Active listening is one of those things that's easy to talk about, in theory, but really, really hard to practice. In real life. You'll notice that the better listener you are, the better your relationship with your partner and the better your relationships and your life. Because, in reality, when you actually pay attention to what your partner on someone else says, you actually put yourself in a position to understand their needs, what do they really want? What are they trying to communicate? How do you respond?

That what become clear as you go on listening actively? Let me give you a few pointers now, so that this becomes a lot more easy to understand. How do you actually listen actively? Number one, you adopt the attitude You may actually learn something from your partner. Yep. Here, you need to realize that you have to get into the belief that I am actually going to pick up something from listening to my partner.

It also allows you to view things from another vantage point. Now imagine that you have only one view on the situation. And that comes from not really listening, interrupting, or saying something in the middle of your partner saying something important to you. You have only one viewpoint, and that is your own. However, to engage in a future discussion, you need to look at this from different angles. Particularly, there's that's what active listening actually allows you to do.

If you want to actively listen, you have to pay attention to what their needs are. You need to look at it from different points of view. And that is their point of view. What do they need? What are they feel? What are they actually thinking about.

And this all comes from listening and paying attention. The next thing you can do is maintain eye contact to display interest and maintain facial expressions that display a sense of understanding and acknowledgement of their feelings. Again, very critical. Notice how in problematic situations, especially when we are accused of something, or we are told something that we don't really like, we either maintain eye contact that's too harsh, or we maintain a lack of eye contact. This is very important. We rarely pay attention to our non verbal gestures and expressions.

However, A lot of communication happens through these nonverbal means. That's why it's important to be mindful of them. So maintaining a healthy amount of eye contact, that involves you having to look into their eyes for a few seconds, turning away or looking at something else and then coming back to their eyes. This is very effective, because it makes them feel like they are being heard some simple gestures like you having your hands on your chin and shaking your head up and down slowly. This helps like the other person is being heard as well. So this is a bunch of stuff that you can do.

And with practice, you can become a more active listener. What does all of this do? active listening allows you to ask a bunch of good questions that can actually be followed up provided you were listening. Now remember, when it comes to actually listening to the other person, you want to get down to the front Details. What does this person need? How do I actually deal with the situation?

So you ask that person next to elaborate. So you can ask them a few of these things. Could you give me an example, when you saw this happen? Let's say you did something to make them angry. Could you give me an example of a situation where I made you angry? Number two, was that good for you?

Did you like it? Can you tell me if there was a time when that didn't actually happen? Notice how active listeners don't simply hear, they focus on the words and gestures to actually grasp meaning and understand what the person is going through. They also focus on asking questions that engage in delivering more details about a particular topic. active listeners also avoid interrupting, changing the topic and walking away from the situation. I know it's a tall order.

But if you want to be an effective communicator, you have to understand that interrupting, changing the topic or walking away from the situation doesn't solve the problem. It only irks the other party that much more and causes even more problems. You want to avoid all of this stuff and actually get into a state where no problems are actually ongoing. You want to get into a position where the other person feels like they have been heard again, and repeat that. You want to make them feel like they have been heard. very profound statement.

Think about it, and actually see how you can apply this in your own relationship. So become the active listener, practice these skills and see How you can apply it in different situations.