What Makes a Great Listener?

In Japan, there’s a service called Family Romance where you can rent a husband. Or a daughter. Or a best friend.

They show up on time, smile warmly, hold your hand if you ask. They laugh at your jokes, listen to your stories, pretend to care and then they go home. You pay the bill. And the performance ends.

It sounds like science fiction. But it’s not.

It’s where we are.

The Loneliness Beneath All The Noise

In the U.S., loneliness has now been declared a public health crisis; some research says it's more dangerous than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And while we’re more digitally connected than ever, we’re emotionally malnourished. We’re scrolling past each other, nodding without listening, replying without presence, fixing without understanding.

We’re surrounded by noise. But rarely heard.

And we’re starving for real connection. But instead of reaching for each other, we scroll, nod, fix, advise, and move on.

We’re surrounded by noise. But rarely heard.

So we automate it to our peril and connection becomes a transaction.

But maybe we don’t need another platform, another therapist, or another app. Maybe what we need is to learn how to listen again.

The Wisdom of a 5-Year-Old

The moment I realized how rare real listening is, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with my 5-year-old niece. She sprawled faced down on the floor, in a belly flop over her coloring book gluing sparkles onto a lopsided paper crown when I mumbled, more to myself than to her: "I don’t want to go to that thing tonight."

With a mop of soft, brown ringlets all around her face, she looked up and asked, “Why not?”

I stare at the carpet, debating how to respond.

Let’s weigh our options, my brain says:

Option 1. Respond with my usual grumblings (“Yeah… mumble mumble… I guess I have to go… it’s only polite.”)

Option 2. Respond with truth?

“To be honest,” I say, out loud this time. On impulse, I choose truth.

“I don’t want to go because everyone’s pretending to be something they’re not.”

I expect silence or a change of subject.

But she doesn’t blink.

Instead, she tilts her head like she’s solving a puzzle and says, “Oh ok, that’s like when I pretend to like carrots.” Then she goes back to glue and crayons.

That stopped me cold.

It wasn’t therapy. It wasn’t advice. It wasn’t a motivational meme.

It was... understanding.

She gave me the one thing most grownups skip: space to feel. Space to make sense of my own mess. No correcting. No silver lining. Just presence.

(Turns out the the best listener in my life is five years old. She also eats glue.)

The Power and Vulnerability of Listening

Most of us were never taught how to listen. And it seems we have more experience being ignored than being heard. We can easily list what makes someone a bad listener: interrupting, zoning out, glancing at their phone, giving answers that don’t match the question.

Sure, you can stop interrupting. Stop fidgeting. Look someone in the eye. But that won’t make you a good listener. It just makes it less obvious that you’re a bad one.

Because listening isn’t just about doing less. It’s about offering more.

More presence. More risk. More willingness to not control the moment.

Because true listening about intent. A decision to be available to someone without needing to steer, correct, or escape when the conversation gets uncomfortable.

And yes, that availability comes with risk.

You don’t get a mute button. No filter. No algorithm cleaning up what you’re about to hear. People will ramble. Overshare. Bore you. Surprise you. Say too much about their colonoscopy or too little about their pain. Some will say things that challenge your worldview or your patience.

But here’s the tradeoff: listening is one of the most life-giving things you can do.

It doesn’t just connect you to others. It connects you to yourself.

And listening, more than almost anything else, plugs you into life.

Even before we’re born, we start listening in the womb. We’re wired to tune in to the human voice. We don’t just hear it; we feel it. Its tone, its texture, the rise and fall. We're exquisitely attuned to all of it. By sixteen weeks, a fetus can already respond to sound. By the third trimester, they can tell the difference between language and background noise. A calm voice soothes it. An angry one startles it.

And at the very end of life, hunger and thirst are the first to go, then speech, followed by vision. But most dying patients retain their senses of touch and hearing until the very end.

We start life by listening.
We end life by listening.

And yet, somewhere in between, we forget how.

Graham Bodie, a professor of communication at the University of Mississippi, found that when most people want to be heard, they don’t want fixes or even feedback. They want to feel that what they said matters. His studies show that the gold standard of listening isn’t parroting back words. It’s responding to the emotion behind them.

In fact, listening well is an active process. We do it by attuning to the subtle cues: voice drops, hesitations, body language. Psychologist Carl Rogers, coined the term active listening… but not in the way it’s used in corporate trainings today. It’s not about nodding with furrowed brows or waiting your turn to talk. It’s about receiving.

He described it like this:

"When I’m actively listening, I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker."

Bodie discovered listeners only reflect the true emotional core about 5% of the time.

That’s staggering.

And it's why people would rather talk to their dog than their spouse sometimes.

READER POLL

Not Everyone Wants a Fix

Here’s a simple truth that would save so many relationships: Not everyone wants to be helped. Some people just want to be heard. Others just need to be held.

The next time someone opens up to you, a partner, a sibling, a friend, a co-worker, don’t assume.

Just ask:"Do you want help, or do you want to be heard? Or do you just want a hug?"

• If they want help, shift into solution-mode. Collaborate. Problem-solve.

• If they want to be heard, stay in listening mode. Reflect. Validate. Let silence do some of the work.

• If they want a hug, or simply presence, give warmth. No words needed.

When in doubt, don’t fix. Just be with them. This one tiny shift can build more intimacy and trust than a hundred pieces of advice ever could.

Final Thought

We live in a world starved for presence and bloated with performance. Connection is getting harder to come by, not because we don’t care, but because we’ve forgotten how to make people feel cared for and listened to.

Sometimes the most powerful gift isn’t advice, or a fix, or even the perfect words.

It’s just this: I see you. You don’t have to pretend with me.

Until next week, be well!

Shakila

P.S. Here’s the results of last week’s poll.