When Vanessa Van Edwards runs corporate workshops and trainings, she asks her clients if they’re good listeners. At least 90% insist they are. Her response: That’s wonderful! And do they mind if she watches a recording of their most recent Zoom meeting?
When she reviews the footage, she almost always notices her clients are still-faced and offer no visible signals that would let a speaker know they’re being heard. “We’ve started to mute our own cues, and it’s gotten worse over the last few years,” says Van Edwards, founder of Science of People, a human behavior research lab, and author of books including Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication. That’s a problem because, as she says, “every person worries in every interaction that they’re not being heard—and they also worry that they’re not being understood.”
The solution is what Van Edwards calls “listening loudly.” That means signalling, through your face and body, that you’re not just present but truly tuned in. It works on video and in person, and there are lots of ways to do it, from raising your eyebrows when something genuinely intrigues you to leaning toward a colleague when their point lands. You don’t have to adopt them all. Van Edwards thinks of these cues as a recipe and stresses that you should only use the ingredients that suit your taste. “I never want anyone to do a listening cue that feels fake or inauthentic,” she says. The cues she recommends are “such a gift to the people we’re listening to”—small signals that, done sincerely, tell someone they truly matter.
Here are 10 ways experts say you can become a better listener.
Listen as if for the first time
One of the sneakiest ways we stop listening is by assuming we already know what someone is about to say. It happens most in our closest relationships—with a partner, a parent, a longtime coworker—where we’ve heard some version of the story before and our brain checks out before the sentence is finished. The problem is that your disengaged stance shows up on your face.
Julian Treasure, a sound and communication expert and author of How to Be Heard, recommends a practice he calls listening “as if for the first time.” The idea is to deliberately reset—to listen to your partner or friend the way you listened the very first time you met them, before you had a mental script for how the conversation would go. “We’re so prone to judge books by covers and make assumptions, particularly if we’ve been in a long relationship with somebody,” Treasure says. You fall into the trap of thinking, “I know what you’re going to say now.”
The shift is internal, but it shows up externally. Genuine curiosity is one of the four essentials of good listening, alongside being conscious, committed, and compassionate, Treasure says. He points out that “there’s always something to learn in every conversation”—even in the ones you’re sure you’ve had a hundred times before.
Mirror the emotion they’re bringing
That’s why the first move when you’re trying to listen well is matching the speaker’s emotional register—their energy, posture, and the intensity in their face. If they’re frustrated, your expression should register that frustration; if they’re anxious, you don’t want to greet them with a reassuring smile that telegraphs “it’ll all be fine” before they’ve finished telling you what’s wrong. When your face and body match someone else’s emotional state, you start to actually feel what they’re feeling, she adds, and build a subconscious rapport.
Sprinkle in some eyebrow raises
Some listening cues are culture-specific; in East Asia, for example, prolonged eye contact can be seen as disrespectful. That’s one reason why Van Edwards loves a good eyebrow raise: It’s a universal signal of intrigue. “Think about it this way,” she says. “When something is really interesting or curiosity-provoking, our eyebrows get out of the way so our eyes can almost see more.”
Whether your reaction is positive or negative, the movement itself reads as engagement. It tells the other person you’re tuned in and taking in what they’re saying. “You can raise your eyebrows to show, ‘I want to see more of that. I want to read more of that,’” Van Edwards says. However: Like any listening cue, it’s best done in moderation. “You don’t want to eyebrow-raise too much,” she says, “or you’re just going to look permanently surprised.”
Do a slow triple nod instead of bobble-heading
In most cultures, a vertical nod is a sign of affirmation; if we nod while someone is talking about how good pizza is, they’ll likely assume we love a gooey slice as much as they do. But not all nods land the same way. Van Edwards is a fan of what she calls a slow triple nod: a deliberate one-two-three rhythm she describes as “a nonverbal dot dot dot.” It tells the speaker to keep going and assures them you’re following along; unlike a quick reflexive nod, it functions almost like a nonverbal highlighter on something the person just said.
You don’t want to overdo it. Otherwise, you “just end up looking like a bobblehead,” Arias says. Her preferred approach is timed nodding—nodding with intention at specific moments rather than continuously. “It can signal understanding and encouragement, and if you’re doing it with intention at certain points in your listening, it doesn’t look performative,” she says. The same cue that telegraphs “I hear you” when used sparingly starts to read as “I’m just waiting for you to finish” when it never stops.
