 14. What Would Paradise Look Like?
• 15. How to Process Your Emotions
• 16. The Wisdom of Dusk
• 17. The Appeal of Austere Places
• 18. How to Go to Bed Earlier
• 19. Why We All Need Quiet Days
• 20. The Benefits of Provincial Life
• 21. How to Live in a Hut
• 22. For Those Who (Privately) Aspire to Become More Reclusive
• 23. The Hard Work of Being 'Lazy'
• 24. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 25. Taking It One Day at a Time
• 26. Spirituality for People who Hate Spirituality
• 27. How to Spill A Drink Down One’s Front - and Survive
• 28. How To Stop Worrying Whether or Not They Like You
• 29. On Soothing
• 30. What Is Wrong with Modern Times - and How to Regain Wisdom
• 31. The Disaster of Anthropocentrism - and the Promise of the Transcendent
• 32. On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason
• 33. How We Are Easily, Too Easily, 'Triggered'
• 34. Hypervigilance
• 35. If The Worst Came to the Worst...
• 36. The Wonders of an Ordinary Life
• 37. In Praise of the Quiet Life
• 38. The Pursuit of Calm
• 39. Insomnia and Philosophy
• 01. African Proverbs to Live By
• 02. Why We Are Haunted by Ghosts of the Past
• 03. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 01. What Goes With What
• 02. Eight Rules to Create Nicer Cities
• 03. The Secret Toll of Our Ugly World
• 04. Henri Rousseau
• 05. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 06. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 07. Francisco Goya's Masterpiece
• 08. How Industry Restores Our Faith in Humanity
• 09. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 10. Buildings That Give Hope - and Buildings That Condemn Us
• 11. Katsushika Hokusai
• 12. Agnes Martin
• 13. The Importance of Architecture
• 14. The Secret of Beauty: Order and Complexity
• 15. Le Corbusier
• 16. Two World Views: Romantic and Classical
• 17. Oscar Niemeyer
• 18. Against Obscurity
• 19. Why Do Scandinavians Have Such Impeccable Taste in Interior Design?
• 20. Art for Art's Sake
• 21. Why We Need to Create a Home
• 22. Why You Should Never Say: ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder’
• 23. Andrea Palladio
• 24. Why Design Matters
• 25. On Good and Bad Taste
• 26. On How to Make an Attractive City
• 27. Art as Therapy
• 28. On Ugliness and the Housing Crisis
• 29. Johannes Vermeer
• 30. Caspar David Friedrich
• 31. Henri Matisse
• 32. Edward Hopper
• 33. Louis Kahn
• 34. Coco Chanel
• 35. Jane Jacobs
• 36. Cy Twombly
• 37. Andy Warhol
• 38. Dieter Rams
• 39. A Therapeutic Approach to Art
• 40. Christo and Jeanne-Claude 
• 41. On the Importance of Drawing
• 42. On Art as a Reminder
• 43. On the Price of Art Works
• 44. Secular Chapels
• 45. Relativism and Urban Planning
• 46. What Art Museums Should Be For
• 47. On Fakes and Originals
• 48. The Museum Gift Shop
• 01. What We Might Learn From The Dandies of The Congo
• 02. The Beauty of Komorebi
• 03. The Past Was Not in Black and White
• 04. The Drawer of Odd Things
• 05. Why Middle-Aged Men Think So Often About the Roman Empire
• 06. The Consolations of Catastrophe
• 07. What is the Point of History?
• 08. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 09. The Value of Reading Things We Disagree with
• 10. Easter for Atheists
• 11. The Life House
• 12. Why Philosophy Should Become More Like Pop Music
• 13. Why Stoicism Continues to Matter
• 14. The School of Life: What We Believe
• 15. Cultural Mining
• 16. Lego – the Movies
• 17. Philosophy – the Movies
• 18. History of Ideas – the Movies
• 19. Sociology – the Movies
• 20. Political Theory – the Movies
• 21. Psychotherapy – the Movies
• 22. Greek Philosophy – the Movies
• 23. Eastern Philosophy – the Movies
• 24. Art – the Movies
• 25. On Aphorisms
• 26. What Comes After Religion?
• 27. The Serious Business of Clothes
• 28. What Is the Point of the Humanities?
• 29. Why Music Works
• 30. The Importance of Music
• 31. The Importance of Books
• 32. What Is Comedy For?
• 33. What Is Philosophy For?
• 34. What Is Art For?
• 35. What Is History For?
• 36. What Is Psychotherapy For?
• 37. What Is Literature For?
• 38. The Joys of Sport
• 01. Following in the Buddha's Footsteps
• 02. Six Persimmons
• 03. The Four Hindu Stages of Life
• 04. Rice or Wheat? The Difference Between Eastern and Western Cultures
• 05. Eastern vs Western Views of Happiness
• 06. Four Great Ideas from Hinduism
• 07. Zen Buddhism and Fireflies
• 08. Six Ideas from Eastern Philosophy
• 09. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 10. Kintsugi 金継ぎ
• 12. Lao Tzu
• 13. Confucius
• 14. Sen no Rikyū
• 15. Matsuo Basho
• 16. Mono No Aware
• 17. Guan Yin
• 18. Gongshi
• 20. Kintsugi
• 22. Why so Many Love the Philosophy of the East - and so Few That of the West
• 01. It Isn't About the Length of a Life...
• 02. On Luxury and Sadness
• 03. On Not Being Able To Cook Very Well
• 04. Food as Therapy
• 05. What We Really Like to Eat When No One is Looking
• 06. What Meal Might Suit My Mood? Questionnaire
• 01. Charles Dickens's Secret
• 02. Giuseppe di Lampedusa — The Leopard
• 03. Sei Shōnagon — The Pillow Book
• 04. Kakuzo Okakura — The Book of Tea
• 05. Victor Hugo and the Art of Contempt
• 06. Edward Gibbon — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• 07. How to Read Fewer Books
• 08. The Downfall of Oscar Wilde
• 09. What Voltaire Meant by 'One Must Cultivate One's Own Garden'
• 10. James Baldwin
• 11. Camus and The Plague
• 12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• 13. Charles Dickens  
• 14. Gustave Flaubert
• 15. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 16. Marcel Proust
• 17. Books as Therapy
• 18. Jane Austen
• 19. Leo Tolstoy
• 20. Virginia Woolf
• 21. James Joyce
• 01. Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys
• 02. Niccolò Machiavelli
• 03. Thomas Hobbes
• 04. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• 05. Adam Smith
• 06. Karl Marx
• 07. John Ruskin
• 08. Henry David Thoreau
• 09. Thoreau and Civil Disobedience
• 10. Matthew Arnold
• 11. William Morris
• 12. Friedrich Hayek
• 13. John Rawls
• 01. What Should A Good Therapist Do For Us?
• 02. The Usefulness Of Speaking Your Feelings To An Empty Chair
• 03. What's the Bit of Therapy That Heals You?
• 04. Why We Need Therapy When We Give Up on Religion
• 05. How Psychotherapy Might Truly Help Us
• 06. Why You Should Take a Sentence Completion Test
• 07. Carl Jung's Word Association Test
• 08. Freud's Porcupine
• 09. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 10. How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill
• 11. Twenty Key Concepts from Psychotherapy
• 12. Why Psychotherapy Works
• 13. The True and the False Self
• 14. What Happens in Psychotherapy? Four Case Studies
• 15. The Problem of Psychological Asymmetry
• 16. Freud on Sublimation
• 17. Sigmund Freud
• 18. Anna Freud
• 19. Melanie Klein
• 20. Donald Winnicott
• 21. John Bowlby 
• 22. A Short Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
• 23. Jacques Lacan
• 01. You Are Living in the Greatest Museum in the World
• 02. When Something is Beautiful...
• 03. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 04. How Giraffes Can Teach Us to Wonder
• 05. Sun Worship
• 06. The Importance of Dancing Like an Idiot
• 07. Walking in the Woods
• 08. Getting More Serious about Pleasure
• 09. On Going to the Zoo
• 10. The Fish Shop
• 11. On Small Islands
• 12. On Stars
• 13. On Grandmothers
• 14. Up at Dawn
• 15. On Crimes in the Newspapers
• 16. Driving on the Motorway at Night
• 17. On Sunday Mornings
• 18. A Favourite Old Jumper
• 19. Holding Hands with a Small Child
• 20. Feeling at Home in the Sea
• 21. The Book That Understands You
• 22. Old Photos of One’s Parents
• 23. Whispering in Bed in the Dark
• 24. On Feeling That Someone Else is So Wrong
• 25. The First Day of Feeling Well Again
• 01. St. Benedict 
• 02. Alexis de Tocqueville 
• 03. Auguste Comte
• 04. Max Weber
• 05. Emile Durkheim
• 06. Margaret Mead
• 07. Theodor Adorno
• 08. Rachel Carson
• 01. Three Essays on Flight
• 02. The Wisdom of Islamic Gardens
• 03. A World Without Air Travel
• 04. Walking in the Woods
• 05. Why We Argue in Paradise
• 06. The Advantages of Staying at Home
• 07. The Wisdom of Nature
• 08. The Holidays When You're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 09. The Shortest Journey: On Going for a Walk around the Block
• 10. How to Spend a Few Days in Paris
• 11. Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can
• 12. Travel as Therapy - an Introduction
• 13. Lunch, 30,000 Feet – for Comfort
• 14. The Western Desert, Australia – for Humility
• 15. Glenpark Road, Birmingham - for Boredom
• 16. Comuna 13, San Javier, Medellin, Colombia - for Dissatisfaction
• 17. Pumping Station, Isla Mayor, Seville - for Snobbery
• 18. Eastown Theatre, Detroit - for Perspective
• 19. Capri Hotel, Changi Airport, Singapore - for Thinking
• 20. Cafe de Zaak, Utrecht - for Sex Education
• 21. Corner shop, Kanagawaken, Yokohama - for Shyness
• 22. Monument Valley, USA - for Calm
• 23. Heathrow Airport, London – for Awe
• 24. Pefkos Beach, Rhodes - for Anxiety
• 01. On Flying Too Close to the Sun - And Not Flying Close Enough
• 02. Kierkegaard on Love
• 03. Aristotle
• 04. Baruch Spinoza
• 05. Arthur Schopenhauer
• 06. Blaise Pascal
• 07. Six Ideas from Western Philosophy
• 08. Introduction to The Curriculum
• 10. The Stoics
• 11. Epicurus
• 12. Augustine
• 13. Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy
• 14. Thomas Aquinas
• 15. Michel de Montaigne
• 16. La Rochefoucauld
• 17. Voltaire
• 18. David Hume
• 19. Immanuel Kant
• 21. Hegel Knew There Would Be Days Like These
• 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 23. Nietzsche
• 24. Nietzsche, Regret and Amor Fati
• 25. Nietzsche and Envy
• 26. Martin Heidegger
• 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein
• 28. Jean-Paul Sartre
• 29. Albert Camus
• 30. Michel Foucault
• 31. Jacques Derrida
• 32. E. M. Cioran
• 01. What to Say in Response to an Affair
• 02. How To Handle the Desire for Affairs?
• 03. What Does It Take To Be Good at Affairs?
• 04. What Ideally Happens When An Affair is Discovered?
• 05. When Does An Affair Begin?  
• 06. A Brief History of Affairs
• 07. How to Reduce the Risk of Affairs
• 08. The Role of Sex in Affairs
• 09. How To Spot A Couple That Might Be Headed For An Affair
• 10. How Can An Affair Help A Marriage?
• 11. The Pleasures of Affairs
• 12. The Pains of Affairs
• 13. The Meaning of Infidelity
• 14. Loyalty and Adultery
• 15. Why People Have Affairs: Distance and Closeness
• 01. Those Who Cannot Feel Love Until It Is Over
• 02. The Heroism of Leaving a Relationship
• 03. Exquisite Agony in Love
• 04. Why It Should Not Have to Last Forever...
• 05. When Does a Divorce Begin?
• 06. Rethinking Divorce
• 07. Three Questions to Help You Decide Whether to Stay in or Leave a Relationship
• 08. Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes
• 09. There's Nothing Wrong with Being on Your Own
• 10. The Wrong Idea of a Baddie
• 11. Finding Closure After a Breakup
• 12. Should Sex Ever Be a Reason to Break Up?
• 13. When a Relationship Fails, Who Rejected Whom?
• 14. The Fear of Not Being Able to Cope Practically Without a Partner
• 15. The Fear of Ending a Relationship
• 16. What About the Children When Divorce is on the Cards?
• 17. What If I Just Repeat the Same Mistakes Next Time?
• 18. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 19. Overcoming Nostalgia for a Past Relationship
• 20. The Feeling of Being Back in Love with the Person You're About to Leave
• 21. The Capacity to Give up on People
• 22. For Those Stuck in a Relationship
• 23. 10 Ideas for People Afraid to Exit a Relationship
• 24. People Who Want to Own Us - but Not Nourish Us
• 25. The Hardest Person in the World to Break up With
• 26. A Non-Tragic View of Breaking Up
• 27. A Guide to Breaking Up
• 28. How to Reject Someone Kindly
• 29. When Someone We Love Has Died
• 30. Why Did They Leave Us?
• 31. How to Break Up
• 32. How We Can Have Our Hearts Broken Even Though No One Has Left Us
• 33. The Psychology of Our Exes
• 34. 'Unfair Dismissal' in Love
• 35. How Not to Be Tortured By a Love Rival
• 36. Coping with Betrayal
• 37. Can Exes be Friends?
• 38. How to Get Over Someone
• 39. Why True Love Doesn’t Have to Last Forever
• 40. How to Get Over a Rejection
• 41. How to End a Relationship
• 42. Stay or Leave?
• 43. How to Get Divorced
• 44. On Forgetting Lovers
• 45. How Not to Break Up with Someone
• 01. Picking Partners Who Won't Understand Us
• 02. How Do Emotionally Healthy People Behave In Relationships? 
• 03. The Avoidant Partner With The Power To Drive You Mad
• 04. On Picking a Socially Unsuitable Partner
• 05. How to Sustain Love: A Tool
• 06. Questions To Ask About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing To
• 07. Our Two Great Fears in Love
• 08. The Pains of Preoccupied Attachment
• 09. Are You Afraid of Intimacy?
• 10. Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love
• 11. Understanding Attachment Theory
• 12. Why We 'Split' Our Partners
• 13. Why We Love People Who Don't Love Us Back
• 14. Should I Be With Them?
• 15. The Seven Rules of Successful Relationships
• 16. Why We Must Explain Our Own Needs
• 17. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 18. Why Some Couples Last — and Some Don't
• 19. The Difference Between Fragile and Strong Couples
• 20. What Relationships Should Really Be About
