An active listener has some traits and qualities in himself/herself that you can find if you observe properly. Being an effective active listener lets you build a good career and make meaningful relationships. Some people are good active listeners by the attitude & behaviors, some are taught in early education and some learn later on how to become active listener. Being active listener lets you overcome many unwanted situations. If you are not a good active listener you might confront with hesitation & people may call you judgmental. If you are a good listener you become a magnetic force and people are more likely to share their ideas with you as they respect your feedback and opinions. Keep reading this post and you will find Top 10 qualities of Effective active listener.
Top 10 Qualities of Effective Active Listener
Eye Contact
A better eye contact is one of the top qualities of an effective active listener. Eyes tell thousands of words. With the eye contact you show in indulgeness, interest & body language. Some times if the listener doesn’t make eye contact, the speakers slows down the conversation in terms of pitch & tone. It specially happens in two way conversation as the speaker has not choices to shift focus.
Smile
A smiling face lets the speaker have more confidence about what he/she says. With an smiling face, an active listener shows not only respect, but also conveys feeling of interest.
Expressions
Expressions of joy, sadness, overjoy, seriousness are pretty common for a meaningful conversation. Relevant Expressions are essential part for any effective communication to take place.
Indulging
The active listener constantly dives into the juice of conversation and tries to show full indulgence in the topic being discussed. In order to show indulgence all other traits are complementary.
Nodding & Non Fluency
An active listener keeps nodding with pauses and uses proper non fluencies allowing the speaker to continues putting the subject. It lets the speaker be more comfortable and shows the listener interest and indulgence.
Pauses
Taking frequent pauses while providing feedback can be pretty helpful. Though its the speaker quality, however, to identify and show indulgence in those pauses taken by the speaker is the part of active listener.
Ask Question
Speakers respect the cross questions. They thrive sometimes hard to encourage the listeners to raise questions. In decisions making process, when the speaker puts the company mission and objective he/she tries to get the feedback and questions from the fellow members to reach the best decision possible. So, it is very crucial quality of the active listener to keep asking the relevant questions out of the context conversation.
Constant Presence of Mind
This is one of the top quality of an active listener. An active listener has to show constant presence of mind while listening to the speaker. We need to admit that most often as a listener we constantly relate the speaker’s context to something with out past data and if this process takes little bit of time then the presence for the current conversation goes off for some moment. Here that is pretty important to show the constant presence and absorbing the context pretty quickly.
Showing Interest
In order to reach the satisfactory end of the conversation, it is necessary to show your interest in the subject. An active listener shows the proper interest in the conversation no matter it is formal or informal, relevant or irrelevant, small or big. Showing interest in conversation lets the speaker to come up with more information and facts.
Body Language
Your body language tells a lot about your presence, indulgence and interest. So, an active listener and speaker both have to have an impressive body language that keeps on attaining the speaker interest.
Don’t Interrupt
An active listener has the quality of not interrupting the speaker in between. Interrupting the speaker in between sends bad signals to the speaker and he loses the interest and comes out to be bit hesitating sometimes. However, if the listener uses the pauses for putting point in front that are relevant then its a juice that works as a constant fuel to the conversation.
Changing the topic
Most listeners mistake to unwillingly change the topic. The listener need to make sure that the topic being conversed does not gets invisible in cross questioning and other conversations.
So, these are the traits and qualities of an effective active listener. If one has to get successful in life then listening property, effectively and actively is pretty important.
