Josh Goldberg | 10 Tips for Impactful Listening

I said—and I’ll censor myself a little bit here—”I am, dude. I’m talking to the only person on the face of the Earth that I could utter those words to at this moment.” Now, my best friend, who remains my best friend—he’s British, so we’ll give him a discount—immediately felt out of his depth in our conversation. He got scared. He didn’t know if he had what it took to help me or to answer my questions. That doesn’t make him special. That doesn’t make him deficient. One of the reasons why we don’t often ask people who we can tell are struggling what’s going on with them is because we’re afraid they might actually answer the question—and then we won’t know what to do.

The answer to what to do, 99% of the time, is precisely what I needed in that moment from my best friend. I needed him to listen. Just listen. I didn’t need to be fixed. I needed to know I wasn’t alone and that I didn’t have to walk this path alone. I needed the opportunity to just stream-of-consciousness talk in the hopes that what I said could be enlightening to both of us and I could start to figure out my way out from this hole of despair and suffering I was in.

The sad truth about the world we live in is that great listeners are like unicorns. They’re incredibly hard to find. There are so many distractions, internal and external, and we miss so many opportunities to make an impact on others by listening with presence and with intention. Because if we can do that, we will know exactly what Carl Buehner meant—a quote you will hear a lot from me—which you will know what he meant when he said, “People will forget what you said. They’ll forget what you did. They’ll never forget how you made them feel.”

There is no better way to impact a human than to make them feel deeply heard, seen, and valued through the act of listening. With that in mind, I want to share ten tips that Ken Falke and I worked on for how to be a great listener. Know that it takes practice. Know that I’ve had to practice. And trust me, it’s worth it to cultivate this critical and valuable skill.

The first thing we’ve got to do is be present. Good listeners are present and demonstrate their engagement by giving their full and undivided attention. No cell phones. No computers. No distractions. Good listeners do their best to devote sufficient time to the conversation so that it’s not cut off prematurely. Listening well takes time, and it requires our attention and presence.

Second is we’ve got to make eye contact. Good listeners look at the person they’re listening to. We don’t move our lips while we’re listening as though we’re preparing a response, and we don’t roll our eyes. Our body language sends a huge message to other people about whether we care about what they’re saying, what we think about it, or how eager we are to respond to what they’re saying. We must ensure our body language communicates one message: “I care. I’m here. I want to know what you have to say.”

The next is, don’t respond. Good listeners do not respond while someone else is talking. You don’t hum or haw, you don’t hurry the speaker up with “Oh yeah, oh yeah, I understand.” Poor listeners always feel compelled to fill pauses and say something. Skilled listeners simply listen without forming a response. You might nod your head or acknowledge their statement with a smile, but we don’t respond—we listen deeply with the goal of hearing what the person is communicating and what they’re experiencing. Period.

The next is don’t interrupt. When you try to speak honestly, you may talk for a little while and then inevitably you’ll pause. Maybe you’re collecting your thoughts, maybe you’re giving someone else an opportunity to weigh in. But in that pause, the person listening gets to choose to send one of two signals. Either we weigh in or interrupt with our own ideas, or try to finish the sentence, or say ‘that happened to me’, or engage in some kind of comparison, or we signal a desire to hear more by not saying anything. When a person can share without being interrupted, what comes after the first pause often is the deep truth—something that rarely gets spoken. It’s as if someone’s going from here and then down deep into the depths. People can be prepped to listen well in this regard. If the person who’s preparing to share clarifies that they want to have the freedom to speak until they say they’re done, you have clear expectations.

And sometimes in interpersonal relationships, we do this. We say, ‘Hey, I want to say something but let me get it out before you respond.” Alternatively, as a listener, we can say, ‘Would you like me to ask you questions or respond or just prefer I wait until you’re done?’ This can set up a framework but by refraining from interrupting, we allow the person that is speaking the time and space required to share deeply.

Don’t try to fill the space. Allow the pauses to be pauses. We do a session in a number of our programs where we require one listener is quiet while the other person talks for 20 minutes. And it’s amazing what happens. In that quiet, the level of thought, reflection, and disclosure is immense.

Don’t feel like you need to be the clever person who always has the response. Recognize that listening has immense value. Listening deeply and completely has immense value.

The next is: don’t parrot. Good listeners don’t parrot back a repetition of what somebody just said. Parroting another person’s words implies that you’re not really trying to understand what they’re saying underneath it, or that you’re just sort of trying to prove that you’re listening. Good listeners attempt to clarify and deepen our understanding. We might say, “Do I understand you? Is this what you mean?” But we don’t parrot it back.

Don’t finish other people’s sentences. Good listeners do not try to finish someone else’s sentences. When bad listeners do it, it implies that they already think they know what the speaker is saying. If that’s the case, why should that person even talk? It’s profoundly invalidating and unhelpful. As a listener, even if you think you know where the speaker is headed, show them the respect by not guessing. Let them speak. Realize that the act of disclosure is powerful, as is the act of listening.

Next is: establish your role. If you’re engaged in something more formal related to disclosure, you can create expectations about what’s taking place—who’s sharing, who’s listening, how you want to navigate this. If you’re going to be the listener in a conversation, you should listen a lot more than you talk. Consider what percentage you might want to shoot for. Perhaps you let them speak for 80% and you speak for 20%. In casual conversations, it may be more 50/50. But when somebody really needs to let go of something or get something off their chest, it may be useful to establish clearer rules. Some people have natural emotional intelligence and they understand those things. Sometimes they don’t, and it’s helpful to establish those roles.

Next is: don’t change the topic. So imagine two friends are driving in the car together down a long stretch of freeway, and one friend is sharing about his broken marriage. And he’s sharing with the other person and says, “When she said that, it hit me—this might be over. I don’t know how we’re going to survive this.” His friend murmurs a distracted acknowledgment, then says, “Dude, check out that Ferrari.”