• 21. The Real Reason Why Couples Break Up
• 22. 6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love
• 23. Can People Change?
• 24. Konrad Lorenz & Why You Choose the Partners You Choose
• 25. The Stranger You Live With
• 26. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 27. Why Anxious and Avoidant Partners Find It Hard to Leave One Another
• 28. The Challenges of Anxious-Avoidant Relationships — Can Couples With Different Attachment Styles Work?
• 29. On Rescue Fantasies
• 30. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 31. What Is Your Attachment Style?
• 32. 'I Will Never Find the Right Partner'
• 33. Too Close or Too Distant: How We Stand in Relationships
• 34. How Are You Difficult to Live with?
• 35. Why We're Compelled to Love Difficult People
• 36. Why Your Lover is Very Damaged - and Annoying
• 37. Why Tiny Things about Our Partners Drive Us Mad
• 38. How to Love Ugly People
• 39. Why Polyamory Probably Won’t Work for You
• 40. Why We Go Cold on Our Partners
• 41. An Instruction Manual to Oneself
• 42. The Terrors of Being Loved
• 43. The Partner as Child Theory
• 44. On the Fear of Intimacy
• 45. Meet the Parents
• 46. On Finding the 'Right' Person
• 47. If You Loved Me, You Wouldn't Want to Change Me
• 48. The Problems of Closeness
• 01. How to Break Logjams in a Relationship
• 02. The Miseries of Push-Pull Relationships 
• 03. A Way To Break Logjams In A Couple
• 04. When Your Partner Loves You – but Does Their Best to Drive You Away...
• 05. A Rule to Help Your Relationship
• 06. Secret Grudges We May Have Against the Other Gender
• 07. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 08. On Being Upset Without Knowing It
• 09. Who is Afraid of Intimacy?
• 10. Why Good Manners Matter in Relationships
• 11. A Role for Lies
• 12. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 13. On Saying 'I Hate You' to Someone You Love
• 14. When Love Isn't Easy
• 15. Two Questions to Repair a Relationship
• 16. Three Steps to Resolving Conflicts in Relationships
• 17. Stop Avoiding Conflict
• 18. An Alternative to Passive Aggression
• 19. Why We Must Soften What We Say to Our Partners
• 20. How to Be Less Defensive in Love
• 21. On Gaslighting
• 22. Why We Play Games in Love
• 23. On 'Rupture' and 'Repair'
• 24. Why it's OK to Want a Partner to Change
• 25. On Arguing More Nakedly
• 26. Do You Still Love Me?
• 27. Why We Need to Feel Heard
• 28. Five Questions to Ask of Bad Behaviour
• 29. The Art of Complaining
• 30. The Challenges of Communication
• 31. How To Have Fewer Bitter Arguments in Love
• 32. The Arguments We Have From Guilt
• 33. Attention-Seeking Arguments
• 34. When Our Partners Are Being Excessively Logical
• 35. When We Tell Our Partners That We Are Normal and They Are Strange
• 36. When Your Partner Tries to Stop You Growing
• 37. When Your Partner Starts Crying Hysterically During an Argument
• 38. Why We Sometimes Set Out to Shatter Our Lover's Good Mood
• 39. Why People Get Defensive in Relationships
• 40. A History of Arguments
• 41. The Fights When There Is No Sex
• 42. What We Might Learn in Couples Therapy
• 43. On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively
• 44. An Alternative to Being Controlling
• 45. Why We Should Not Silently Suffer From A Lack of Touch in Love
• 46. Why Anger Has a Place in Love
• 47. The Importance of Relationship Counselling
• 48. How to Argue in Relationships
• 49. Why We (Sometimes) Hope the People We Love Might Die
• 50. Be the Change You Want To See
• 51. I Wish I Was Still Single
• 52. Love and Sulking
• 53. On Being Unintentionally Hurt
• 54. The Secret Problems of Other Couples
• 55. On the Dangers of Being Too Defensive
• 56. On How to Defuse an Argument
• 57. How to Save Love with Pessimism
• 58. How 'Transference' Makes You Hard to Live With
• 59. Why You Resent Your Partner
• 60. Why It Is Always Your Partner's Fault
• 61. If It Wasn't for You...
• 62. Why You Are So Annoyed By What You Once Admired
• 63. Why You’re (Probably) Not a Great Communicator
• 01. Why Dating Apps Won't Help You Find Love
• 02. Being Honest on a Date
• 03. Why Haven't They Called - and the Rorschach Test
• 04. Dating When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 05. Varieties of Madness Commonly Met with On Dates
• 06. How to Seduce with Confidence
• 07. A Brief History of Dating
• 08. How to Prove Attractive to Someone on a Date
• 09. Existentialism and Dating
• 10. What to Talk About on a Date
• 11. What to Eat and Drink on a Date
• 12. How to Seduce Someone on a Date
• 13. How Not to Think on a Date
• 01. Getting Better at Picking Lovers
• 02. How We May Be Creating The Lovers We Fear
• 03. What If the People We Could Love Are Here Already; We Just Can't See Them?
• 04. The Lengths We Go to Avoid Love
• 05. Our Secret Wish Never to Find Love
• 06. Why We All End up Marrying Our Parents
• 07. True Love Begins With Self-Love
• 08. The Importance of Being Single
• 09. Why We Keep Choosing Bad Partners
• 10. Celebrity Crushes
• 11. Romantic Masochism
• 12. What Do You Love Me For?
• 13. If Love Never Came
• 14. On the Madness and Charm of Crushes
• 15. Why Only the Happy Single Find True Love
• 16. Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?
• 17. In Praise of Unrequited Love
• 18. Two Reasons Why You Might Still Be Single
• 19. How We Choose a Partner
• 20. Why Flirting Matters
• 21. Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone
• 22. Mate Selection
• 23. Reasons to Remain Single
• 24. How to Enjoy a New Relationship
• 01. Alternatives to Romantic Monogamy
• 02. Twenty Ideas on Marriage
• 03. For Moments of Marital Crisis
• 04. What to Do on Your Wedding Night
• 05. Who Should You Invite to Your Wedding?
• 06. Pragmatic Reasons for Getting Married
• 07. The Standard Marriage and Its Seven Alternatives
• 08. Utopian Marriage
• 09. When Is One Ready to Get Married?
• 10. On the Continuing Relevance of Marriage
• 11. On Marrying the Wrong Person — 9 Reasons We Will Regret Getting Married
• 01. What Are We Lying To Our Lovers About? 
• 02. Those Who Have to Wait for a War to Say ‘I Love You’
• 03. What Celebrity Stalkers Can Teach Us About Love
• 04. The Achievement of Missing Someone
• 05. How Love Can Teach Us Who We Are
• 06. Beyond the Need for Melodrama in Love
• 07. True Love is Boring
• 08. How to Make Love Last Forever
• 09. How to Be Vulnerable
• 10. Why You Can't Read Your Partner's Mind
• 11. What Teddy Bears Teach Us About Love
• 12. What Role Do You Play in Your Relationship?
• 13. Why We Should Be 'Babyish' in Love
• 14. The Maturity of Regression
• 15. The Benefits of Insecurity in Love
• 16. Taking the Pressure off Love
• 17. A Pledge for Lovers
• 18. A Projection Exercise for Couples
• 19. A New Ritual: The Morning and Evening Kiss
• 20. Can Our Phones Solve Our Love Lives?
• 21. If We're All Bad at Love, Shouldn't We Change Our Definition of Normality?
• 22. Other People's Relationships
• 23. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 24. The Pleasure of Reading Together in Bed
• 25. 22 Questions to Reignite Love
• 26. The Wisdom of Romantic Compromise
• 27. How to Complain
• 28. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 29. Teaching and Love
• 30. Love and Self-Love
• 31. Humour in Love
• 32. The Advantages of Long-Distance Love
• 33. In Praise of Hugs
• 34. Why Affectionate Teasing is Kind and Necessary
• 35. The Couple Courtroom Game
• 36. Getting over a Row
• 37. Keeping Secrets in Relationships
• 38. A Lover's Guide to Sulking
• 39. Artificial Conversations
• 40. On the Role of Stories in Love
• 41. On the Hardest Job in the World
• 42. On the Beloved's Wrist
• 01. How Even Very ‘Nice’ Parents Can Mess Up Their Children
• 02. The Parents We Would Love To Have Had: An Exercise
• 03. Fatherless Boys
• 04. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 05. The Problems of Miniature Adults
• 06. Mothers and Daughters
• 07. The Importance of Swords and Guns for Children
• 08. When Parents Won't Let Their Children Grow Up
• 09. The Fragile Parent
• 10. Parenting and People-Pleasing
• 11. Three Kinds of Parental Love
• 12. A Portrait of Tenderness
• 13. What Makes a Good Parent? A Checklist
• 14. On the Curiosity of Children
• 15. How to Lend a Child Confidence
• 16. The Importance of Play
• 17. Why Children Need an Emotional Education
• 18. Coping with One's Parents
• 19. Are Children for Me?
• 20. How Parents Might Let Their Children Know of Their Issues
• 21. How We Crave to Be Soothed
• 22. Escaping the Shadow of a Parent
• 23. On Being Angry with a Parent
• 24. What You Might Want to Tell Your Child About Homework
• 25. On Apologising to Your Child
• 26. Teaching Children about Relationships
• 27. How Should a Parent Love their Child?
• 28. When people pleasers become parents - and need to say 'no'
• 29. On the Sweetness of Children
• 30. Listening to Children
• 31. Whether or not to have Children
• 32. The Children of Snobs
• 33. Why Good Parents Have Naughty Children
• 34. The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
• 35. The Significance of Parenthood
• 36. Why Family Matters
• 37. Parenting and Working
• 38. On Children's Art
• 39. What Babies Can Teach Us
• 40. Why – When It Comes to Children – Love May Not Be Enough
• 01. What We Really, Really Want in Love
• 02. Falling in Love with a Stranger
• 03. Why We Need 'Ubuntu'
• 04. The Buddhist View of Love
• 05. What True Love Looks Like
• 06. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 07. Kierkegaard on Love
• 08. Why Do I Feel So Lonely?
• 09. Pygmalion and your Love life
• 10. How to Love
• 11. What is Love?
• 12. On Romanticism
• 13. A Short History of Love
• 14. The Definition of Love
• 15. Why We Need the Ancient Greek Vocabulary of Love
• 16. The Cure for Love
• 17. Why We Need to Speak of Love in Public
• 18. How Romanticism Ruined Love
• 19. Our Most Romantic Moments
• 20. Loving and Being Loved
• 21. Romantic Realism
• 22. On Being Romantic or Classical
• 01. The Difficulties of Impotence
• 02. What is Sexual Perversion?
• 03. Our Unconscious Fear of Successful Sex
• 04. The Logic of Our Fantasies
• 05. Rethinking Gender
• 06. The Ongoing Complexities of Our Intimate Lives
• 07. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 08. Desire and Intimacy
• 09. What Makes a Person Attractive?
• 10. How to Talk About Your Sexual Fantasy
• 11. The Problem of Sexual Shame
• 12. Who Initiates Sex: and Why It Matters So Much
• 13. On Still Being a Virgin
• 14. Love and Sex
• 15. Impotence and Respect
• 16. Sexual Non-Liberation
• 17. The Excitement of Kissing
• 18. The Appeal of Outdoor Sex
• 19. The Sexual Fantasies of Others
• 20. On Art and Masturbation
• 21. The Psychology of Cross-Dressing
• 22. The Fear of Being Bad in Bed
• 23. The Sex-Starved Relationship
• 24. How to Start Having Sex Again
• 25. Sexual Liberation
• 26. The Poignancy of Old Pornography
• 27. On Porn Addiction
• 28. A Brief Philosophy of Oral Sex
• 29. Why We Go Off Sex
• 30. On Being a Sleazebag
• 31. A Brief Theory of Sexual Excitement
• 01. Work Outs For Our Minds
• 02. Interviewing Our Bodies
• 03. The Top Dog - Under Dog Exercise
• 04. A Guide For The Recovering Avoidant
• 05. Where Are Humanity’s Problems Really Located?
• 06. On Feeling Obliged 
• 07. Why We Struggle With Self-Discipline
• 08. Why We Should Practice Automatic Writing
• 09. Why We Behave As We Do
• 10. Mechanisms of Defence
• 11. On Always Finding Fault with Others
• 12. The Hidden Logic of Illogical Behaviour
• 13. How to Weaken the Hold of Addiction
• 14. Charles Darwin and The Descent of Man
• 15. Why We Are All Addicts
• 16. Straightforward vs. Complicated People
• 17. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 18. The Need for a Cry
• 19. On Confinement
• 20. The Importance of Singing Badly
• 21. You Don't Need Permission
• 22. On Feeling Stuck
• 23. Am I Paranoid?
• 24. Learning to Be More Selfish
• 25. Learning How to Be Angry
• 26. Why We're All Liars
• 27. Are You a Masochist?
• 28. How Badly Adapted We Are to Life on Earth
• 29. How We Prefer to Act Rather Than Think
• 30. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 31. On Dreaming
• 32. The Need to be Alone
• 33. On the Remarkable Need to Speak
• 34. Thinking Too Much; and Thinking Too Little
• 35. On Nagging
• 36. The Prevention of Suicide
• 37. On Getting an Early Night
• 38. Why We Eat Too Much
• 39. On Taking Drugs
• 40. On Perfectionism
• 41. On Procrastination
• 01. Why We Overreact
• 02. Giving Up on People Pleasing
• 03. The Benefits of Forgetfulness
• 04. How to Take Criticism
• 05. A More Spontaneous Life
• 06. On Self-Assertion
• 07. The Benefit of Analogies
• 08. Why We Need Moments of Mad Thinking
• 09. The Task of Turning Vague Thoughts into More Precise Ones
• 10. How to Catch Your Own Thoughts
• 11. Why Our Best Thoughts Come To Us in the Shower
• 13. Confidence
• 14. Why We Should Try to Become Better Narcissists
• 15. Why We Require Poor Memories To Survive
• 16. The Importance of Confession
• 17. How Emotionally Healthy Are You?
• 18. What Is An Emotionally Healthy Childhood?
• 19. Unprocessed Emotion
• 20. How to Be a Genius
• 21. On Resilience
• 22. How to Decide
• 23. Why It Should Be Glamorous to Change Your Mind
• 24. How to Make More of Our Memories
• 25. What’s Wrong with Needy People
• 26. Emotional Education: An Introduction
• 27. Philosophical Meditation
• 28. Honesty
• 29. Self-Love
• 30. Emotional Scepticism
