M7: Active Listening

This past week I got to experience a lot of active listening, and it wasn’t even for the assignment, but I used the techniques described to us in all of those conversations that I had. I had to do a lot of listening this week because I got put in between two friends who were having a dispute and didn’t want to directly talk to each other so I became their “owl.”🦉 I learned a lot about being an active listener in this situation because not only did I have to understand what they were saying and feeling because that’s what you should do when you are listening to someone and trying to be an active listener, but I also had to take this information pull out the parts the other person needed to receive and give it to them. I had about 3 conversations with each of them that were back and forth, I also had other one on one conversations with them, but not about this situation. I always try to be an active listener, because if I'm talking to someone I would want that from them as well. I always try to make some sort of eye contact or at least look at the person when I talk to them and when they are talking to me even if they aren’t reciprocating it. My friend Jordan who was one of the people I was actively talking to isn't the greatest at making eye contact in a conversation, but she will occasionally look at you, and I know this is something she does, so it doesn’t really affect the conversation, but it does make the conversation stronger when she does. My other friend Beks is good about making eye contact in conversations, but with some of the things we were talking about she wasn’t always able to look at me, she was afraid of showing her humility, which is a big thing for her. The main thing we were talking about in our conversations was about how each of them felt like they had jeopardized their friendship because of one thing that was said. I was there to reassure both of them that, that definitely was not the case at all. It made things awkward for a little bit but it could never ruin their friendship. They still chose not to talk for four days, and that was where I stepped in. They are my two closest friends, so I know a lot about both of them and how they feel about things, so relaying their feelings to the other person wasn’t hard for me, but it was difficult for me to get them to believe what I was saying was true because they were both in denial. I knew this was a delicate time for both of them, and I understood why so I was always trying to be as empathetic as I could, but I also had to be stern so that they would believe what I was relaying to them, or how I felt about what we were talking about. I'm already an extremely empathetic person, and when it was my two closest friends, I was actually feeling what they were feeling, and I've had prior experiences similar to theirs so I had some type of understand of what was going on which really helped drive our conversations. I was able to pull something I had gone through and ask if that was what they had felt or thought and we would be able to go from there.

These conversations actually made me even closer to both of my friends💙, who I was already pretty close to anyways. I was able to find out how they interpret information and just the way they talk. I picked up on this so much that I was using both of their mannerisms throughout the week without even thinking about it. Being an active listener can and will grow your relationship with a person, or people. When you are being an active listener you are able to pick up on little things that you might not see if you were just half listening or distracted. You can see a dramatic eye shift, or a slight change in facial expression and if you know a person well enough that will tell you more than their words ever will. It was a lot of those little things that I saw that helped my drive the conversations further, because I could tell if they were holding back, or not being completely honest, or if they were thinking about something else. I was also able to learn how to be comfortable in the silence, which is really weird, I usually don’t do well with silence.

I can’t exactly describe their feelings after each conversation because most of the time they were in a processing state of mind and just weren’t mentally capable of trying to talk about the situation anymore. But they both would tell me they appreciate that I was actually listening to them and was adding insight on what they were saying, so I think I was able to achieve being an active listener for them. I mean they came and talked to me again after the first time so I was doing something right.  Jordan
Beks