8 Keys For How To Be A Better Listener In A Relationship

Want to know how to be a better listener in a relationship?

If you’ve ever heard your partner say: 

“You’re not listening to me. You don’t understand me,” 

Then you know how painful it is when you can’t connect with your partner. 

If your spouse says you aren’t listening — it hurts. Even if you are trying your best to hear and understand, if you can’t get this right, it’ll be impossible to have unity, harmony, and love. 

Learning how to be a good listener in a relationship can be the difference between fighting and intimacy. In this article, I’ll show you the three essential components of being an amazing listener. Once you get these steps down, you’ll begin receiving positive feedback, and your relationship will change. 

How to be a better listener in a relationship comes down to these three keys

1. Learning how to feel what your partner is sharing (entering their world).
2. Giving ‘active listening’ cues that let your partner you are there with them.
3. Knowing how to hold yourself while someone shares their opinion, criticism, or perspective.

As you may have noticed, the process doesn’t start with actions. While most teachings on active listening focus on the outward actions of ‘active listening,’ I don’t think that works. 

Contrary to what most counselors, books, or teachers will teach you — active listening isn’t just about saying this, then that, and then this. If that worked, we could program robots to listen to us, and we would all feel heard. 

In my work in the nation’s largest research program on marital success, I’ve learned that great listening is a combination of ‘steps’ and ‘feeling.’ The emphasis here is, feeling. 

Once you learn how to feel your partner, to connect with your partner, the steps will be very easy. 

Before I give you the how-to of great listening, let me first tell you what not to do. 

What NOT TO DO to be a great listener 

With a little fear of sounding biased or sexist, I’d like to give men one key piece of advice. 

“If you want to be a great listener — 

don’t jump right into giving advice.” 

Even if the temptation is strong, hold back from giving advice unless it’s asked. 

While this suggestion fits all genders, research shows that men are more focused on solutions, and women tend to focus on confirmation and connection. That being said, both men and women enjoy conversations where understanding is at the forefront. 

While I could give a lengthy list of what not to do for great listening, let me just share one more piece of advice. 

To be a great listener, don’t interrupt. 

While both genders can improve their listening by cutting each other off less, the research is clear: men interrupt women more often. That being said, whether you’re a man or woman If you are listening, stay quiet. Or, to say this another way: 

“God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. “

Genders aside, all my studies and work as a relationship coach for 13 years have taught me that everyone likes to be listened to in pretty much the same way.

 

How To Be A Great Listener: Learn How To Feel What She Says

If you want to be a great listener, you need to learn to feel your partner. 

I can’t stress this step enough. 

Great listening comes down to one thing:

Our ability to connect and feel the other person. 

While I’ll teach you the proven actions of great listening — none of that matters if the feeling isn’t there. Without the feeling element, listening could be successfully done by a robot. 

To bring this home a bit more, I’d like for you to consider a time you felt really understood. If you think about that moment, it’s likely you had a sense of ‘being gotten.’ And if you think about   any moment when you were really heard, it’s likely you would say: “I felt really understood.” 

Great listening is a process, but even more importantly, it’s about a feeling. With the steps below, you can learn how to give your partner that sensation of being really understood. 

Learning how to ‘get your partner’ doesn’t have to be complicated. As a matter of fact, it’s a lot simpler than most people make it. 

Here is how to feel what your partner feels, all so you become a great listener

For a moment, I want you to imagine being your partner. 

I’d like for you to put on your partner’s filter. Get into your partner’s world for a moment.

When I say filter, I mean the sense through which your partner feels, senses, sees, and hears the world. As you can imagine, the lens through which your partner experiences is very different than your own. 

When you start to consider the major differences, it can begin to enhance your ability to feel and see what your partner does. 

To take on the filter of your partner, here is something you can do. 

For a moment, I want you to imagine being your partner and asking yourself: 

• What it’s like to be your other half when you wake up? 
• How is it changing your gender, ethnicity, or worldview as your partner? 
• When you are your partner, is the world changed somehow? 
• Does experience and the filter affect how you receive and experience others? 

As you read these next few lines, I’d like to invite you to consider how the different filter of your partner affects his/her experience of you. To help you do that, I want you to reflect on a recent time your partner told you he/she didn’t feel heard. Go back into that moment and see if you can begin to see yourself from your partner’s point of view. 

What did your partner feel when they shared? What did your partner see was happening? 

Really dig in and imagine the world as if you were your boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse. 

The more you can bring the sensations of being your other half — the more you will be able to really hear what is being shared. 

Being a great listener is about empathizing, and empathy is about being able to feel what is happening to your partner. 

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes in this kind of way will dramatically transform your ability to be a great listener. The more your listening will reach your partner. The more you are able to feel what it’s like to be the other person, the deeper your words will touch. 