• 31. Politeness
• 32. Charity
• 34. Love-as-Generosity
• 35. Comforting
• 36. Emotional Translation
• 38. On Pessimism
• 39. The Problem with Cynicism
• 40. On Keeping Going
• 41. Closeness
• 42. On Higher Consciousness
• 43. On Exercising the Mind
• 44. Authentic Work
• 45. The Sorrows of Work
• 46. Cultural Consolation
• 47. Appreciation
• 48. Cheerful Despair
• 01. Why Some People Love Extreme Sports
• 02. The Overlooked Pains of Very, Very Tidy People
• 03. On Feeling Guilty for No Reason
• 04. The Fear of Being Touched
• 05. Why Most of Us Feel Like Losers
• 06. One of the More Beautiful Paintings in the World...
• 07. The Origins of a Sense of Persecution
• 08. How to Overcome Psychological Barriers
• 09. The Sinner Inside All of Us
• 10. How to Be Less Defensive
• 11. Are You a Sadist or a Masochist?
• 12. You Might Be Mad
• 13. Fears Are Not Facts
• 14. Why It's Good to Be a Narcissist
• 15. Am I a Bad Person?
• 16. Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned
• 17. The Five Features of Paranoia
• 18. Why So Many of Us Are Masochists
• 19. In Praise of Self-Doubt
• 20. Why We Get Locked Inside Stories — and How to Break Free
• 21. Why Grandiosity is a Symptom of Self-Hatred
• 22. The Origins of Imposter Syndrome
• 23. The Upsides of Being Ill
• 24. The Roots of Paranoia
• 25. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 26. How Social Media Affects Our Self-Worth
• 27. How to Be Beautiful
• 28. Trying to Be Kinder to Ourselves
• 29. The Role of Love in Mental Health
• 30. Trauma and Fearfulness
• 31. On Despair and the Imagination
• 32. On Being Able to Defend Oneself
• 33. The Fear of Death
• 34. I Am Not My Body
• 35. The Problems of Being Very Beautiful
• 36. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 37. Am I Fat? An Answer from History
• 38. The Problem of Shame
• 39. On Feeling Ugly
• 40. The Particular Beauty of Unhappy-Looking People
• 41. How Not to Become a Conspiracy Theorist
• 42. The Terror of a ‘No’
• 43. On Being Hated
• 44. The Origins of Everyday Nastiness
• 45. The Weakness of Strength Theory
• 46. On Self-Sabotage
• 47. FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out
• 48. On a Sense of Sinfulness
• 01. We All Need Our North Pole
• 02. We Need to Change the Movie We Are In
• 03. Maybe You Are, in Your Own Way, a Little Bit Marvellous
• 04. Why We Deny Ourselves the Chance of Happiness
• 05. How to Live More Consciously
• 06. Our Secret Longing to Be Good
• 07. Why Everyone Needs to Feel 'Lost' for a While
• 08. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 09. On Feeling Rather Than Thinking
• 10. How to Be Interesting
• 11. Am I Too Clever?
• 12. A More Self-Accepting Life
• 13. 'Let Him Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone'
• 14. The Roots of Loneliness
• 15. Small Acts of Liberation
• 16. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 17. The Fear of Happiness
• 18. The Truth May Already Be Inside Us
• 19. What Is the Meaning of Life?
• 20. The Desire to Write
• 21. Are Intelligent People More Lonely?
• 22. A Better Word than Happiness: Eudaimonia
• 23. The Meaning of Life
• 24. Our Secret Fantasies
• 25. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 26. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 27. An Updated Ten Commandments
• 28. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 29. How to Become a Better Person
• 30. On Resolutions
• 31. On Final Things
• 01. The Stages of Development - And What If We Miss Out on One…
• 02. Who Might I Have Been If…
• 03. Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
• 04. We Are All Lonely - Now Can We Be Friends?
• 05. How to Make It Through
• 06. 12 Signs That You Are Mature in the Eyes of Psychotherapy
• 07. The Breast and the Mouth
• 08. A Test to Measure How Nice You Are
• 09. What Hypochondriacs Aren't Able to Tell You
• 10. The Origins of Sanity
• 11. The Always Unfinished Business of Self-Knowledge
• 12. Learning to Laugh at Ourselves
• 13. A Simple Question to Set You Free
• 14. Locating the Trouble
• 15. Who Knows More, the Young or the Old?
• 16. Beyond Sanctimony
• 17. The Ingredients of Emotional Maturity
• 18. When Illness is Preferable to Health
• 19. What Should My Life Have Been Like?
• 20. Why We Need to Go Back to Emotional School
• 21. The Point of Writing Letters We Never Send
• 22. Self-Forgiveness
• 23. Why We Must Have Done Bad to Be Good
• 24. Finding the Courage to Be Ourselves
• 25. What Regret Can Teach Us
• 26. The Importance of Adolescence
• 27. How to Love Difficult People
• 28. On Falling Mentally Ill
• 29. Splitting Humanity into Saints and Sinners
• 30. Becoming Free
• 31. Learning to Listen to the Adult Inside Us
• 32. The Ultimate Test of Emotional Maturity
• 33. Can People Change?
• 34. When Home is Not Home...
• 35. Learning to Lay Down Boundaries
• 36. You Could Finally Leave School!
• 37. When Do You Know You Are Emotionally Mature? 26 Signs of Emotional Maturity
• 38. How to Lengthen Your Life
• 39. We Only Learn If We Repeat
• 40. The Drive to Keep Growing Emotionally
• 41. On Bittersweet Memories
• 42. Small Triumphs of the Mentally Unwell
• 43. The Importance of Atonement
• 44. How To Be a Mummy's Boy
• 45. On Consolation
• 46. The Inner Idiot
• 47. The Dangers of the Good Child
• 48. Why None of Us are Really 'Sinners'
• 49. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 50. Are Humans Still Evolving?
• 51. On Losers – and Tragic Heroes
• 52. On the Serious Role of Stuffed Animals
• 53. Why Self-Help Books Matter
• 01. Suffering From A Snobbery That Isn’t Ours
• 02. How to Recover the Plot
• 03. Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
• 04. When, and Why, Do We Pick up Our Phones?
• 05. What is the Unconscious - and What Might Be Inside Yours?
• 06. Complete the Story – and Discover What's Really On Your mind
• 07. Complete the Sentence – and Find Out What's Really on Your Mind
• 08. The One Question You Need to Understand Who You Are
• 09. Six Fundamental Truths of Self-Awareness
• 10. Why Knowing Ourselves is Impossible – and Necessary
• 11. Making Friends with Your Unconscious
• 12. Do You Believe in Mind-Reading?
• 13. Questioning Our Conscience
• 14. A Bedtime Meditation
• 15. How to Figure Out What You Really, Really Think
• 16. Why You Should Keep a Journal
• 17. In Praise of Introspection
• 18. What Brain Scans Reveal About Our Minds
• 19. What is Mental Health?
• 20. The One Question You Need to Ask to Know Whether You're a Good Person
• 21. Eight Rules of The School of Life
• 22. No One Cares
• 23. The High Price We Pay for Our Fear of Being Alone
• 24. 5 Signs of Emotional Immaturity
• 25. On Knowing Who One Is
• 26. Why Self-Analysis Works
• 27. Knowing Things Intellectually vs. Knowing Them Emotionally
• 28. The Novel We Really Need To Read Next
• 29. Is Free Will or Determinism Correct?
• 30. Emotional Identity
• 31. Know Yourself — Socrates and How to Develop Self-Knowledge
• 32. Self-Knowledge Quiz
• 33. On Being Very Normal
• 01. How History Can Explain Our Unhappiness
• 02. How Lonely Are You? A Test
• 03. The Wisdom of Tears
• 04. You Don't Always Need to Be Funny
• 05. On Suicide
• 06. You Have Permission to Be Miserable
• 07. The Pessimist's Guide to Mental Illness
• 08. Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Me?
• 09. Why We Enjoy the Suffering of Others
• 10. The Tragedy of Birth
• 11. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 12. Our Tragic Condition
• 13. The Melancholy Charm of Lonely Travelling Places
• 14. Nostalgia for Religion
• 15. Parties and Melancholy
• 16. Why Very Beautiful Scenes Can Make Us So Melancholy
• 17. On Old Photos of Oneself
• 18. Are Intelligent People More Melancholic?
• 19. Strangers and Melancholy
• 20. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 21. Sex and Melancholy
• 22. Astronomy and Melancholy
• 23. Nostalgia for the Womb
• 24. Melancholy and the Feeling of Being Superfluous
• 25. Pills & Melancholy
• 26. Melancholy: the best kind of Despair
• 27. On Melancholy
• 01. We Are Made of Moods
• 02. Why Sweet Things Make Us Cry
• 03. Overcoming Manic Moods
• 04. Learning to Feel What We Really Feel
• 05. Exercise When We're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 06. Why You May Be Experiencing a Mental Midwinter
• 07. Living Long-Term with Mental Illness
• 08. The Role of Sleep in Mental Health
• 09. The Role of Pills in Mental Health
• 10. Mental Illness and Acceptance
• 11. Mental Illness and 'Reasons to Live'
• 12. Taming a Pitiless Inner Critic
• 13. Reasons to Give Up on Human Beings
• 14. The Window of Tolerance
• 15. On Realising One Might Be an Introvert
• 16. Our Right to be Miserable
• 17. How to Manage One's Moods
• 18. On Living in a More Light-Hearted Way
• 19. On Disliking Oneself
• 20. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 21. Learning to Listen to One's Own Boredom
• 22. On Depression
• 23. In Praise of the Melancholy Child
• 24. Why We May Be Angry Rather Than Sad
• 25. On Not Being in the Moment
• 26. 'Pure' OCD - and Intrusive Thoughts
• 27. Twenty Moods
• 28. How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things
• 29. The Secret Optimism of Angry People
• 30. On Feeling Depressed
• 31. The Difficulty of Being in the Present
• 32. On Being Out of Touch with One's Feelings
• 33. Our Secret Thoughts
• 34. The Psychology of Colour
• 35. On Self-Pity
• 36. On Irritability
• 37. On Anger
• 38. On the Things that Make Adults Cry
• 39. Detachment
• 01. On Those Ruined by Success
• 02. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 03. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 04. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 05. Self-Forgiveness
• 06. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 07. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 08. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 09. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 10. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 11. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 12. The Perfectionist Trap
• 13. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 14. On Perfectionism
• 01. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 02. How Prone Might You Be To Insomnia? Questionnaire
• 03. How Ready Might You Be for Therapy? Questionnaire
• 04. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 01. Intergenerational Trauma
• 02. How the Unfinished Business of Childhood is Played Out in Relationships
• 03. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 04. Can Childhoods Really Matter So Much?
• 05. What Some Childhoods Don’t Allow You to Think
• 06. The Legacy of an Unloving Childhood
• 07. Why You Don’t Need a Very Bad Childhood to Have a Complicated Adulthood
• 08. When People Let Us Know What the World Has Done to Them
• 09. The Healing Power of Time
• 10. You Are Freer Than You Think
• 11. On Parenting Our Parents
• 12. Letting Go of Self-Protective Strategies
• 13. How to Tell If Someone Had a Difficult Childhood...
• 14. Childhood Matters, Unfortunately!
• 15. How Should We Define 'Mental Illness'?
• 16. Taking Childhood Seriously
• 17. Sympathy for Our Younger Selves
• 18. How Music Can Heal Us
• 19. What Your Body Reveals About Your Past
• 20. Why Adults Often Behave Like Children
• 21. How to Live Long-Term With Trauma
• 22. Should We Forgive Our Parents or Not?
• 23. Reparenting Your Inner Child
• 24. The Agonies of Shame
• 25. How Trauma Works
• 26. Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves
• 27. Why We Sometimes Feel Like Curling Up Into a Ball
• 28. How to Get Your Parents Out of Your Head
• 29. Why Parents Bully Their Children
• 30. On Projection
• 31. Self-Archaeology
• 32. It's Not Your Fault
• 33. If Our Parents Never Listened
• 34. Why Everything Relates to Your Childhood
• 35. Why Those Who Should Love Us Can Hurt Us
• 36. The Upsides of Having a Mental Breakdown
• 37. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 38. How We Should Have Been Loved
• 39. Self-Hatred and High-Achievement
• 40. A Self-Hatred Audit
• 41. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 42. Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly
• 43. What is Emotional Neglect?
• 44. How Unloving Parents can Generate Self-Hating Children
• 45. How Mental Illness Closes Down Our Minds
• 46. Trauma and EMDR Therapy
• 47. How to Fight off Your Inner Critic
• 48. The One Subject You Really Need to Study: Your Own Childhood
• 49. Sharing Our Early Wounds
• 50. Trauma and How to Overcome It
• 51. Why We're All Messed Up By Our Childhoods
• 52. The Golden Child Syndrome
• 53. The Importance of Being an Unhappy Teenager
• 54. How We Get Damaged by Emotional Neglect
• 55. The Secrets of a Privileged Childhood
• 56. What We Owe to the People Who Loved Us in Childhood
• 57. Criticism When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 58. On Suffering in Silence
• 59. How a Messed up Childhood Affects You in Adulthood
• 60. Daddy Issues
• 61. The Non-Rewritable Disc: the Fateful Impact of Childhood
• 62. On the Longing for Maternal Tenderness
• 01. The Need for Processing 
• 02. The Subtle Art of Not Listening to People Too Closely
• 03. The Art of Good Listening
• 04. Becoming More Interesting
• 05. In Praise of Small Chats With Strangers
• 06. Why We Should Listen Rather Than Reassure
• 07. How We Can Hurt Without Thinking
• 08. Leaning in to Vulnerability
