Listening

• Become interested in other people. Encourage others to talk about themselves. The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested. Connect with people, don't perform for them.
• Being able to listen well is a superpower. Listening is difficult because it involves suppressing your ego long enough to consider what is being said before you respond.
• Forget your agenda. Don't have internal monologue.
• Avoid trying to respond immediately and allow the other person time to finish speaking.
• Don't answer your phone while speaking with someone in real life. If the real life conversation starts, has precedence over the asynchronous ones.
• While listening to someone sharing a problem keep asking them "Is there more?", until there is no more. Create space for the other person to continue Talking. This is called reflecting and simply means repeating back a word or phrase to encourage the other person to go on.
• Use open questions more. Open questions are any questions that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no reply.
• When you are feeling confused, do a small summary to make sure you didn't miss anything important.
• Giving someone an opportunity to clarifying their emotions and thoughts, or to delve deeper into a certain topic, is one way you can help them process and understand their feelings about a situation.