Listening Attentively

To be honest, I used to think that active listening is being concentrated on who is talking and trying to understand what he or she is trying to say until I attended the course about listening. As we are contaminated with scenes of people not even letting the others end their sentences, in most of the conversations we witness, I find it normal that I felt like an active listener when I let people complete their process of explaining their thoughts. What I learned is that listening is more complicated that it seems and there are various techniques to be able to truly connect with someone. As most of the things we learned in this class, active listening has the purpose of fulfilling the needs of being understood. We try to let people share what is alive for them at that moment with us by guiding them with some techniques such as body language, nodding our head, making small comments that shows the other that we are there for them and listening. There are also methods such as paraphrasing what we heard in order to show that we understood what is said and in order to fulfill the need of being understood. Another interesting technique is to give people time to think about what they said and why are they talking by waiting before commenting. This also gives us an opportunity to suspend our judgments for a while and truly see what is going on. I observe in life that having someone understand us, makes us want to share more with them and increases our energy and sympathy towards them. That's why I believe we should practice active listening and become a good listener.