• 09. How to Become Someone People Will Confide in
• 10. How To Write An Effective Thank You Letter
• 11. How to Be a Good Listener
• 12. How to Comment Online
• 13. Listening as Editing
• 14. The Importance of Flattery
• 15. How to Narrate Your Life Story
• 16. The Art of Listening
• 17. How to Narrate Your Dreams
• 18. How to Talk About Yourself
• 19. Communication
• 20. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 21. On How to Disagree
• 22. On the Art of Conversation
• 01. On Feeling Painfully Different
• 02. Abandoning Hope
• 03. How to Leave a Party
• 04. On Becoming a Hermit
• 05. How to Have a Renaissance
• 06. Think Like an Aristocrat
• 07. Van Gogh's Neglected Genius
• 08. How to Be Quietly Confident
• 09. How to Live Like an Exile
• 10. How to Cope With Bullying
• 11. Stop Being So Nice
• 12. The Origins of Shyness
• 13. On Friendliness to Strangers
• 14. What to Do at Parties If You Hate Small Talk
• 15. How to Approach Strangers at A Party
• 16. How to Be Comfortable on Your Own in Public
• 17. Akrasia - or Why We Don't Do What We Believe
• 18. Why We Think So Much about Our Hair
• 19. Aphorisms on Confidence
• 20. How Knowledge of Difficulties Lends Confidence
• 21. How Thinking You’re an Idiot Lends Confidence
• 22. How to Overcome Shyness
• 23. The Mind-Body Problem
• 24. The Impostor Syndrome
• 25. On the Origins of Confidence
• 26. Self-Esteem
• 27. On Confidence
• 28. On Not Liking the Way One Looks
• 02. Why Losers Make the Best Friends
• 03. Our Very Best Friends
• 04. The Difficulties of Oversharing
• 05. Is It OK to Outgrow Our Friends?
• 06. Why Everyone We Meet is a Little Bit Lonely
• 07. On 'Complicated' Friendships
• 08. The Friend Who Can Tease Us
• 09. Don't Be Too Normal If You Want to Make Friends
• 10. The Forgotten Art of Making Friends
• 11. The Friend Who Balances Us
• 12. The Purpose of Friendship
• 13. Why the Best Kind of Friends Are Lonely
• 14. How to Lose Friends
• 15. Why Misfits Make Great Friends
• 16. How to Handle an Envious Friend
• 17. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 18. Companionship and Mental Health
• 19. How Often Do We Need to Go to Parties?
• 20. Virtual Dinners: Conversation Menus
• 21. The Cleaning Party
• 22. On Talking Horizontally
• 23. Dinner Table Orchestra
• 24. On Sofa Jumping
• 25. On Studying Someone Else's Hands
• 26. What Women and Men May Learn from One Another When They are Just Friends
• 27. How to Say 'I Love You' to a Friend
• 28. How to End a Friendship
• 29. What Can Stop the Loneliness?
• 30. Why Men Are So Bad at Friendship
• 31. What Would An Ideal Friend Be Like?
• 32. 'Couldn't We Just Be Friends?'
• 33. On Acquiring an Enemy
• 34. Why Old Friends Matter
• 35. Why Not to Panic about Enemies
• 36. What Is the Purpose of Friendship?
• 37. Friendship and Vulnerability
• 38. On Socks and Friendship
• 39. The Teasing of Old Friends
• 01. The Boring Person
• 02. The Loveliest People in the World
• 03. The Life Saving Role of Small Chats
• 04. The Origins of Shifty People
• 05. The Many Faults of Other People
• 06. Why Nice People Give Us the 'Ick'
• 07. How to Become a More Interesting Person
• 08. The Challenges of Hugging
• 09. Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People
• 10. The Origins of People Pleasing
• 11. The Eyes of Love
• 12. Kindness Isn't Weakness
• 13. Why We're All Capable of Damaging Others
• 14. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 15. What Love Really Is – and Why It Matters
• 16. The Need for Kindness
• 17. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 18. What to Do When a Stranger Annoys You
• 19. How to Choose A Good Present
• 20. How to Be a Good Guest
• 21. How To Make People Feel Good about Themselves
• 22. How To Tell When You Are Being A Bore
• 23. What Is Empathy?
• 24. How Not to Rant
• 25. How Not to Be Boring
• 26. On Eggs and Compassion
• 27. How to Become an Adult
• 28. People-Pleasing: and How to Overcome It
• 29. Why Truly Sociable People Hate Parties
• 30. How to Be Diplomatic
• 31. Sane Insanity
• 32. Charity of Interpretation
• 33. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 34. The Solution to Clumsiness
• 35. How to Be a Man
• 36. Political Correctness vs. Politeness
• 37. Aphorisms on Kindness
• 38. Why We Don’t Really Want to Be Nice
• 39. The Charm of Vulnerability
• 40. The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills
• 41. How to Be Open-Minded
• 42. Why Kind People Always Lie
• 43. How to Be Warm
• 44. The Problem of Over-Friendliness
• 45. How to Forgive
• 46. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 47. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 48. On Charm
• 49. On Being Kind
• 50. On Gratitude
• 51. On Forgiveness
• 52. On Charity
• 53. On Wisdom
• 01. How to Fire Someone
• 02. Diplomacy at the Office
• 03. How to Tell a Colleague Their Breath Smells
• 04. How to Screw Up at Work
• 05. In Praise of Teamwork
• 06. How to Become an Entrepreneur
• 07. The Need for Eloquence
• 08. The Nature and Causes of Procrastination
• 09. In Praise of Networking
• 10. Why Creativity is Too Important to Be Left to Artists
• 11. How to Survive Bureaucracy
• 12. Machismo and Management
• 13. What Art Can Teach Business About Being Fussy
• 14. On Novelists and Manuals
• 15. How Not to Let Work Explode Your Life
• 16. How to Sell
• 17. Innovation, Empathy and Introspection
• 18. Innovation and Creativity
• 19. Innovation and Science Fiction
• 20. The Acceptance of Change
• 21. The Collaborative Virtues
• 22. Towards Better Collaboration
• 23. How To Make Efficiency a Habit
• 24. On Raising the Prestige of 'Details'
• 25. Monasticism & How to Avoid Distraction
• 26. How to Dare to Begin
• 27. On Meaning – and Motivation
• 28. The Psychological Obstacles Holding Employees Back
• 29. On Feedback
• 30. How to Better Understand Customers
• 31. On Bounded and Unbounded Tasks
• 01. What Should Truly Motivate Us at Work
• 02. Nature as a Cure for the Sickness of Modern Times
• 03. The Difficulties of Work-Life Balance
• 04. The Challenges of Modernity
• 05. Businesses for Love; Businesses for Money
• 06. Countries for Losers; Countries for Winners
• 07. Towards a Solution to Inequality
• 08. Free Trade - or Protectionism?
• 09. Should We Work on Ourselves - or on the World?
• 10. Why Is There Unemployment?
• 11. Artists and Supermarket Tycoons
• 12. Business and the Arts
• 13. Sentimentality in Art - and Business
• 14. How to Make a Country Rich
• 15. First World Problems
• 16. On Devotion to Corporations
• 17. Good vs Classical Economics
• 18. What Is a Good Brand?
• 19. Good Economic Measures: Beyond GDP
• 20. What Good Business Should Be
• 21. On the Faultiness of Our Economic Indicators
• 22. On the Dawn of Capitalism
• 23. Utopian Capitalism
• 24. On Philanthropy
• 01. Why Do We Work So Hard?
• 02. On Eating a Friend
• 03. Is the Modern World Too 'Materialistic'?
• 04. On Consumer Capitalism
• 05. How to Choose the Perfect Gift
• 06. The Importance of Maslow's Pyramid of Needs
• 07. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 08. Money and 'Higher Things'
• 09. Why We Are All Addicts
• 10. Why We Are So Bad at Shopping
• 11. Business and the Ladder of Needs
• 12. Consumer Self-Knowledge
• 13. "Giving Customers What They Want"
• 14. The Entrepreneur and the Artist
• 15. What Advertising Can Learn from Art
• 16. What the Luxury Sector Does for Us
• 17. On Using Sex to Sell
• 18. Understanding Brand Promises
• 19. Consumer Education: On Learning How to Spend
• 20. Good Materialism
• 21. Why We Hate Cheap Things
• 22. Why We Continue to Love Expensive Things
• 23. Why Advertising Is so Annoying - but Doesn't Have to Be
• 24. On Good Demand
• 25. On Consumption and Status Anxiety
• 26. On the Responsibility of the Consumer
• 27. Adverts Know What We Want - They Just Can't Sell It to us
• 28. On the True Desires of the Rich
• 01. How to Be Original
• 02. When Are We Truly Productive?
• 03. The Importance of the Siesta
• 04. Career Therapy
• 05. On Meritocracy
• 06. The Vocation Myth
• 07. The Good Sides of Work
• 08. The Good Office
• 09. The EQ Office
• 10. Good Salaries: What We Earn - and What We’re Worth
• 11. What Good Business Should Be
• 12. On the Pleasures of Work
• 01. How Does An Emotionally Healthy Person Relate To Their Career?
• 02. The Concept of Voluntary Poverty
• 03. The Dangers of Having Too Little To Do
• 04. How Could a Working Life Be Meaningful?
• 05. On Learning to Live Deeply Rather than Broadly
• 06. What They Forget to Teach You at School
• 07. Authentic Work
• 08. Why We Need to Work
• 09. How We Came to Desire a Job We Could Love
• 10. Why Work Is So Much Easier than Love
• 11. Work and Maturity
• 12. How Your Job Shapes Your Identity
• 13. Authentic Work
• 01. Do We Need to Read the News?
• 02. On Gossip
• 03. How the Media Damages Our Faith in Humanity
• 04. Why We Secretly Love Bad News
• 05. Celebrity Crushes
• 06. On Switching Off the News
• 07. We've Been Here Before
• 08. In Praise of Bias
• 09. The News from Without - and the News from Within
• 10. History as a Corrective to News
• 11. Emotional Technology
• 12. What's Wrong with the Media
• 13. On the Dangers of the Internet
• 14. On Taking Digital Sabbaths
• 15. On the Role of Censorship
• 16. On the Role of Disasters
• 17. On the Role of Art in News
• 18. Tragedies and Ordinary Lives in the Media
• 19. On the Failures of Economic News
• 20. On Health News
• 21. What State Broadcasters Should Do
• 22. On the Role of Cheerful News
• 23. On News and Kindness
• 24. On Maniacs and Murderers
• 01. The United States and Happiness
• 02. Political Emotional Maturity
• 03. On Feeling Offended
• 04. A Guide to Good Nationalism
• 05. Why We Do - After All - Care about Politics
• 06. Why Socrates Hated Democracy
• 07. The Fragility of Good Government
• 08. Romantic vs. Classical Voters
• 09. Africa after Independence
• 01. Should I Follow My Dreams?
• 02. How to Retire Early
• 03. The Agonies of Choice
• 04. The Creative Itch
• 05. Broadening the Job Search
• 06. Our Families and Our Careers
• 07. The Challenges of Choosing a Career
• 08. On Career Crises
• 09. The Output/Input Confusion
• 10. Finding a Mission
• 11. How to Serve
• 12. Why Work-Life Balance is an Illusion
• 13. On Gratitude – and Motivation
• 14. How to Find Fulfilling Work
• 15. On the Origins of Motivation at Work
• 16. On Becoming an Entrepreneur
• 17. On Being an Unemployed Arts Graduate
• 01. On Small Talk at the Office
• 02. On Falling Apart at the Office
• 03. The Sorrows of Competition
• 04. What Is That Sunday Evening Feeling?
• 05. How Parents Get in the Way of Our Career Plans
• 06. Why Modern Work Is So Boring
• 07. Why Pessimism is the Key to Good Government
• 08. The Sorrows of Colleagues
• 09. The Sorrows of Commercialisation
• 10. The Sorrows of Standardisation
• 11. Confidence in the System
• 12. Job Monogamy
• 13. The Duty Trap
• 14. The Perfectionist Trap
• 15. On Professional Failure
• 16. Nasty Businesses
• 17. The Job Investment Trap
• 18. How Your Job Shapes Your Identity
• 19. The Pains of Leadership
• 20. Would It Be Better for Your Job If You Were Celibate?
• 21. On Stress and Inner Voices
• 22. On Being Wary of Simple-Looking Issues
• 23. On Commuting
• 24. On the Sorrows of Work
• 25. On Misemployment
• 26. On Guilt-trips and Charm
• 01. The Dangers of People Who Have Been to Boarding School
• 02. Giving Up on Being Special
• 03. The Problem with Individualism
• 04. Winners and Losers in the Race of Life
• 05. Being on the Receiving End of Pity
• 06. Shakespeare: 'When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state...'
• 07. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 08. On the Loss of Reputation
• 09. The Secret Sorrows of Over-Achievers
• 10. You Are Not What You Earn
• 11. Artistic Philanthropy
• 12. The Need to Keep Believing in Luck
• 13. On Glamour
• 14. The Incumbent Problem
• 15. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 16. On the Dangers of Success
• 17. On Doing Better Than Our Parents
• 18. Success at School vs. Success in Life
• 19. Why We Look Down on People Who Don’t Earn Very Much
• 20. What Is 'Success'?
• 21. On Children and Power
• 22. On Pleasure in the Downfall of the Mighty
• 23. On Status and Democracy
• 24. On Failure and Success in the Game of Fame
• 25. On Envy
• 26. A Philosophical Exercise for Envy
• 27. On the Envy of Politicians
• 28. On Consumption and Status Anxiety
• 29. On the Desire for Fame
• 30. On Fame and Sibling Rivalry
• 01. Why Humanity Destroyed Itself
• 02. How Science Could - at Last - Properly Replace Religion
• 03. Our Forgotten Craving for Community
• 04. Why isn't the Future here yet?
• 05. On Changing the World
• 06. What Community Centres Should Be Like
• 07. On Seduction
• 08. The Importance of Utopian Thinking
• 09. Art is Advertising for What We Really Need
• 10. Why the World Stands Ready to Be Changed
• 11. On the Desire to Change the World
• 12. Utopian Collective Pride
• 13. Envy of a Utopian Future
• 14. Utopian Artificial Intelligence
• 15. Utopian Education
• 16. Utopian Marriage
• 17. Utopian Film
• 18. Utopian Culture
• 19. Utopian Festivals
• 20. Utopian Business Consultancy
• 21. Utopian Capitalism
• 22. Utopian Government
• 23. Utopian Media
• 24. Utopian Tax
• 25. Utopian Celebrity Culture
• 26. The Future of the Banking Industry
• 27. The Future of the Communications Industry
• 28. The Future of the Hotel Industry

