5 Ways to Become an Active Listener in 2025
“When people talk, listen completely.
Most people never listen.”
– Ernest Hemingway
What happens when you become a better listener? The benefits don’t just include increased work performance and success in your relationships. They give you the power to change lives by simply being present and utterly receptive to another human being’s experience.
In 2025, we are bombarded with constant new information and noise, and often feel the pressure to be the loudest person in the room. Yet how you will become a stronger leader, colleague, or friend in 2025 won’t be by making more noise – it will be through becoming a receptive sounding board for others.
Before I share 5 practical methods for becoming an active listener, let’s define what it means. Active listening was first defined by humanistic psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson in the 1950s as a communication technique where the listener fully concentrates, understands, responds, and remembers what was said to them. Rather than just hearing words fly over your head, active listening involves showing genuine interest and empathy towards others’ experiences. When we dig deeper into the tools that active listening yields us, we unlock our capacity to connect with, comfort, and even motivate others on a deeper level.
What the people in your life often need is for you to put your own agenda to the sidelines and become more engaged in their personal experience. Let’s expand on some wisdom from educators Terry Dubroy and Ricky Dussault’s conversation on Thriving Perspectives that will help you master the art of active listening, and make connections and long-lasting impacts that stand the test of time.
Active Listening Method #1: Initiate casual conversations rather than formal check-ins.
How you set the stage for your interactions with employees, colleagues, fellow team members, and any individual for that matter, must be done with intention. From the intention of “I want to become a more active listener”, you must choose a more casual approach for conversation as opposed to a formal one. A casual approach will increase the probability that the people you plan to interact with on a more meaningful level even open up to you to begin with.
For instance, research shows that structured, formal check-ins can leave employees feeling tense and self-conscious. Even if you intend to be supportive by carving out time for a private meeting, you may not need to go that far to build a meaningful connection. Instead, try offering a quick, genuine compliment on their work ethic as you cross paths – maybe acknowledging their consistency on a project or their dedication during a busy week. A brief, sincere moment like that can feel far less intimidating than a thirty-minute closed-door meeting, while still opening the door to trust and authentic conversation.
Active Listening Method #2: Practice mirroring.
A core component of active listening is mirroring. In active listening, mirroring is the technique of subtly reflecting the words, tone, or body language of others to show understanding and encourage them to continue sharing.
You can mirror someone who you’re interacting with by noticing their facial expression, tone, and body language while they are communicating with you. Although it can feel uncomfortable to join another’s emotional experience, even making a subtle shift such as softening your assertive posture can indicate that you are truly ‘leaning in’ to their experience – that you truly do care.
If these areas of active listening sound too technical or difficult to implement, an additional way that you can set the groundwork for mirroring is by mindfully choosing not to brush off, undermine, or add a polarizing opinion to what others share with you.
Active Listening Method #3: Exercise patience.
Understand that listening builds trust, but also that trust must be built over time. The concept of being able to leave a dramatically positive impact on someone else’s life by simply being their sounding board can be exciting, and even inspiring, to contemplate. However, you may find yourself so invigorated to begin listening more that you expect quick results and get disappointed when you don’t see them. However, trust truly does take time to build and can be broken 10 times quicker than it was built up.
Plus, if you’re one of the first people to break the standard, authoritarian style of “I speak and you listen”, some people may be caught off-guard by an individual in a position of authority who doesn’t shut down their ideas and gives them the space to expand further. While this can be a liberating experience for many, every personality is different and some people take longer to truly trust what you are offering than others.
Use this tool consistently, but don’t use it for the motivation of wanting ‘results’. Allow it to be your teacher in the art of patience, and find reward in simply being able to open a space for connection even if it is not utilized immediately.
Active Listening Method #4: Know when the information you are receiving indicates greater resources/supports are needed.
In Terry Dubroy and Ricky Dussault’s conversation on Thriving Perspectives, they noted their shared experience as educators when it comes to being on the receiving end of more difficult personal stories. As Terry vulnerably shared,
“Students who confide in you about experiencing difficulty in their life or otherwise require educators to be good listeners, but never blurring or crossing professional boundaries. We can be supportive of students by doing our best to acknowledge what was shared, but also to guide them in ways that are beneficial to their needs at that time.”
Just like education, in every professional sphere there is a boundary line between being an active listener and a professional therapist that must not be ignored (except therapy!). In intense moments where you feel like a lot has been shared with you, consider that we are often the best help to people when we accept our limitations and guide them in a direction where we foresee they would be better supported.
Active Listening Method #5: Always strive to be an emotional sounding board before becoming an emotional problem-solver.
If you are reading this post, chances are you are a conscientious, hardworking, and caring individual who wants the best for the people around you. When learning how to improve ourselves and help the people around us, however, it is valuable to remember that people do not need you to do the heavy lifting for them. Instead, you can simply be their sounding board – reflecting their own messages back to them, and being a safe person for them to share thoughts with you that otherwise may have remained bottled up to the point of implosion. You will often find yourself tempted in such instances to give people all of the knowledge and energy that you possibly can, but it is wise to understand that you can do so much for another person by simply being present with them.
You don’t need to solve people’s emotional problems, and more often than not, there is quiet power in receiving rather than solving. In doing so, you will conserve your own energy and return from a work day without feeling drained by your encounters, which in turn gives you more energy for all other areas of your life.
Journalling Prompts for Becoming an Active Listener
Ready to become an active listener? Meditate on the following questions:
Am I more of an emotional sounding board or emotional problem-solver?
How can I become more receptive to others’ experiences without adding my own opinion or solution to the mix?
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