“Active listening is a communication technique that is used in counseling, training, and conflict resolution. It requires that the listener fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said.”
Thanks, Wikipedia. But that’s not all.
First of all, let’s start by saying what active listening is not.
Active listening isn’t just putting your fishy face on and repeating what the counterpart is saying. That’s called reflective listening, and by the way, it doesn’t necessarily entail that your attention is alive during the encounter.
Active listening isn’t waiting for the other person to finish just to spit out the answer that you were preparing the whole time you were supposed to actually listen.
And active listening isn’t trying to prescribe solutions to the counterpart’s challenges and obstacles, at least not without fully understanding the whole context and spending at least some time in an empathetic state with him/her first.
Oh, and by the way, using it just in “counseling, training, and conflict resolution” looks like a shortcut.