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Why Losers Make the Best Friends

The Subtle Art of Not Listening to People Too Closely

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How to Become a More Effective Listener in Any Situation

Last Updated: June 24, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Moshe Ratson, MFT, PCC and by wikiHow staff writer, Dev Murphy, MA . Moshe Ratson is the Executive Director of spiral2grow Marriage & Family Therapy, a coaching and therapy clinic in New York City. Moshe is an International Coach Federation accredited Professional Certified Coach (PCC). He received his MS in Marriage and Family Therapy from Iona College. Moshe is a clinical member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), and a member of the International Coach Federation (ICF). There are 10 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 1,586,498 times.

Being a good listener can enrich your understanding, expand your capacity for empathy, and improve your communication skills. It takes practice to be a good listener, but it’s a valuable skill to have—especially when disagreements arise! If you’d like to improve your listening skills, this article is for you: we’ve assembled a list of psychology-backed tips to help you be more open-minded and know what to say in conversations, as well as how to read and effectively employ body language. Read on to get started!

Things You Should Know

• Be a good listener by holding eye contact with the speaker and doing your best to limit distractions, such as your phone or TV.
• Show them you’re paying attention by nodding or saying “Mmhmm” occasionally—but avoid interrupting them unless you need to ask a clarifying question.
• Avoid pressuring them to talk or asking rapid-fire questions, which could make them feel like they’re being interrogated. Let them go at their own pace.

Hold eye contact.

• However, avoid staring at them—blink and glance away now and again before returning back to their gaze.
• Studies show the ideal amount of eye contact is about 3 seconds at a time; longer periods of direct eye contact may make the other person uncomfortable. [2] X Research source

Try to limit any distractions.

• If possible, talk somewhere where you won’t be distracted, such as your home, the park, or somewhere else quiet. A busy restaurant, for instance, may not be a great place to have serious conversations.

Show them you’re paying attention.

• Note that this isn’t the same thing as interrupting. Interrupting is generally considered rude, but an occasional verbal acknowledgement that you’re listening and comprehending can encourage the other person to keep talking.

Use body language to encourage the speaker.

