Active Listening Skills: The Most Underrated Skill for Success in Work and Life

Years ago, I worked at an ad agency that promised the world and then went out of business seven months later. I hadn’t been there long enough to feel like the place had shaped me in any meaningful way. It didn’t deliver much growth, but it did deliver one lesson – a lesson that quietly shaped every job, every relationship, and every difficult conversation I had after that. That lesson was active listening skills – though at the time, I had absolutely no idea that’s what it was.

At that stage, I was a young digital “specialist,” which is essentially someone with WiFi, misplaced confidence, and the professional judgment of a golden retriever guarding a fridge. I worked closely with a senior account manager who was brilliant and refreshingly blunt. One day, mid-meeting, I jumped in to sprinkle some unsolicited digital “wisdom” – the kind absolutely nobody had asked for. She stopped speaking, turned slowly, stared through my skull, and said:

“You’ve got a real problem with interrupting people when they’re speaking.”

It hit me like being smacked with a wet slipper by someone who’s just discovered I’ve been microwaving fish in the office kitchen. My face went hot. And the worst part? I genuinely didn’t even know I was doing it. That’s when I discovered the first painful truth in what active listening really was, and interrupting was the conversational equivalent of stepping on someone’s shoelaces, tripping them, and then acting surprised when they fall through the emotional drywall.

Interrupting sends terrible signals – “My point is more important,” “I’m the main character,” or “I’ve decided you’ve spoken enough, thank you.” It shrinks our world. And it’s the opposite of influence, because it’s rarely the loudest person in the room who makes the biggest impact – it’s the one paying the closest attention.

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Listening Is Not Silence – It’s Intentional Attention

Years later, during the Cambridge Communicating for Impact and Influence course, I learned something that should be tattooed on the forehead of every manager alive: effective communication in the workplace isn’t built on talking – it’s built on active listening techniques.

Not speaking. Not dominating. Not performing dramatic monologues like we’re auditioning for a corporate soap opera. Listening.

Most of us proudly claim we’re “great listeners” – which is adorable, considering half the time we’re mentally assembling counter-arguments like an IKEA bookshelf missing half the screws.

To build real active listening skills, we move through three layers:

1. Hearing – sound enters our ears; congratulations, we’re alive.
2. Understanding – we interpret words instead of prepping our next clever counterattack.
3. Integrating – the rare part, responding from understanding rather than ego.

And here’s where it gets interesting: we often think we’re applying active listening in the workplace, but what we’re actually doing is listening for an attack.

Because we often listen for intent, not meaning.

• Intent-listening sounds like: “Are they implying something about me?”
• Meaning-listening sounds like: “What are they actually saying?”

One leads to defensiveness.
The other leads to clarity.

And then, just when we think we’re handling the conversation like functional adults, our emotions wander in uninvited, like that colleague who weaponises “got a sec?”, and start interpreting everything with the accuracy of a drunk translator trying to defuse a bomb made of feelings.

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Our Emotions Are Horrific Interpreters

If there’s one truth about emotional intelligence in communication, it’s this, our emotions are absolutely terrible at interpreting meaning. When we’re tired, stressed, irritated, or already annoyed by the person talking – or even just the topic – something unhelpful happens: we’re no longer listening to the words. We’re listening to our reaction to the words. It’s emotional ventriloquism.

Someone says, “Do you have a moment to chat?” Our brain hears: “Prepare for psychological combat.”

Emotion collapses listening into pure self-protection. We start scanning for danger like a paranoid pigeon convinced every shadow is an incoming hawk with unresolved childhood issues. This is exactly how emotions affect listening, and it destroys clarity. When our emotional temperature is high, we can hear:

• accusation where there’s curiosity
• criticism where there’s context
• conflict where there’s simply conversation

That’s why self-awareness in communication matters. Active listening begins not with our ears, but with our nervous system. And once our emotions hijack the conversation, clarity disappears. That’s where things get dangerous – because the moment we stop listening, the other person stops feeling safe to speak.

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Listening Creates Safety – And Safety Creates Honesty

One of the biggest truths in all my reinvention work – and in leadership communication skills – is this: you can’t change what you can’t see. And you can’t see what others don’t feel safe to tell you. That’s the real currency of communication: not volume, not charisma, not authority – but safety.

When someone feels heard, they open up. Not dramatically, not with fireworks or sudden life revelations – just naturally, like they finally have room to exhale. But when they don’t feel heard, they shut down faster than a printer the moment you make eye contact with it. And once someone shuts down, the whole conversation collapses like a folding chair at a family braai.

This is where active listening becomes a genuine competitive advantage for leaders. Influence isn’t built on who talks the most or who dominates the room. Influence is built on creating an environment where people feel safe enough to speak honestly. Active listening changes the emotional climate of a conversation. It moves us from competing to collaborating, from defending to understanding, from “battle” to “bridge.”

This is also where many of us fail: we mistake authority for understanding. But real trust in teams doesn’t come from leading the loudest – it comes from listening the deepest. And that’s the heart of all of this: less proving, more choosing. Choose to understand first; respond second.

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The Science Agrees (Because Even Feelings Need Receipts)

This isn’t soft, fluffy theory.
There’s actual evidence — the kind with charts, footnotes, and stressed postgraduate students — proving the benefits of active listening techniques and how to practice active listening effectively.

• Active listening improves job performance, leadership effectiveness, and team functioning [Source]
• Active listening increases influence more reliably than speaking [Source]
• Active listening builds trust, psychological safety, and collaboration, which fuels innovation [Source]

The summary?

Talking loudly makes noise.
Listening carefully makes impact.

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The Practical Bits: How to Listen Like Adult Humans

We’re probably not practicing active listening skills if:

• we’re waiting for our turn to talk
• we interrupt
• we mentally finish someone’s sentences
• we rehearse our reply mid-conversation
• we’re emotionally triggered and pretending we’re not
• we’ve Googled how to stop interrupting people in the last week

We are listening when:

• we slow down
• we ask clarifying questions
• we summarise accurately
• the other person feels safe enough to continue

And whether we’re the ones not listening, or someone else isn’t listening to us, the approach is the same:

• “Let me finish this thought first.”
• “Give me a moment to complete this part.”
• “Can we take this one at a time so we stay clear?”

People mirror environments.
If we set calm, collaborative energy, the room adjusts.

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Final Thought: Listening Costs Nothing, but Not Listening Costs Us Everything

Listening costs us nothing.
Not listening? That’ll cost us clarity, trust, influence, and possibly our jobs – and frankly, that’s a terrible return on investment.

So the next time someone speaks – really listen.
Hear them.
Understand them.
And give their words the space to land before you decide what to do with them.
You might be surprised by what you’ve been missing – whole universes of meaning hiding between syllables like shy raccoons.