5 Ways To Practice Active Listening
One of the greatest and most precious gifts in life is to find someone who listens to you.
In fact, how do you feel when you are talking about your daily life, and you notice your interlocutor gets distracted? There might be thousands of reasons, maybe he has his own problems, or you might be a little boring or repetitive, or you give too detailed explanations, but I find it quite disappointing. When it happens to me, I stop speaking or I change the subject.
I am not talking about the act of listening to what we practice in business meetings when someone speaks in a louder voice or longer than the others, who most of the time keep silent and politely wait until their turn.
I am referring to attentively listening to a person’s words, which means a person’s soul expressing itself. It happens when someone dares to tell you about his personal limits and struggles, and you are listening because you are interested in what he says. It’s not about his strengths, it’s about his weaknesses. He opens because he trusts you, or he just needs to say his problems aloud: speaking about what weighs on his soul, he will find an answer or feel relieved. It is storytelling: talking about the events; he gets the complete picture.
Listening to a friend or a loved one is something we do every day. Yet how can we show them, and…