• Turn your body toward the speaker. If you're turned away from the speaker, then it may look like you're itching to leave. If you cross your legs, for example, cross your leg toward the speaker instead of away.
• Avoid crossing your arms over your chest, as this may make you appear standoffish or skeptical even if you don't actually feel that way.

Try to see where they’re coming from.

• As the saying goes, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.” In other words, try listening more than you speak.

Give the speaker space.

• Maintaining eye contact (without staring at them) and keeping your body language open may help them feel encouraged to open up.
• You might also say something like, “There’s no pressure, I’m here whenever you’re ready.”

Ask meaningful and empowering questions.

• Ask thoughtful questions that show you’re listening and offer the speaker a chance to explore the situation from a new angle. For instance, “So, he thanked you for helping him, but then he said, ‘I could have done it myself, though’? What does that mean?”
• This question invites the speaker to analyze the situation on their own and come to a conclusion themselves, which is more helpful than saying something like, “That thank you doesn’t sound sincere—this guy’s a jerk!”

Repeat what they say back to them.

• While it might feel more natural to rephrase what a person says to show you’re listening and understanding, this can actually be mentally and emotionally overwhelming for you both, especially if the speaker feels you aren’t rephrasing things accurately. [10] X Trustworthy Source PubMed Central Journal archive from the U.S. National Institutes of Health Go to source
• However, if you mishear or don’t understand something, it may be helpful in this case to rephrase what the speaker has said to make sure you’re comprehending them.

Read their body language.

• Notice their facial expressions throughout the conversation: do they smile a little when they talk about their crush? Do their eyebrows furrow in concern when they talk about work?
• Note how their body position shifts at different points—for instance, maybe they cross their arms in frustration when they talk about a fight they had with their spouse, or they wistfully play with their hair when they talk about what they want for their birthday.

Avoid comparing the person's experiences to your own.

• This is especially true when you compare something really serious to your own less-intense experiences (such as comparing the person's divorce to your three-month long relationship).
• Even if you’re sincerely trying to connect and validate their experience, this may actually make the person feel like you're not really listening at all and are focused more on yourself.
• Avoid saying "I" or "me" a lot, as it’s a good indicator that you're focusing more on yourself than on the person's situation. [11] X Research source
• Of course, if the person knows that you've had a similar experience, then they may ask for your opinion. In this case, you can offer it, but be cautious about acting like your experiences are exactly like the other person's.

Resist jumping into problem-solving mode.

• Often, when someone shares a problem they’re having, they’re just looking to vent and feel understood and supported—not have their problems fixed for them.
• Focus on absorbing everything the person is saying to you. Only after that can you really try to help—and only do so if they ask for your advice.
• If you want to offer help and aren’t sure if they’re open to it, consider asking them if they’re looking for simple support, or help resolving the issue.

Remember what you've been told.

• It's okay if you don't have a razor sharp memory. Remembering basic details—such as the names of people involved or relevant details from a previous conversation—and incorporating them into your responses will indicate you’re paying attention.
• On the other hand, if you keep having to stop and ask for clarification or keep forgetting who everyone is, this can get frustrating for the speaker, who may feel as if you’re not really listening.

Follow up with the speaker afterward.

• Try not to be put off if they don’t want to get into the conversation again when you bring it up. Just let them know you’re there for them if they ever do want to talk about it.

Listening Tips

Expert Q&A

Reader Videos

• If possible, postpone an important conversation if you are not in the right headspace to listen. It is better to not talk if you are not ready. Thanks Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0

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• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-older-dad/201409/active-listening-is-key-great-interactions
• ↑ https://www.science.org/content/article/video-how-long-can-you-make-eye-contact-things-start-get-uncomfortable
• ↑ https://today.duke.edu/2019/06/how-practice-active-listening
• ↑ https://hbr.org/2016/07/what-great-listeners-actually-do
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/conversational-intelligence/201402/navigational-listening
• ↑ Moshe Ratson, MFT, PCC. Marriage & Family Therapist. Expert Interview. 7 August 2019.
• ↑ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1052562917748696
• ↑ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27151897/
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201111/the-art-listening-how-open-are-your-ears
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/happy-healthy-relationships/202108/listening-understand-instead-respond

About This Article

To be a good listener, try to listen more than you're talking so you're not dominating the conversation. However, make sure the other person knows you're still listening by making eye contact with them and staying focused on what they're saying. You can also nod at appropriate times and occasionally interject with things like "Yea, that makes sense" or "I see" to show that you're paying attention. Also, make sure you're remembering what the other person is saying since it will look like you weren't if you can't recall anything they said. To learn how to show someone you're listening with your body language, scroll down! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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What Makes a Good Listener — and How to Be a Better One

Adobe Stock / Fairygodboss Staff

We’ve all done it if we’re being honest with ourselves: A friend or family member is talking to us about something important, but there we are scrolling through Instagram (what’s that Beyoncé posted?) or pondering what’s in our fridge to scrounge for dinner later (are there any vegetables left?!) . Maybe they’ve even stopped what they were saying to ask, “Are you even listening to me?”

Being a good listener is an important part of connecting with and learning from others. In the workplace, it can be a particularly useful tool, whether you’re dealing with a tough manager or an organization filled with communication silos.

Lucky for you, you can learn and hone good listening skills over time. Here’s how to be a better listener starting today.

What is a good listener?

Good listeners practice active and empathetic listening .

“Both kinds of listening require giving your full attention to another person in order to better understand them,” Ximena Vengoechea, a workplace expert and the author of Listen Like You Mean it: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connectio n, previously wrote on The Muse .

“Through empathetic listening, you can create a space in which others feel safe being themselves, laying the foundation for open and honest communication between both the speaker and the listener,” she added.

Why is it so important to be a good listener?

Being a bad listener can negatively impact your own and others’ productivity and happiness at work.

On the flip side, being a good listener comes with a lot of perks. “Effective listening helps you to understand others better, allowing you to get your work done on time,” Vengoechea wrote. “It enables you to improve partnerships with your peers and thereby collaborate more effectively. It can even help you shift the balance of your relationship with your manager from head-scratching (what did their feedback mean?) to aligned.”

It can also make you popular at work: When you listen attentively and thoughtfully, people feel seen, heard, and supported, which can increase loyalty among your coworkers and supervisors, Nadia Ibrahim-Taney, a university career coach and lecturer, previously told The Muse . Similarly, it can make you a more attractive candidate in the eyes of recruiters and hiring managers during your next job search. 

Finally, being a good listener is also a crucial step to becoming a great boss: One 2020 study found that when supervisors practice active-empathetic listening, it has a significant positive relationship with employee work engagement.

4 qualities of good listeners

Through their actions, good listeners express and develop these crucial qualities. Good listeners are: 

1. Empathetic.

2. patient..

Patience is a valuable workplace skill in all sorts of ways—and a quality that helps foster good listening. Because good listeners know meaningful conversations and connections happen when people aren’t interrupted, hurried along, or cut off.

3. Curious.

Good listeners are genuinely curious about people and the world around them. They aren’t asking questions or continuing conversations to seem polite—they want answers, and they’re excited about how the speaker will provide them.

4. Lifelong learners.

Good listeners use their curiosity to ensure they never stop learning, don’t assume they know everything, and approach each conversation with the goal of gaining new and valuable insight. This forces them to be fully engaged, ask follow-up questions, and avoid lecturing.

7 expert tips to be a better listener

Every new situation and person will present challenges on your path to becoming a good listener. Apply these expert tips when you attend business meetings, hop on a sales call, or chat with your manager in your weekly one-on-one, and you’ll be sure to show your colleagues you’re someone worth talking to.

1. Be fully present.

Being present means that you’re engaged in the current moment—not anticipating what someone will say next, practicing your own response, or letting your mind wander onto other topics or distractions (this is not the time to be thinking about the latest plot twist on Succession). 

Of course, being fully present is often easier said than done. Try silencing your devices and setting aside a set amount of uninterrupted time to speak with someone to ensure you’re able to be fully focused on the conversation. Practicing meditation is another great way to hone this skill.

Figure out what triggers your distraction, then come up with a way to revert your attention. It can be as simple as telling yourself, “Ah—I’m distracted again, time to refocus,” or noticing that you're always distracted before lunch and rescheduling the meetings you have then.

2. Gauge what people need from you.

Good listeners know that while many conversations come with certain goals or expectations, they should be attentive to the needs and wants of the people they’re talking to.

Let your colleague get some things off their chest, and then assess what they’re looking for from you. If they ask for advice, give it. If they don’t, resist the urge to jump in with your opinion or ideas for “fixing” their situation. 

“If you aren’t sure what’s needed, try asking something like, ‘Would it be helpful to hear my advice on this?’ or, ‘I have some ideas about how to proceed—would you be open to that?’” Vengoechea wrote on The Muse . “If you’re not sure where to even start, asking simply, ‘Would you like me to listen or respond?’ can move the conversation in the right direction.”

3. Avoid interrupting.

We all know how frustrating it can be to have someone constantly interrupt you. Interruptions can come across as disrespectful and derail a conversation or a person’s train of thought. So if you want to be a better listener, avoid interrupting your conversation partner. 

You need to find a healthy balance of not letting someone ramble and go on a 20-minute tangent and allowing your colleague to finish their thoughts. If this is a bad habit of yours, work to be open to a slower pace of conversation. Pauses and silences are your friends. You don’t need to fill every moment with words or cut anyone off. 

Even if you're simply excited about an idea, cutting someone off is a surefire way to give the cue that you’re not a good partner and listener, which undermines your excitement and ambition.

4. Ask follow-up questions.

The best way to show you care about and fully understand someone is to ask relevant follow-up questions. 

“If you’re being asked to take over the planning of an annual work event, for example, you might want to ask about the goals and desired impact of the event as well as the obstacles former planners have run into in the past,” Leah Campbell, who holds a degree in psychology and worked in human resources for years, previously wrote on The Muse .

5. Pay attention to body and vocal cues.

Pay attention to the speaker’s intonation, pace of speech, and overall mood and how it may be different from other interactions you’ve had with them. For example, if a colleague is normally vivacious but changes their tone or gets quiet right after you make a comment, they may have felt shut down. Becoming aware of these cues can teach you better ways to respond (or not respond).

It's also important to pay attention to their body language. While your focus should be on listening to what they’re saying, their facial expressions or hand gestures may not always match their words—and could give you clues as to what’s happening below the surface.

6. Get your body language right.

Although they might not be speaking much during the conversation, good listeners show that they’re engaged by using active body language . This includes maintaining eye contact , nodding, or leaning in to show agreement or encourage the speaker to continue. 

“Listen in a neutral pose that shows you’re engaged, but not presumptuous. Use open body language (i.e., don’t cross your arms), avoid extreme facial expressions (regardless of whether they’re favorable or disapproving), and nix the foot tapping and other fidgety habits that signal impatience,” Lea McLeod, an experienced manager, career consultant, and job search coach, previously wrote on The Muse . “I’ve found that by assuming a neutral body pose, I’m mentally preparing to listen.”

You don’t need to stare them right in the eye for the entire conversation (that might be alarming), but you do need to be actively engaged, focusing your energy and attention on the speaker.

7. Summarize what you’ve heard.

“A great way to verbalize active listening is to summarize and confirm back to the person the subject of what they were trying to communicate,” Ibrahim-Taney told The Muse. 

McLeod suggests repeating what you’ve understood back to them with something like, “So what I hear you saying is _____. Is that right?” or “Let me summarize what I heard you say: _____. Did I miss or misinterpret anything?”

Use this tactic toward the end of a conversation to clarify any points, highlight important moments, or illuminate any outstanding issues—and maybe consider writing it down in a follow-up email for future reference.

What's your no. 1 piece of advice to be a better listener? Share your answer in the comments to help other Fairygodboss members!

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The Qualities Of A Good Listener

Most people believe communication is only about speaking. But listening is equally important if you want to connect with people….

Most people believe communication is only about speaking. But listening is equally important if you want to connect with people.

