What Makes a Good Listener?

What makes a good listener?" This is a question almost anybody who desires to become a good conversationalist will ask him or herself from time to time. After all, there's almost nothing more enjoyable to a person than to talk about him or herself, on occasion. The trick, though, to be good at conversation, is to be able to really listen to another person.
Listening well involves more than just nodding and murmuring platitudes whenever somebody has you engaged in what you think is "conversation." We've all seen that sort of verbal give-and-take, and it usually manifests itself with one or both people interrupting each other, or sitting and saying things like "uh, huh, " "is that so?" and the like.
A good listener, though, does far more than go through the motions. For starters, he or she tends to look directly at the person with whom he or she is speaking. This means eye-to-eye, and not eye-to-mouth or "eye-to-some-point-over-the-other-person's-head" when it comes to carrying on a conversation.
In our culture, listening and looking directly at a person can be a little hard. We tend not to look each other eye-to-eye when we pass on the street, and this holds true in many instances when we converse directly. Also, a good listener will take in what's been said, process it for a second and then occasionally repeat back at least a part of what the other person said in order to ensure that there's no misunderstanding involved.
Good listeners appreciate what another person is saying, and normally allow that person to say what they have to say fully and without a constant stream of interruption. This is very hard for many people to do, by the way, mainly because normal people have a bit of self-centeredness or self-involvement, and it's only natural to exercise that through the mechanism of talking at someone.
Unfortunately, a constant stream of such interruption only signals poor listening ability, and is rude on top of everything else. So, learn to cultivate good listening ability by first of all looking at the other person who's doing the talking, maybe repeat back a part of what they said in order to make sure you've heard correctly, and then endeavor to not interrupt another person's talking whenever possible.

Trevor Johnson