Three Easy Active Listening Exercises

Grab a partner, grab a friend, it’s active listening practice time! Active listening is a form of listening where you bring your full attention to the person speaking and seek to understand them, instead of being distracted or focusing on your agenda. Active listening is a great way to help someone feel heard and learn where they’re coming from – an excellent skill to have in friendship, romance, or business. Here are some basic exercises from a workshop I ran and the rationale for picking them: 

Exercise 1: Better presence through meditation. Being present is foundational to active listening: it’s hard to do other active listening skills if you’re not present. Removing environmental distractions, like electronics, goes a long way towards helping us be present, but we may still find our minds wandering. That’s where meditation comes in. Meditation gives us a way of working with our attention and teaches us how it feels to be present.

To kick off the exercise, we meditated for two minutes (I would have recommended longer if we had more time in the workshop), focusing our attention on our breath and gently bringing it back if it wandered. The important part of the exercise is not to completely stop the mind from wandering, but to practice bringing it back when it does. Then, we talked in pairs: the speaker would describe their weekend for three minutes while the listener said nothing and gave their full attention, drawing it back if it wandered away. Then the speaker and listener switched roles and repeated the exercise.

Exercise 2: Practicing paraphrasing. Paraphrasing helps your understanding of the person you’re listening to and makes the other person feel seen. A good paraphrase will identify events and emotions: what happened and how did the speaker feel about it? If someone says “My friend was late to our weekly lunch again! It’s like they’re not even trying,” one potential paraphrase is “That’s really frustrating that your friend is not keeping their commitment.” In this case, “not keeping their commitment” is the event and frustration is the emotion.

We paired up for this exercise and took turns talking about problems: the speaker told the listener about one of their problems, past or present, big or small. Then the listener paraphrased the problem and reflected back how the speaker feels about it. The speaker offered feedback on the paraphrase – which parts felt accurate and which felt like they missed the speaker’s point (and why), and the listener revised their paraphrase. The pair repeated the paraphrase – feedback – revise cycle until the speaker felt like the listener captured their intent (or until four minutes had passed – again due to workshop constraints). Afterwards, the partners switched.

Exercise 3: Exploring through questions. Where paraphrasing is used to make the other person feel seen and confirm our understanding of their experience, questions are used to explore the significance of what the speaker is sharing and seek deeper understanding. Good questions allow room for a range of responses and usually focus on emotions, experiences, or meaning. For example, if someone’s telling you about a hobby, an open-ended question is “what about [your hobby] do you like?”  Another way of looking at it is that a good question will take one step towards the bigger picture; going from a hobby to what the person likes about the hobby can reveal parts of their personality. 

In this exercise, the speaker talked about one of their hobbies while the listener only asked questions and tried to make them open-ended and exploratory. After four minutes, the roles switched. This exercise is as simple as it sounds, but might feel a bit weird. Some folks’ conversation styles tend to lean more on story-telling and some tend to lean more on asking (That’s Not What I Meant, Deborah Tannen), so being forced to only speak or ask questions might feel a little forced. That’s okay! It’s just like exercising a muscle you don’t use often.

The Rationale

I drew the basis for the exercises from three reputable sources (as far as internet self-help goes): Healthline, VeryWell Mind, and Psychology Today. I also pulled from my own experience with active listening (having a mother who’s a therapist comes in handy sometimes). Although the lists varied some in phrasing and advice, they shared common themes:

1. Giving the speaker your full attention
2. Don’t interrupt
3. Withhold judgement
4. Reflect their experiences back to them
5. Ask thoughtful/open-ended questions   
6. Use body language to show engagement

You could simply take this list, think about it, and try to have a conversation where you do those things. And that might work for some people, but there are a couple stumbling blocks I want to address:

For one, being told not to do something (“don’t interrupt”) is not as helpful as being given something to do (get ready to paraphrase what the other person is saying). When we’re told not to do something, we’re still thinking about the offending behavior (the white bear problem) and it can be easy to slip back into our old habits when we stop actively focusing. But when we have a new behavior to replace the old one, we can focus on it until it becomes our default (a strategy suggested by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit). So, I picked exercises that gave practitioners something positive to focus on. 

Another challenge is to know whether you’re getting better. How do you tell if you’re being more attentive or asking more open-ended questions? Any feedback you get in a real conversation is indirect and conversations happen quickly enough that it can be hard to pay attention to feedback in the first place. By focusing on a single skill and stripping away the usual responsibilities of a conversation, exercises allow you to get clearer feedback and dedicate your full attention to improving a specific area.

I also tried to pick exercises that would naturally promote good listening behaviors. It’s difficult to fake the body language that comes with a feeling, so the best way to look curious and engaged is to be curious and engaged. Even when the listener isn’t speaking, all of the selected exercises give the listener something active and challenging to do. Hopefully, this will naturally create a sense of engagement that will spill over into body language. 

Active listening can feel awkward at first, especially for folks who are used to trying to bring the spotlight of the conversation to themselves rather than shine it on someone else. But even with fumbling first attempts, the person we’re talking with will usually be able to tell that we’re trying to be attentive and appreciate the effort.

Thanks to Early Readers: Erin Rosenfeld