Radical Listening and the Practice of True Connection

Explore radical listening, the science behind feeling heard, and practical ways to use intention, silence, and mindful questions in coaching and education.

Radical listening is an approach to conversation that begins with a positive intention and adapts to the speaker’s needs, helping them feel seen, valued, and heard. Developed by Christian van Nieuwerburgh and Robert Biswas-Diener, it treats listening as a deliberate way of building connection.

This matters in positive psychology because listening supports relationships, reflection, and growth. Research discussed in the authors’ book found that high-quality listening reduced immediate feelings of loneliness when people shared experiences of social rejection. The findings suggest that how we listen can matter even when we have no solution to offer.

Your intention directs your attention

Van Nieuwerburgh and Biswas-Diener propose that intention guides attention. A listener looking for strengths will notice different details from someone assessing an argument or checking understanding.

Van Nieuwerburgh describes how his intention changes when examining a doctoral candidate. At the beginning, he listens with appreciation, wanting the candidate to feel comfortable and appreciated. As the examination progresses, he listens for weaknesses in the argument and what may be missing.

Both purposes can be useful, though each draws your attention to only part of what someone is saying. If you’re focused on finding errors, for example, you may miss what matters to the speaker or the support they’re looking for.

Before an important conversation, ask what you hope your listening will make possible for the other person. Keep that intention open to revision as their needs become clearer.

What radical listening brings to everyday practice

In their 2025 book, Radical Listening, van Nieuwerburgh and Biswas-Diener describe six skills that combine internal attention with visible responses. Their model offers a practical structure for developing intentional, responsive listening. Read the authors’ university introduction to the approach.

The internal skills are noticing, quieting, and accepting. These involve attending to what is happening, reducing distractions, and remaining open to the speaker’s experience. The outward skills are acknowledging, questioning, and interjecting, which give the speaker evidence that the listener is engaged.

These skills overlap with familiar active listening practices. The authors emphasise the intention behind them and whether the response helps the person speaking. A carefully phrased summary may be useful, but so may a spontaneous laugh or a short question that follows an important detail.

What research tells us about feeling heard

In their book, van Nieuwerburgh and Biswas-Diener discuss a study by Guy Itzchakov, Netta Weinstein, Dvori Saluk, and Moty Amar, published in a 2023 journal issue, which examined listening and loneliness across five experiments involving 1,643 participants. The studies used several methods, including live conversations and imagined interactions, to examine responses to sharing experiences of social rejection.

High-quality listening reduced participants’ immediate feelings of loneliness compared with ordinary listening. The findings also implicated feeling connected to the listener and being able to express oneself authentically. Read the study, Connection Heals Wounds.

For practitioners, the research gives a concrete reason to attend to the speaker’s experience of the interaction. Feeling heard can matter even when a conversation produces no immediate solution.

Match your response to the person speaking

Radical listening includes what the authors call optimal support matching, meaning that the support offered fits what the person needs. Advice, reassurance, reflection, and constructive challenge serve different purposes.

Supporting someone does not always mean helping them solve a problem. Biswas-Diener includes validating someone’s experience within what the authors describe as appreciation, while noting that the listener’s intention can shift within a conversation.

Matching does not necessarily require agreement, and listening can include challenging someone’s thinking. The key is to understand their perspective first and make it clear that your questions are meant to help them work through an idea.

Silence and interjections can both support listening

Quieting involves reducing external distractions and noticing internal ones, such as rehearsing advice while the speaker is still talking. A pause can give someone time to think, find words, or decide what to share next.

The authors suggest that briefly joining in can show the speaker you’re engaged, as long as you give them room to continue. They call this interjecting, making a distinction between contributing to someone’s thought and taking over the conversation.

Biswas-Diener gives examples such as:

These brief contributions can highlight an important moment or clarify a detail before returning the conversation to the speaker.

The same care applies across cultures and professional settings, where silence, eye contact, humor, and speaking over one another can mean different things to different people. Rather than assuming your conversational habits work for everyone, pay attention to how the person responds and ask about their preferences.

Whether you pause or join in, notice how the person responds. If they seem comfortable continuing, your approach may be working for them, but if they lose their train of thought or indicate they’d prefer something different, take that as a cue to adjust.

Put radical listening into practice

The principles of radical listening offer a starting point for reflecting on your own practice. Drawing on the authors’ ideas, we suggest the following prompts for a coaching conversation, student consultation, or meeting with a colleague.

1. Before speaking, identify an intention, such as understanding the person’s experience or helping them recognize their resources. Remove one predictable distraction.
2. Early in the conversation, check what would be useful. Ask whether they want reflection, ideas, or help examining a decision.
3. Follow something they say with one relevant question. Allow time for the answer without preparing your next contribution.
4. At the end, ask what was useful about the conversation and what they would have preferred you to do differently.

Use that feedback to assess your listening. Your sense of being attentive is only part of the picture, and the speaker may have experienced the exchange differently.

Radical listening gives practitioners a way to examine the small choices through which professional relationships develop. Try it in your next meaningful conversation, and ask the other person how your listening helped.

Frequently asked questions