Active Listening Techniques: 30 Practical Tools to Hone Your Communication Skills

From Sept 2023 through Feb 2024, our small group bible study has been immersed in the review of this book, Active Listening. We have been delighted throughout reading stories, putting it into practice, and before you move on with group discussions about why enriching our thinking with active listening (compassion, thoughtfulness, empathy, and encouragement) is essential. We want to establish better communication skills through the positive thinking practices we learned from this beautiful book. Our group consisted of three women and one man. As our host, the man provided the weekly review, with many uses of what we learned being applied during our future meetings as examples. This teaching ability provided a very thoughtful direction with applied past learning reviews to reinforce it into “actual” practice.

I found the book very helpful!

I did like that its on active listening. But the fact that the book only gave short stories and not any real information kind of bothered me a little. The exercises are okay. But I think more information would help.

Easy read on practical everyday uses for communication. I know a lot of these and use them; but it is teaching me a few new items to add when engaged in a conversation via face to face, text or email. Great for HR training and college freshman class. We all need refreshers in this time of COVID with emotions running higher n higher.

A great book for those who are looking to hone their active listening skills. Also touches on effective communication techniques that you can actually use in the real world. A practical book that I would recommend (and already have) to every person that I communicate with on a daily basis!

Very helpful tips. The situations used to illustrate the tips were applicable and relatable. The tips used common sense and were achievable.

great books

I’ve been using this to help with my triggers during arguments and my therapist approves! We go over some of the exercises in the book together and it’s been really helpful!

Excellent book, easy to read and definitely enables you to improve your listening skills which positively impacts on your relationships

I can highly recommend this book. It offers great advice on how to become a better listener and even beyond on how in general become a more empathic and attentive person. From my experience even most books worth reading have their valuable core content buried with a lot of dispensable stuff you will have to dig through. Not this one! I really enjoyed, that the chapters are very short (2 - 4 pages per topic), well structured, always containing a practical example, a short explanation and some bullet points. No blah, no over academic discourse, just clear straightforward advice. Thanks to the author for her great advice, given in a great and easy accessible way!

Changed my life. Awesome book

I like this book. It's written in an easy to read language and broken down in to interesting chapters. Each section is brief but informative and inculde good tips. If you need a quick reference point that you can go back to now and then when dealing with certain communication issues, this is a good source.

So this book was good, well written and easy to read.. but it didn’t give me so much advice on ways of listening and tools for effective listening, more case studies and explanations of why people don’t listen.. more based on work than relationships I would say. I then reread The Lost Art of Listening, by Michael P Nichols which gave me way more tips and tricks on effective listening..