Are You Even Actively Listening or Just Acting to Listen?

Sikandar Khan
5 min readMay 16, 2022
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If you have ever buried your face into a book on communication advice in the hopes of improving yours, chances are you have had the active listening advice thrown at you.

I’m sure some of you have even had to face the embarrassment of being called out for absent-mindedness, especially when your friend is narrating a heartbreaking story of their dog dying.

Our attention tends to drift, especially, since the generation raised on social media and relentless and never-ending TikToks and Instagram feeds have the shortest attention spans — comparable, must I dare say, to that of the infamously amnesic goldfish.

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Must I grab at the ear lobes and tug to make the ear hole ever so slightly wider in the hopes of catching more meaning and words? Of course not, you numbskull.

Anyone who has had the unfortunate luck of being hit with constipation knows that straining rarely does you any good.

Active Listening Is Easily the Most Selfless Act

Active listening is solid communication advice; the kind you need to hear but will run so far away from that you’d even climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. We are caught up in our own dramas, live inside our own heads almost on a permanent basis, and rarely ever act out of selflessness (active listening is the most easily accessible charitable act you can do.)

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To actively listen to someone, you first have to swallow your own pride, and instead of droning or ruminating about your own aspirations, worries, and anxieties, you listen with the intent to understand the other person’s aspirations, worries, and anxieties.

Being In Your Head Makes You a Bad Listener

Take it from someone who has been complimented for good listening before: stay out of your head as much as you can.

Your life consists of two realities: subjective and objective.

The subjective reality is how you perceive things, people, and circumstances. Without delving too deep into the psychology mumbo jumbo, this reality is affected by the way you were raised, the beliefs you hold about yourself and the world around you, and past traumas. Interestingly, however, as familiar as subjective reality is to us, it is mostly unreliable.

The objective reality, on the other hand, is the actual way things are. Hardcore truths of life stand unaffected and unfazed by your emotions, desires, or needs. Fortunately, we humans can think objectively by detaching ourselves from our reality or programming.

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When we stay in our heads, we miss out on the objective reality — that which is staring at us right in the face. The more we stay inside our own reality, the lesser chances we have of actively listening, and, hence, understanding others.

When any interaction takes place, we open ourselves up to another person’s reality; the human affirmation that a person who is not us requires as much attention as we give ourselves.

Active Listening Is a Superpower!

Have you ever been asked, “If you could have any superpower, what would it be?” I have been. At times, the answer was the ability to fly like Superman, and, at other times, it was the ability to cover distances like Flash.

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It’s a fun question that forces you to think of this hypothetical scenario where your life could be a lot easier. At the root of desiring a superpower is the longing for an easy life; we all want to be able to cruise through life.

What if I told you that active listening is such a superpower — the one that can change your life for good. I can’t say that you’ll cruise through life, but your ride will get a lot less bumpy when you start listening to others intently.

All problems are interpersonal relationship problems, says the book The Courage to Be Disliked. What is the most integral part of interpersonal relations? Interpersonal communication. And listening makes up more than half of all the communication that takes place. Around 90% of what we communicate isn’t communicated by speech. Let that sink in.

The actual fruit of active listening is getting to know other people’s subtext — the intentions, the unspoken desires, the underlying emotions, and other clues that reveal the speaker’s actual meaning.

The spoken words are just the tip of the iceberg; the great majority of that iceberg lies submerged in a sea of subtext.

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In my own communications with the people in my life, I home in on the tiny face twitches that involuntarily happen when someone is lying, the sudden change of expression that reveals discomfort with what was said, the change in pitch that reveals excitement or nervousness.

But the subtext isn’t just present in the above-mentioned cues. When talking to someone, don’t just listen to the actual words being said. If you listen intently, you can get to know someone in one conversation. How did your friend respond to your good morning? If he sounded off, maybe you should ask him if everything is okay.

Active listening can get you out of tricky situations. People leave behind clues to understand them, like bread crumbs.

Your job, as the consummate student of communication, is to pick up on these clues and follow the trail. Your life will get a lot easier once you start understanding others.

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Sikandar Khan

Freelance writer | I write about psychology, fitness, self-improvement, and writing | Follow me on X @AlexKhanWrites | Stoic mind, body, and soul