As American author Ernest Hemingway said, “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

But what are the qualities of a good listener? And what are the traits of good listeners? Are there any specific characteristics of a good listener?

Moreover, how would you know what kind of listener you are, and if you possess the traits of a good listener?

One way to tell if you are being good listeners is to examine the intention with which you are listening. Sometimes you listen only until we get the answer we are waiting for so you can respond. But listening to someone just to respond to them or refute their point is not a good listening practice.

Good listeners listen with empathy, patience, and understanding.

What Makes Someone A Good Listener?

If you have the following qualities, you are a good listener:, you don’t get distracted easily.

We all try our best to listen, whether it’s a short meeting or lengthy conference. But some of us get distracted by side conversations or are tempted to reply to a text message.

You may think that it is possible to multitask by doing something else while also listening to someone. But you can’t truly listen to someone and do something else at the same time. Being distracted by another task isn’t one of the characteristics of a good listener.

Make sure you don’t have external or internal distractions to be a good listener. Put your phone away, tune out any side conversations and noise, and shut your laptop. Remember, listening to someone is not the time to show off your multitasking skills. Paying complete attention to the speaker is one of the most important traits of good listeners.

You are eager to learn from others

Has it ever happened to you? Your friend tells you about how he lost a new phone a week ago. And instead of empathizing, you tune him out knowing how forgetful he is. So you are happy to miss out on the new information as you feel you have already heard the same story before. But, if you have the characteristics of effective listening, you will listen intently.

No matter how much you may think you already know about the person, there’s always more to discover. One of the main traits of good listeners is listening with great interest until the end.

You don’t interrupt

Sometimes, you know more about some subjects and are more eager to share your viewpoints than listen to the other person. But you have to listen and make sure not to interrupt.

Patience is among the essential traits of a good listener. A good listener gives the speaker time by letting them complete their point. And if you possess the qualities of a good listener, you don’t interrupt the speaker. Rather, you patiently wait until the end to share your thoughts or feedback.

You ask the right questions

Listening does not mean sitting in silence. Most people forget that communication is a two-way process. So the next time you are listening, try asking clarifying questions at the appropriate moment. Asking thoughtful questions shows that you were paying attention and are interested in the speaker’s points.

The other benefit of asking questions is it helps ensure you have understood the point.  This is one of the characteristics of a good listener.

You accept other opinions

Another one of the characteristics of effective listening is open-mindedness. Remember, a conversation is a dialogue. It’s an exchange of ideas. You must be prepared to learn something new and change your perspective during a conversation.

Unfortunately, many people lack the traits of a good listener and refuse to listen to other perspectives. Knowing and instilling the characteristics of a good listener can help you to see the world from the other person’s lens. So remember, being open to other opinions is one of the key traits of a good listener.

We meet people who won’t stop talking. We also meet people who only listen blankly and don’t bother to respond. A good communicator blends both sides bringing out the characteristics of effective listening. To be a good communicator, you first need to possess the qualities of a good listener. And you can do so by creating a good listening climate at your workplace. Harappa’s Listening Actively course teaches you how to build a listening climate and the best practices used in many organizations to improve listening skills. Join the course today and take the first step towards becoming an active listener.

Explore topics such as Active Listening , How to Improve Listening Skills , Listening Barriers , Listening Process and the Principles of Effective Listening from our Harappa Diaries blog section to ace your soft skills.

8 Simple Ways to Be a Good Listener in Conversations

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There is a direct connection between the quality of the conversations that we have and the quality of our relationships.

Having confidence in your conversation skills can help you get to know a new client, mentor, or friend who could end up sticking around for years to come.

But did you know that a major part of being a good conversationalist is saying nothing at all?

It’s true– using mindful listening is the best way to demonstrate that you’re interested in what other people are saying and you’re open to hearing about their unique experiences, opinions, or expertise.

Table of Contents

Are You a Mindful Listener?

Being mindful during a conversation requires all of your focus to be on the speaker as you’re giving visual cues (such as nodding in agreement) as they talk.

Before knowing about mindful listening, I would have back and forth conversations while anxiously awaiting my turn to speak. I would half listen to the person who was speaking and half prepare what I was going to say in response.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but once you learn about mindful listening, you realize how much information you’re leaving on the table when people are talking to you.

You never know what insights other people can give you until you give them your full attention instead of focusing on your next move. Part of being a good listener is being open to new information that you’re not necessarily looking for, but need to hear.

Like many people, you may already think that you’re a good listener. But recent studies show that despite how we perceive our listening skills, most of us are more easily distracted than we think.

Improve your listening skills by creating a SMART goal to help you follow through. The video below provides a quick overview of SMART goals and then show three examples for each of the seven areas of your life — for a total of 21 examples.

In this article, we are going to talk about how to be a good listener so people will want to talk to you.

When you’re able to stand out in a conversation and engage the speaker in their own story, you will learn new perspectives and ideas and people will respect you for being able to put your ego aside as you hear what other people have to say.

But first, let’s look at some other benefits of being a good listener.

Benefits of Being a Good Listener

• Helps you empathize and understand someone else’s point of view
• Good listeners easily develop social and professional relationships
• Good listeners make good mentors because they make for good sounding boards for those who need to problem-solve
• Listening displays respect to other people
• Reduces chances of miscommunication

Now that you know why it’s important to be a good listener, let’s look at some strategies to help you get there.

1. Listen Without Making Judgements

We all have a natural tendency to judge people during interpersonal communication. We judge everything from the validity of what people say to how they’re saying it so we can assign a value to their knowledge. However, judging is rarely helpful when you’re having a conversation.

When listening is done well, it’s done with empathy. You’re aiming to view the world through someone else’s eyes to understand what they’re feeling.

This requires listening without judgement because if you let your opinions come into play, they derail the conversation as you send all types of subtle nonverbal cues relaying your differing perspectives.

If you enter a discussion with the goal of understanding someone else’s perspective without any judgment, people will want to have deeper discussions with you because they will trust that you respect what they’re saying and they will want to hear what you have to say in return.

Also, when people feel like they’re being judged, they’re less likely to divulge information, which means they could leave out something that would have been valuable for you to know .

Make sure that you wait until the conversation is over before making your assessment.

For example, if someone tells you: “I don’t think I’m going to go to college next year. I’ll probably just work for a year.” You could respond with judgement by saying: “What type of job could you get with just a high school degree?” This answer clearly shows your opinion .

To answer without judgment, separate yourself from your opinion, and say something like: “So you’re considering taking some time off?” This just reflects the idea back without passing judgment.

2. Think About Why You’re Talking

After listening from a judgement-free standpoint, respond with intention. Consider the motivations behind what you’re saying and be self-aware of why you’re responding.

Are you trying to show the other person your sense of understanding because you can relate to what they’re saying? Or are you planning to one-up them in some way?

You can’t come into a conversation with an agenda. You need to process what the other person is saying, rather than formulate your response while they’re still talking. You have to try to let go of your innate need to be heard so you can step into the other person’s reality and generate a sense of understanding.

For example, if someone is telling you about their problematic boss, don't jump in by saying, “I'm having trouble with my boss also, listen to what happened last week…”

Rather, say something like, “I'm sorry you're having a hard time with your boss. What's going on?” This response leaves the conversation focused on the original speaker rather than moving the focus over to you.

3. Use Positive Body Language

Physically showing that you’re listening doesn’t come naturally for everybody.  But if someone is ready to open up to you about their life, opinions, or experiences in some way, and you sit back with your arms crossed and don’t say a word, they’re not going to say much .

Avoid multitasking when having a conversation. Leave your phone alone and don’t worry about other people who may be passing by. Instead, focus on the speaker by turning your head and body to face them and by making eye contact. Lean in just a bit to demonstrate you’re engaged in the conversation.

To encourage someone to keep talking or to suggest that you agree with what they’re saying, nod your head as they're talking. You can also slightly tilt your head to demonstrate your interest in what is being said.

Make sure to maintain an open body posture by uncrossing your legs and keeping your arms open and your palms exposed. You may also stand with your arms relaxed at your sides to show a willingness to listen and interact.

Finally, when it’s done with intent, mirroring the speaker’s body language communicates that you're in agreement. Mirroring starts with noticing the other person’s facial expressions and physical stance and then subtly copying it yourself.

Even if you know you’re listening intently to someone, you have to show it through your body language in order for them to be sure, because your body language can communicate more than what you actually say .

4. Paraphrase What You Hear

Taking an opportunity to paraphrase what you hear during a conversation shows the speaker that you’re paying attention and it gives them an opportunity to clarify, if needed. 

Put what they’ve said into your own words to give the speaker a chance to correct your understanding.

Studies have found that misunderstandings in the workplace may lead to a lack of trust, increased stress, and increased job turnover. Because of this, it’s a good idea to always ensure clear communication.

There are several ways that you can do this. You can phrase it as a question to give the speaker a chance to refine their original comments, such as by saying, “So, you’re saying that….?” or you could paraphrase with a statement, starting with, “If I’m understanding you correctly, …”

Here are some tips to keep in mind when paraphrasing a speaker:

• Focus your paraphrase on what the speaker implied, not what you wanted them to imply (i.e., don’t say, “I think what you meant to say is…”)
• Keep the focus of your paraphrase on the speaker, so if they say, “I don’t have enough time to finish everything I want to do,” don’t respond with, “No one really has enough time, right?”
• Own your paraphrase by saying “If I’m understanding you correctly…”
• Use some of the speaker’s exact words. So if they say, “We need to reduce overhead costs by 5%.” You could say, “If I understood you correctly in the finance meeting, you believe we need to reduce overhead costs by 5%?”
• Don’t judge the speaker’s thoughts (e.g., “Don’t you think that’s rather unreasonable?”)
• Use paraphrasing to confirm your impressions (e.g., “It sounds like you were excited when…”)

5. Have an Intent to Learn

We often listen to each other to be polite, not because we are truly curious about what the other person is saying. But if you’re only pretending to listen, you won’t get anything out of the conversation, and the speaker is sure to notice.

You have to go into every conversation with a beginner’s mindset, willing to be open to new ideas and hear about other people’s feelings, thoughts, words, and perspectives. In order to learn and grow, you have to hear information that is disproving, not confirming.

Having this attitude will help you be an engaged listener because you will be looking for those pieces of information that are new to you. To do this, think about what you already know about the subject and listen out for anything new. This will help you stay engaged and wanting to hear more.

6. Ask Questions

A big part of learning is asking questions that encourage discovery and insight. Asking a good question lets the speaker know that you’ve heard what they said, and you understand it well enough to want more information.

Show that you’re listening by asking relevant follow-up questions when the speaker is finished talking.

Asking questions will not only prevent you from making assumptions, but it will also give you a deeper understanding of the intended message and it will help you remember what is being said.

Ask open-ended questions to encourage the speaker to go deeper. Things like, “How did that make you feel?” and “What’s your take on that?” are good ways to get someone to say more about a topic.

Asking questions like these will invite people to open up and help you obtain meaningful answers that you may not have otherwise gotten.

If you can't think of an open ended question, you can always fall back on “why” or “how” something happened. These follow-up questions can be used when the speaker is talking about any topic and comes to a break in their story, because neither can be answered in one word .

Encourage people to share more, even if it’s a very small amount. This will make you appear to be interested, even if you’re really not.

For example, if the person is talking about something you have no interest in such as listing every sport their child has ever played, ask something like, “Which was their favorite?” rather than trying to come up with a specific question.

( Check out this article on how to effectively communicate with someone who is prone to shutting down. )

7. Wait Before Responding

It can be tough, but it’s critical to wait for the end of the speaker’s thoughts before formulating a response.

When you’re thinking about what you’re going to say next while the speaker is still talking, you’re not receiving all of the information that’s being offered because you’re no longer listening. This gets you ahead with what you want to say, but lets the speaker’s message pass you by.

Allowing yourself to be distracted in this way during conversations is very self-serving because you’re making a declaration that your thoughts are more important than the speaker’s.

