Now we’re down to the most difficult group of listening skills: Reflecting skills. Reflecting skills are the key skills required to be a master listener. With Following Skills and Attending Skills alone, you’ll be good, but you may still misunderstand or misinterpret the speaker. Bolton offers these thoughts on reflective listening:

In a reflective response, the listener restates the feelings and/or content of what the speaker has communicated and does so in a way that demonstrates understanding and acceptance.

There are four reflecting skills:

• A paraphrase is “a concise response to the speaker which states the essence of the other’s content in the listener’s own words.” When I talk to folks about the virtues of reflective listening, this is often what they think about, but it doesn’t stop here.

• Reflecting feelings “involves mirroring back to the speaker, in a succinct statement, the emotions which she is communicating.” You can deduce the speaker’s feelings by

  • observing body language
  • listening to their tone
  • listening to the type of feeling words they use
  • putting yourself in their shoes

  By non-judgmentally reflecting the speaker’s feelings, you encourage them to talk more freely and openly, which helps create an instant intimacy with the person. Further, in order to fully understand the content, we must understand the emotions surrounding the content.

• Reflecting meaning is simply reflecting both the speakers content and emotion.

  When we respond to the speaker’s meanings—the feelings that paralyze or motivate and the content to which the feelings are associated—our listening is often most effective.

  When first learning how to reflect meaning, try using the formula: “You feel…because…” For example: “You feel angry because that jerk cut you off in traffic.” You might think that saying something like: “You feel…because…” would come across as silly or condescending, but it doesn’t. People focus on the fact that you actually understood them rather than the actual words you used to communicate that understanding.

• Summative reflections are restatements of the over-all themes and feelings of a conversation.

  Summaries are useful in any number of situations, and are most effective “when the listener (1) gathers together points that the speaker brought up, and (2) selects relevant data—that which will help the speaker more clearly understand key elements of her situation.” A good summary, then, empowers the speaker to “speak in more depth” about the topic.

  Bolton gives a great example of how helpful summative reflections can be:

  Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychotherapist, told a colleague about his first visit with Sigmund Freud in the year 1907. Jung had much that he wanted to talk about with Freud, and he spoke with intense animation for three whole hours. Finally Freud interrupted him and, to Jung’s astonishment, proceeded to group the content of Jung’s monologue into several precise categories that enabled them to spend their remaining hours together in a more profitable give and take.

So, there you have it. A summary of the three sets of skills needed to become an effective listener. I’ve only scratched the surface here, and would strongly recommend that you pickup Bolton’s excellent book People Skills to learn more about effective listening.

Other posts on How to listen:

• How to listen: Following skills
• How to listen: Attending Skills
• How to listen

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I’m certainly no expert on listening. Most of the ideas and all of the quotes come from an amazing book by Robert Bolton: People Skills. IMO, it is the greatest book on how to apply listening skills in your everyday life.