Bad listening. And it happens.

If somebody is sharing deeply, you have to stay focused. There might be other things on your mind or logistics related to something in the future, but the act of good listening requires you to stick to the topic at hand. Let the person sharing decide when it’s time to shift gears. A good listener stays focused and attentive on the story. Even if there are distractions—stay engaged, stay present. It’s a huge opportunity to make someone feel seen and to give them exactly what they need.

The next—and the last—ask open-ended questions, aka don’t give advice. So these last two components, in our opinion, are the most important elements of good listening.

I want you to imagine that you’re struggling and you want to talk to somebody about your problems. So you choose a trusted confidant and you spill your guts. You lay it all out there, and you were hoping that they just listen and you could get it off your chest. Instead, as soon as you finish, they jump in and they say, “I know exactly what you need to do.” And they proceed to give you all kinds of advice about what you should do.

You sense that your friend is trying to be helpful—but it’s not helpful. When you try to solve somebody else’s problems, or you tell that person what you think they should do, you send a very clear message. And that clear message is: I don’t think that you are capable of figuring this out on your own.

Unfortunately, rather than building a deep connection, it actually sets up a relationship of inequality. The listener is trying to control the person who’s struggling, rather than attempting to connect on the same level and understand.

Every human being has the need to be heard, seen, and validated. You can’t accomplish any of that if you treat the other person as somebody who is not capable. As the saying goes, unsolicited advice is criticism. If somebody’s not asking you for advice, don’t give it to them. Listen.

So what is a listener supposed to do after hearing a friend share all of these problems that need fixing? There’s two types of responses that will be far more helpful than offering advice.

The first: ask open-ended questions to help your friend come to their own conclusions.
The second: share your experience of what’s been helpful for you, without converting it to advice about what may work for somebody else.

Asking those open-ended questions helps people think deeply about their struggle and arrive at their own decisions. So rather than trying to drive somebody into a decision-making process, the goal of good listening is that we support another person to get to where they need to go on their journey, in a way that honors their journey and their dignity.

At the end of the day, they’ll know what they need to do.

The final area that is required for good listening is to show empathy. And an empathetic listener witnesses without judgment, and really shows a willingness to share someone else’s burden. To walk alongside somebody else and to understand how their experience is making them feel.

If you take a rock out of your rucksack and you hand it to someone who’s empathetic, that person will make you feel safe. You will feel like they’re trustworthy, and ultimately, they will help you to put that rock down. That empathetic listener will show that they hold you in positive regard and they don’t question your intentions, make assumptions, or make judgments. Rather, they believe in your intentions and in the relationship.

When you can be sure that another person values you and will continue to value you, it becomes a lot easier to be honest about nearly anything. Don’t underestimate the profound impact you might be able to have on someone’s struggle by listening in an empathetic fashion.

Research shows that for the vast majority of people, empathetic listening produces substantial gains in mental health. One experiment that we talk often about here is called the Friendship Bench Project. It’s been conducted in Zimbabwe, where grandmothers are available to listen to anyone who might need to share.

27,000 people have sat on those benches next to those grandmothers, and what those grandmothers offer is their time and their willingness to listen to others with empathy. For literally thousands—tens of thousands—of struggling people, that’s enough to regain the strength to move forward.

In a relationship defined by empathy, there’s also no hierarchy. Sympathy is different. Sympathetic people feel a sense of pity for those struggling. They look down at someone and they think, “You poor thing.” In contrast, empathy is about putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Whereas the sympathetic person looks down at someone—at the other—the empathetic person helps somebody realize that we’re the same.

So how do you teach empathy, or learn to become empathetic? Might be the toughest skill to teach and learn. Much of that learning process starts with following the first nine steps of becoming a good listener. Once you hone good listening skills and you show other people that you genuinely care what they have to say, empathy can start to appear naturally.

It’s also learned by going through your own journey from struggle to strength and choosing to risk disclosure. This inside-out strategy requires you to look deep inside of yourself—to acknowledge your gifts and your pain—and offer up your story to others. An outside-in person, someone who lives with a head and heart disconnected, functioning from a place of ego, is going to have a hard time showing empathy. You cannot show deep compassion if you’re someone who survives by functioning only at a surface level.

When we connect our head and our heart, we can much more easily listen to people with empathy.

On the subject of empathy, I want to share a story of an experience I had where empathy was such a profound part of the mix. When we decided to get divorced, my wife and I, I had to make phone calls to my friends to let them know that this was happening. And I remember being incredibly anxious about sharing the news with one of my dearest friends who I’ve been best friends with since I was 14.

And uh, Shotti was married. He’s religious. And I just was worried that he was going to be judgmental, see it as a failure. And so there was a lot for me that I was thinking about as I called him. And I called him up and I said, “Hey, uh, Rashad—I’m getting divorced.” And his first response was to tell me that he was sorry to hear it, and he asked how I was doing.

And after I shared that with him, his response to me was, “I know one thing for sure: the only people who know what happens in a relationship are the two people who were in it. And those are the only two people entitled to an opinion about what the right decision is.” And he said, “I just want to make sure that you’re okay and that you know that I’m here for whatever you need.”

For me, in that moment, that was empathy. He knew what he knew. He knew what he didn’t know. And he communicated in a way that honored the place that I was at. And I felt such a profound sense of relief and connection after talking with Rashad.

So examples like his, and traveling my own road, have really taught me how to show others that I’m safe to confide in. I would strongly, strongly, strongly urge you to work on the act of listening—especially listening with presence, and not to fix, but just listening to other people and realizing—realizing that’s 99% of the battle.

So listen well, and you can help other people struggle well.