While focusing on yourself is important, realizing that there is a purpose larger than yourself opens you up to being a good listener. No matter how important you think your comment is, interrupting someone else to say it won’t make them want to keep talking to you.

In general, wait two seconds after a person is finished speaking before chiming in with your comments. Offering a short pause will show the speaker that you’re listening to what they’re saying and you want to be thoughtful in your response.

This pause will make the speaker feel valuable as they see you processing what they’ve said, allowing them to achieve their goal of speaking to begin with.

8. Build the Speaker’s Self-Esteem

Good listeners are able to give the speaker a positive experience by being active in the conversation. You can make a speaker feel supported and confident by offering them a safe environment in which to speak.

Try to offer constructive feedback without becoming defensive or argumentative.

Good listeners avoid sounding competitive or like they’re only listening to find errors in the speaker’s logic. Rather, they may challenge assumptions and pose another opinion, but they always make the speaker feel like they’re trying to help, not like they’re trying to win a debate.

You can do this by allowing differences to be discussed openly and by facilitating a constructive exchange of opinions. This requires speaking deliberately and aiming to make sense of both sides of the argument.

Final Thoughts on How to Be a Good Listener

In our increasingly polarized world, having good listening skills is critical in order to reduce needless conflict and promote an environment of understanding.

Keep these tips in mind next time you’re starting a conversation with someone to help them feel at ease and respected.

Remember that good listeners are those who people feel like they can bounce ideas off of rather than people who are just absorbing words. Good listeners give speakers more energy and help them leave conversations feeling confident in themselves.

Finally, if you want improve your communication skills, be sure read these articles:

• 11 SMART Goals Examples for Improving Your Listening Skills
• 9 Ways to Be a Good Communicator Throughout Your Life
• 13 SMART Goals Examples for Improving Your Communication Skills

Connie Stemmle is a professional editor, freelance writer and ghostwriter. She holds a BS in Marketing and a Master’s Degree in Social Work. When she is not writing, Connie is either spending time with her 4-year-old daughter, running, or making efforts in her community to promote social justice.

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‘To be a good speaker, be a good listener, first’

Public speaking champion mark brown on being an effective communicator.

It would help young managers if they listen carefully to what people are saying, before they start talking.

“Most of those listening to a conversation are just waiting to start talking,” says Mark Brown, a US-based public speaker. “Very often, good ideas and solutions can come from your subordinates, if you listen to them,” says Brown.

It’s as important to communicate clearly and effectively, he says, to avoid ambiguity.

He should know a thing or two about speaking. In 1995, Brown aced a contest involving 20,000 people from 14 countries to win the Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking. Since then, he has been a globetrotter, speaking on a variety of subjects — to over 1.5 million people at last count — across five continents.

He was in Chennai recently to speak at Reverberation 2017, the semi-annual conference of District 82 of Toastmasters International.

Elaborating on the importance of an unambiguous message, Brown says: “Suppose you say, ‘I need this ASAP’. To some people, ASAP could mean ‘as soon as possible for me based on my current set of priorities’. So, be specific and say, ‘Can I get this by 2 pm tomorrow afternoon’. Specificity leads to clarity.”

“Are your emails or SMS communication clear enough, and do your colleagues understand them? Sometimes, poor communication can lead to poor planning and perhaps a poor product, and can cost a lot of money. So, mind how you send emails and text messages,” is Brown’s advice to young managers.

Brown says that while speaking in public, it’s important to know the audience and understand their perspective.

“Put yourself in their shoes and think how your words can help them reach a certain goal or gain information or entertain them. In addition, one has to be sure that one’s message is valid. Learning to have eye contact, to pause and build a relationship with the audience, these are skills that one can learn,” he elaborates.

One can certainly learn and train to be an effective speaker. Brown speaks from experience, having left Jamaica for the US when he was 18.

“I could not speak well. My voice would trail off, but over time and through Toastmasters, I gained the confidence to speak clearly, and believed that my voice should be heard.”

Brown himself prepares carefully to address different audiences.

First, learn who the audience is. “I have been speaking for over 20 years. I talk to young people aged 12-18, including secondary school students; to prepare, I use references that a 13-year-old can understand and relate to. With a business audience, my material and approach is different.”

Brown stresses the importance of English as the language of business communication the world over.

In India on his second visit, Brown sees a hunger for excellence in communication.

“I have seen people work hard on their communication skills as they realise that to be a leader, you have to learn to communicate effectively with subordinates, stakeholders and clients. They want to communicate their ideas, vision and goals clearly. Many Toastmasters are also members of corporate clubs, and they use the skills they learn here in the real world of business,” explains the orator.

Ask him if he’s ever at a loss for words, and Brown says, laughing: “I’m married!” Then adds: “Rarely am I at a loss for words, but I do take the words I deliver very seriously. Many people need to consider the power of the pause. Take some time to gather your thoughts before you deliver what you want to say. And then formulate your answer.”

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24 June 2020 11:22:39 IST

Successful leaders are great speakers — and listeners too

There is one underlining trait that sets great leaders apart; great leaders are great communicators. Throughout history, we have innumerable examples of this. Speeches, such as “I have the heart and stomach of a king” by Elizabeth I and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream”, have won battles and changed history. Many other leaders, such as Barack Obama and Narendra Modi, have used their excellent oratory skills to sway people to their side and win their hearts and, most importantly, votes.

In the business world, great communicators have carved a much deeper distinction between their products and solutions than their competition. A few have even managed to create fervent loyalty among consumers that they practically beg for the introduction of new variants or products and carry those around more proudly than their own skins. While we sing praises of great communicators, can we do without great listeners? Is listening a quality that a leader can do without?

Ones who listen

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, by Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar , quite says it all.

Good speakers are charismatic and appealing, aren’t they? More often than not, ‘speaking’ is feted by us, while we overlook the vital half of communication — ‘listening’. Amazon throws 40,000 results for books on “great speeches”. If you look closely, you will realise that for whom we feel the truest deference and affection, and are ready to go the extra mile — say, work late nights or even over the weekends, are not the ones who are great speakers but the ones who listen to us.

With all the noise, distraction, and so much going on, it is challenging to be a good listener, however, to become a good communicator and a leader, you have to be a good listener first.

When you listen genuinely, you understand what exactly the other person wants, you learn to read the person, his or her emotions beyond the mere spoken words. But the problem is that we mostly don’t listen with open minds. We are busy preparing how we are going to react to what the other person is saying, or worse, our unequivocal belief that we are right even before the person has started speaking.

Forges stronger rapport

But we must remember that listening helps forge stronger relations, rapport, and trust between people and teams. When you listen truthfully, you are interested in the speaker, and it shows without trying from the kind of questions you ask. It can help in averting conflicts and prevent crisis. A leader must listen with compassion, without judgment, and with an open mind. While it is human to judge people, to become good listeners and a better leader, we need to suspend judgment.

My grandmother always asked me to listen (to guests) more than speaking my mind. She would pinch my ears and say, “God has given us two ears and only one mouth for some reason”. While I made faces and cocked a snook at her (from a safe distance), I am grateful for the wisdom she shared with us as I grew up. A great leader has to be a great listener. After all, listening allows us to connect with people better, and successful leadership thrives on rich connections.

And by the way, the world’s best speeches even include those that were full of lies and deceit too, for example, Lenin’s “All Power to the Soviets” address in 1917; with historical hindsight, we know he had no such intentions.

(The writer is Lead PR (Product and Technology, Western Digital India, a consumer and enterprise technology company.)

Is It Better To Be A Good Listener Or Talker

We’ve all been in those conversations – the ones where you can’t seem to get a word in edgewise, or on the flip side, the ones where you’re doing all the talking and desperately hoping for some input from your conversational partner.

It’s a delicate balance between being a good listener and an effective talker, yet striking that perfect equilibrium can be quite challenging.

So, the question is: which one should we prioritize? Should we focus on honing our listening skills or sharpen our communication prowess?

As we navigate through life’s countless interactions, it’s essential to recognize and understand the subconscious desires that drive us towards certain conversational styles . By tapping into this hidden realm of understanding, we can become more mindful of how we communicate with others and ultimately foster more meaningful connections .

So let’s dive into this age-old debate – is it better to be a good listener or talker? The answer might just surprise you.

The Importance Of Active Listening

Active listening is like a master key that unlocks the door to meaningful connections and personal growth .

In today’s fast-paced world where distractions are rampant, breaking through listening barriers and honing in on the art of active listening can be transformative.

Not only does it pave the way for empathy building , but it also allows us to gain insights into others’ perspectives and feelings.

By truly hearing what someone has to say, we create a foundation for mutual understanding and foster deeper relationships.

As we delve further into this essential skill set, let’s explore how active listening can also enhance our ability to communicate effectively, opening doors to even more opportunities for growth and connection.

Communicating Effectively

Communicating effectively can be a game changer in both our personal and professional lives.

It’s not just about being a good listener or talker, but rather mastering the art of striking the right balance between the two.

Being aware of nonverbal cues and working to overcome communication barriers are essential aspects of effective communication.

When we pay attention to what others are saying, as well as their body language , we’re able to better understand their emotions and intentions.

By honing our listening skills and knowing when it’s appropriate to contribute constructively to the conversation , we can create stronger connections with others and foster mutual understanding.

This leads us seamlessly into the next section where we’ll explore how to strike that perfect balance in conversations.

Striking A Balance In Conversations

As we’ve explored the importance of communicating effectively, it’s essential to understand that striking a balance in conversations is key to fostering healthy and productive interactions.

Balancing dialogues involves being both a good listener and talker, as it allows for a more dynamic and engaging conversation. This equilibrium can be achieved by keeping in mind the following aspects:

Active listening : Pay attention to what the other person is saying, ask questions, and show empathy.

Be concise : Express your thoughts clearly and concisely without dominating the conversation.

Give space : Allow the other person to share their thoughts and opinions without interruption.

Read body language : Understand non-verbal cues to gauge when it’s appropriate to speak or listen.

Mastering these conversation dynamics will enable you to establish meaningful connections with others while ensuring that everyone feels heard and respected.

As you progress in honing these skills, it’s crucial to develop situational awareness in communication so that you can adapt your approach based on the environment and individuals involved in the conversation. This flexibility will undoubtedly lead you towards becoming a more effective communicator overall.

Situational Awareness In Communication

Navigating the waters of communication is like being a skilled sailor, adjusting your sails to catch the right wind as it constantly changes direction.

In this journey, situational adaptability and context consideration are your compass, guiding you to strike the perfect balance between being a good listener and talker.

By understanding the ebb and flow of conversation, knowing when to listen intently and when to contribute valuable insights, you can adapt seamlessly to any situation – maximizing your effectiveness in both personal and professional settings.

As we delve deeper into enhancing interpersonal relationships, let’s explore how mastering this delicate dance can lead to stronger connections with those around us.

Enhancing Interpersonal Relationships

As we’ve seen, situational awareness in communication can greatly improve our interactions with others.

Now, let’s delve into how enhancing interpersonal relationships can further build on this foundation.

By focusing on relationship building and empathy development, we not only improve our ability to communicate effectively but also forge deeper connections with those around us.

To do this, it’s essential to strike a balance between being a good listener and talker.

Active listening allows us to understand others’ perspectives and emotions, while expressing ourselves helps form genuine bonds.

In the end, honing these skills ultimately leads to stronger relationships and greater harmony in both our personal and professional lives.

In the grand symphony of life, it’s crucial to recognize when to play our parts as eloquent speakers and when to be attentive listeners .

Striking that perfect harmony between talking and listening not only enriches our interpersonal relationships but also helps us navigate through various social situations with ease.

So, let’s fine-tune our conversational instruments and embrace the art of being both a good listener and talker.

After all, the most beautiful music is created when each note is played in balance and harmony.

About Skillabilly Editorial Staff

The Editorial Staff at Skillabilly is a team of Personal and professional experts in the education and career services industry led by Shalev Morag. We have been creating Skill guides and tutorials since 2022, and Skillabilly has become an impactful free skills and abilities resource site in the industry.

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