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What’s the Most Effective Way to Move From Attentive Listening to True Empathetic Listening?
A practical breakdown of the core ideas from How to Listen with Intention by Patrick King, including how to shift from attentive to empathetic listening, use conversation games to deepen connection, and strengthen emotional awareness so you can truly understand others. Ideal for readers who want to communicate with more presence, curiosity, and emotional intelligence.
Keep reading to learn how these listening strategies can help you connect more deeply, ask better questions, and make every conversation feel meaningful for the person across from you.
Talking about yourself triggers the same feel-good response in your brain as eating your favorite food or receiving a cash prize. What’s crazier, the 2012 Harvard study that discovered the link between talking, eating, and making money also found that participants were willing to give up 25% of the money they just earned for the opportunity to keep talking about themselves!
It’s no wonder people are inclined to talk more than they listen! But, if we’re not careful, that biological reward for talking will turn us into conversational narcissists. A conversational narcissist uses every opportunity to share their thoughts and talk about themselves.
You might be thinking, “That’s not me. I listen well.”
You may maintain eye contact, ask questions, and nod along, but if you’re filtering everything through your own perspective, you’re merely an attentive listener. Attentive listeners fail to connect with their conversation partners because they’re judging people as they talk, and that judgment creates a low-grade tension that prevents connection. As King explains in the book, “While the other person speaks, an attentive listener compares statements to their own points of view, deciding whether they’re in agreement with them or not, like someone on a debate team.” If you want to establish a deep connection with the person you’re talking to, you must move from attentive listening to empathetic listening.
Empathetic Listening
Empathetic listening requires temporarily setting aside your perspective, judgments, and beliefs to feel what the other person is feeling. The highest form of listening means embodying what someone is experiencing and reflecting it back to them. When you can embody what someone is experiencing, show them that you get it, and keep the focus on them without hijacking the conversation, you start discovering fascinating details beneath the surface and get the thrill of genuine connection.
You’ll be far more willing to take the time to see people’s world through their perspective if you find them fascinating. Therefore, imagine a trusted friend has just told you the person you’re about to talk to is one of the most fascinating people they’ve met, and has had a life experience that you’ll love to know more about. Your job is to dig past the surface-level traits, like what they do or where they’re from, and inch closer to what moves them and how they see the world. Make your conversational job fun by playing these two conversation games:
Conversation Game #1: The Late-Night Host
Picture yourself replacing your favorite late-night host, like Conan O’Brien or Jimmy Fallon. Your job isn’t to impress. It’s to make the person across from you feel like the most interesting person in the room. Playfully ask open-ended questions and treat every answer like it’s the start of a great story. Use short prompts like “Tell me more about that” or “What was that like for you?” You want to nudge them into storytelling mode using as few words as possible. When you hear an emotional word, gently pull on it. If they say, “I was pretty anxious about it…” just ask, “Where did that anxiety come from?” — and let them go deeper.
Conversation Game #2: The Transformation Game
Think of yourself as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible. To complete an upcoming mission, you’ll need to wear a mask of the person you’re talking to and convince everyone you encounter that you are that person. The best way to act as they would act is to feel what they feel. As they’re talking, try to simulate their emotional experience in real time. Process what you hear on a felt level. Then reflect it back to them for confirmation. Use phrases like “That must have felt…” or “So you were feeling…” Every time they confirm your guess with an “Exactly” or “That’s right” you get one step closer to finalizing the transformation. The game isn’t over until you’ve got them to verify at least five emotions.
Emotional Self-Audit
If you want to get better at these games and make people feel like you’re truly listening to them, you must increase your emotional intelligence. The essence of emotional intelligence is being self-aware enough to recognize and manage your own emotions so they don’t cloud your ability to interpret someone else’s. If you can’t recognize and manage your emotional state, you’ll just project your emotions onto others and completely miss what they are feeling. If you’re anxious, you’ll be inclined to think the other person is anxious talking to you and wants to get out of the conversation. If you’re frustrated, you’ll think the other person is frustrated with you.
Therefore, before walking into a conversation, ask yourself, “How am I feeling? And what’s happened in the last hour or two that might be making me feel this way?” Maybe you didn’t eat well, got an annoying email, or glanced at a big loss in your stock portfolio. When you notice your emotions and can explain them, it’s easier to set them aside and be present.