Active Listening is the Key to Everything

It is really important to mention that to be a good conversation partner we must not only provide meaningful topics for discussion, but also engage in proactive listening. It may seem like a subtle thing, however by providing an ear and actively engaging in the conversation we raise our partners opinion of us. Specifically, the perceived responsiveness that they will feel from us will help build a much stronger connection between the two. When you actively engage and focus on what your partner is saying, you are able to understand their emotions and resonate with them. As well, since you and your partner are so intertwined, once it is your turn to talk, they will end up doing the exact same thing and reciprocate with good listening skills. This comes extremely helpful in times of conflict – when each of you is able to express their side while maintaining your cool, you will be able to further understand the root causes of the conflict and be able to find solutions much easier.

Within the umbrella of active listening come notions of mind-reading and perception checking. Mind-reading, as discussed earlier, refers to an individual thinking that they know what is on their partners mind whether they are both sitting in silence or are having a discussion, and frankly – nobody is that good at it. That is why we also recommend when you actively listen, you also talk with your partner to help further understand what they’re talking about by asking them direct questions and “paraphrasing” to make sure that you understood what is being discussed, instead of failing to understand what your partner might be implying. This helps in regular face-to-face conversations as well as text-messaging your LDR partner. How? Even in the time of emojis and abbreviations, we may still misunderstand concepts or notions that are being discussed, and thus confusion can occur, and conflict can arise. Unless we are able to see our partners’ body language and hear the tone they are using when speaking, it can be very hard to misinterpret a simple response of ‘good’ to the regular “how are you?”. This brings us forward to another example of something active that we ourselves can try and monitor – paralanguage! Read on in our other post about it.