Listen Better: 5 Essential Phrases for Active/Reflective Listening

Listening is a skill, but many of us do it poorly. If we can learn to do it better, it can produce dramatic improvements in our lives. In this video, I'm going to teach you five stock phrases I use when I do reflective listening, or active listening, or looping back—it goes by a bunch of different names, but it's the same basic skill.

Hi, everybody! I'm Bruce Lambert from HowCommunicationWorks. com, a channel where I teach you communication skills so you can advance in your career, improve your relationships, and be more confident.

Listening is one of the great unheralded skills in communication. Most of us think about communication as being about talking—you know, about how we say things, about being articulate, being creative, being thoughtful, being funny, being charismatic, and so on. But I find, especially over the last ten years of my life or so, that the most important skill is listening.

Listening does involve actually talking in certain ways, so I want to talk today about one particular listening skill called reflective listening, or active listening, or sometimes looping back. It involves basically repeating what someone has just said in order to confirm that you've understood it, to show that you're paying attention, and to give people an opportunity to elaborate on their feelings. If you remember my previous video on empathic listening, which I'll link to, that video talked about how one way to help people feel comforted and feel better when they're emotionally upset is to give them an opportunity to elaborate on their feelings, and reflective listening gives people an opportunity to do that.

It's just an incredibly powerful skill, and I strongly recommend you take some time to use it. I'm going to give you these five phrases that I use when I do reflective listening, but first, I want to give you a caution. The caution is that this is a kind of technique, and sometimes we think techniques are gimmicks or just devices or sort of mirror techniques, and then when we use them, we're being insincere or inauthentic.

I think that's a real risk. If you use these things without an authentic desire to listen to people, to care about them, and to be kind to them, and to show concern and empathy to them, if that authentic feeling isn't there inside of you in terms of your own intention in the interaction, then I think these things can come across as gimmicks or techniques. People might even call you on them and say, "Oh, don't use that BS psychobabble on me.

" But what I find much more common is when I enter an interaction authentically, with the sincere intention to listen to somebody and to try to help, and to try to understand what they're saying, then I can use these phrases, and people don't even notice them. They certainly don't notice I'm using any technique, and I don't even notice I'm using a technique anymore because I've incorporated this so much into my own personal style. I do worry that some of my friends and family will watch this video and notice that I've been using these phrases with them and maybe they'll think I've been being inauthentic, but that's not the case; this is just the way I communicate now.

So, let's go over these phrases—five phrases I use when I do reflective listening. Number one: "You are [emotion]. " So, let's imagine the scenario we're talking about is a person who's angry with us because we've showed up late for a date, a meeting, or an appointment.

They're angry with us, and we start talking to them, and they're really angry. So I just say, "You're angry. You're angry with me for showing up to this meeting late; you think that I'm being disrespectful to you by showing up late to this appointment.

" Then I insert whatever I'm observing. Notice that these phrases aren't really the key to empathic listening. The key is focusing on what other people are saying and focusing on what other people are feeling.

We fill in the blank in these phrases; these phrases are just a template to insert your observations. The much more fundamental skill is being observant—paying attention to people's nonverbal behavior in the context so that we know what they're feeling. As we're trying to determine what they mean and what they're feeling, we can use these phrases to allow them to elaborate on their feelings.

So, if someone starts to get angry with me, one of the things I might say is, "You're really angry with me," and then fill in the blank. That's number one. Number two: "It sounds like.

. . " and then you fill in the blank.

So, else I might say, "It sounds like you're really upset with me for showing up to this meeting late. It sounds like you think I'm being disrespectful to you for coming to our meeting late. " So, "It sounds like.

. . " and then insert your observations.

Number three: "It seems like. . .

" This is very closely related to the other. I didn’t promise you these will all be completely unique, but these are the phrases that I use, and you can alternate them so they don't start to sound like a gimmick. So, "It seems like.

. . " You observe their behavior and say, "It seems like you're really frustrated with me for showing up to this meeting late.

It seems like your perception is that I constantly come to these appointments late and that maybe this shows some disrespect for you or that I don't care. " So, I just say, "It seems like. .

. " and then I insert my observation. Number four: "What I’m hearing is.

. . " and then I insert my observation.

"What I'm hearing is a lot of anger at me. . .

" For coming late to our date, what I'm hearing is frustration. What I'm hearing is sadness. So, what I'm hearing is—and then insert the observation—and then be quiet and listen to the range of what people are saying.

That's actually a key to listening as well. Number five in my stock phrases for doing reflective listening: you seem to be saying. So, you seem to be saying that when I show up late to these dates, it gets you really angry.

You seem to be saying that if I am not always on time, that it reflects disrespect to you and to our meetings. You seem to be saying that my coming late reflects badly on me as a person or on my character. So, you seem to be saying—and then insert the observation.

So, that's it. Those are five phrases that I frequently use when I'm trying to listen carefully to people and demonstrate to them that I'm listening to them, and when I'm trying to give them an opportunity to elaborate on how they're feeling so that I can understand their feelings, their intentions, their thoughts, their beliefs, and so that I can do a better job listening, so that I can do a better job communicating. So, that's it.

These are, in my experience, incredibly powerful techniques. They must be used with authentic intention, or else they might come across as gimmicks. But if you, in all sincerity, with an authentic intention to be kind and helpful, use these phrases, I think you will finally be able to transform your relationships and dramatically improve your skills as a listener.

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