Once you step into the experience of someone else, the easier it will be to say: 

“I know how you feel. I hear you.” 

And the more ‘in your body’ that feeling is for you — the more your partner will relax and feel heard. By putting yourself in the experience of your partner, the more you will become a great listener. 

Now, before we move on to the next step, I want you to notice a few things.  

• I never said give advice. 
• I didn’t suggest that you try to fix the problem. 
• Not once did I mention that you need to resolve the issue. 

To be a great listener, we always start with feeling the experience of our partner.

Now that you’ve read this far, you’re ready for the next pieces of how to be a great listener in a relationship. 

How To Be A Great Listener: Use These Words

Right now, I’d like to teach you an incredibly powerful process for responding. This is what counselors and therapists pay thousands of dollars to learn. 

Now, before I teach you the magic phrases, I need to stress something. Without a strong sense of feeling what your partner feels, these phrases will potentially be flat and without their power. 

If you can tune into your partner’s experience and you deeply feel their words — these phrases will dissipate their emotions of anger, frustration, or revenge. And if you can follow this process all the way through to its conclusion, you can even reach a place of calmness and connection together. 

First, we begin with some key phrases, I encourage you to save these somewhere (or commit them to memory). 

After the phrases, you will still need to do a little work. If you’ve done my first suggestion, it’ll be easy to nail the steps here.

The magic phrases for great listeners

“I hear you” 

“I understand you”

“I see why you feel that way” 

“It makes sense that you’re feeling that way.” 

Those are the magical phrases that I’ve used with over one thousand clients. Those are the phrases that I use with my wife, my son, my family, and anyone else who ever needs my heartfelt listening. 

If you want to be a great listener, commit yourself to memorizing these phrases. 

“I hear you” 

“I understand you”

“I see why you feel that way” 

“It makes sense that you’re feeling that way.”

These words chained together disarm a person. They render the fight or flight energy from combat to a place of emotional safety. 

Now, these words alone can do wonders, but to really become a great listener, there is another step. 

This set of words can make the novice listener get close to reaching mastery, but there is one more step if you want to be a great listener in your relationship. 

How To Be A Great Listener: Master Words Of Feeling 

The landscape of people is rooted in emotions. 

Our bodies are designed to feel, sense, and experience. No matter how rational you think someone is, they are still emotional creatures. This means that great listening gets fine-tuned by our own ability to feel and convey feeling with our words. 

To help you become more attuned to the world of emotions. To help you improve your sense of feelings, try reading these words. 

Admiration

Adoration

Anxious

Appreciation

Amusement

Anxiety

Awe

Awkwardness

Boredom

Calmness

Confusion

Craving

Disgust

Pain

Envy

Excitement

Fear

Horror

Interest

Joy

Nostalgia

Sadness

Satisfaction

Sexual desire

Sympathy

Triumph

Numb 

Confused 

Shutdown

Uneasy 

Embarrassed 

Worried

Engaged

Lonely

Upset 

Abandoned 

By enhancing your emotional vocabulary, the more your ability to empathize will improve. In turn, this will improve your ability to connect and listen to your partner too. 

Being A Great Listener Improves Your Relationship 

Keeping a healthy, robust, and loving marriage is vital to your happiness. As research shows, divorce drops a person’s wealth, their health, and for men (especially), divorce has many negative side effects. In my experience, couples who can’t listen to each other are more likely to get divorced, and they’re more likely to be unhappy in their relationship. 

If we don’t improve our ability to listen, we are more likely to be unhappy in our relationship. Not only that, we are more likely to experience these negative side effects: 

• Short tempers & short fuses 
• Distance & disconnection 
• More frequent fights 
• Disappointment when your partner hurts you
• Emotional shutdowns (stonewalling)
• Big blowouts
• Big, drawn-out talks that don’t go anywhere 
• Emotional outbursts that cause overwhelm 
• Repetitive relationship problems that don’t get resolved 

It’s likely that most of those repetitive issues that couples experience come down to this one issue: both partners not feeling heard.

On the other hand, when we become better listeners, we are more likely to have a great connection. And if you are a great listener, it’s more likely you will feel happier in your relationship. This, in turn, can have these positive side-effects (these stats are for married couples, but even unmarried couples experience these positives): 

Increased sense of overall happiness (Marketwatch) 

Financial abundance (Ohio University Research shows married people have 93% more wealth)

Longevity and lifespan (WebMD)  

Feeling healthier and health issues than single counterparts (NCBI cited study)

More productivity at work (yes, a great relationship makes you better at work, Chicago Tribune). 

Getting your daily quote of touch, intimacy, and social connection 

Less added weight for women (compared to women in unhappy marriages, APA Journal). 

Before you go anywhere, answer this question in the comments.  What helps you feel heard?

Share – What have you learned about how to be a better listener in a relationship?