Tilt your head toward them
When you tilt one ear toward your shoulder, exposing the other, it sends a very specific message: You want to hear the person you’re talking to better. “We love when dogs and cats tilt their heads at us,” Van Edwards says. “It makes us feel like we’re being listened to—that’s why we think it’s cute.” Head-tilting, she adds, is a “wonderful warmth cue,” and it works whether you’re standing in front of someone or looking at them through a screen.
Lean in
Leaning toward someone is one of the oldest signals of interest, and it works on Zoom just as well as it does across a dinner table. Van Edwards frames it as a way of activating your senses: When we want to smell, taste, or hear something better, we lean in to do it. The same instinct shows up in conversation. “A lean is a beautiful nonverbal cue of saying, ‘I want to activate my senses to experience you more,’” she says.
Leaning in is much superior to other postures. Make it a point to avoid slumping back or propping your head up in your hand, Treasure advises—both of which read as boredom or fatigue, no matter how interested you are.
Point your toes, torso, and top toward the other person
Van Edwards calls this “fronting”—angling what she describes as your “three Ts” (toes, torso, and top) toward whoever you’re listening to. “I want your toes to be on parallel lines” with the speaker’s, she says. The cue sounds almost too small to matter, but when it’s absent, people notice immediately. Think of a bad date where the other person’s feet are pointed toward the door, or a meeting where someone keeps their chair swiveled away from whoever’s talking. Their body is telegraphing that they’d rather be somewhere else.
Van Edwards became especially interested in fronting through her work with doctors and dentists on bedside manner. One of the most common mistakes she sees is a doctor taking notes with their body fully turned toward the computer, even while the patient is still talking. The fix is small: angle the chair, the notepad, or at minimum the torso back toward the person speaking. The same logic applies in a board meeting (swivel toward whoever has the floor) or at dinner.
Use words that match the emotional temperature
A well-placed “oh” or “wow” does some of the heaviest lifting in any conversation. Van Edwards calls these vocalizations—the small “uh-huhs,” “no ways,” and “reallys” we drop in while someone else is talking—and they’re one of the clearest signals that you’re tracking not just what the speaker is saying, but how they feel about it. The trick is matching the vocalization to the emotional weight of what you’re hearing.
If a friend is venting about something genuinely awful and you respond with a chipper “oh!,” the mismatch will register instantly. A low, sympathetic “no!” lands very differently than an upbeat one. “If you want to literally feel as someone else feels, you can do as they do,” Van Edwards says. “You can express as they express.”
Let pauses happen
Some of the most powerful listening cues are the ones you don’t perform. The two most common places to practice restraint: not rushing to fill a pause when someone is searching for the right word, and not reaching for your phone to look something up, even when you’re genuinely curious about what they just said. The intention behind grabbing the phone might be flattering—” I want to learn more about this thing you mentioned”—but the speaker can’t see your intention. They can only see you breaking eye contact to scroll. “It may not matter what our intention was,” Arias says. “What’s going to matter more is their perception of the behaviour.”
Try a “lower-lid flex”
This one is subtle, slightly weird, and surprisingly effective. When humans need to see something better—a sign across a parking lot, a bird in a far-off tree—we instinctively harden our lower eyelids to block out excess light and sharpen the image (kind of like a squint). Van Edwards calls this the “lower-lid flex,” and the cue translates directly into conversation: a slight tightening of the lower lids reads as intense focus, the visual equivalent of trying to take in every detail of what someone is saying. It’s universal across genders and cultures, and it pairs especially well with a slight forward lean, she adds.
Van Edwards offers one fun piece of evidence that the cue registers, even when we don’t realize it: Scan People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive winners, and you’ll notice that many of them are flexing their lower lids in the cover shot. “It’s sexy to be intensely looked at,” she says. The same intensity that flatters a camera also flatters a speaker—it tells them you’re not just present, you’re locked in.
Remember that listening is work
At the end of every semester, Arias likes to ask the students in her listening class how they’re feeling. The answer is almost always the same: exhausted. She teases them about it: “Why? You didn’t do anything. You just sat there. I’m the one who’s been walking back and forth for 75 minutes, talking and pointing at slides.” The students push back—“but we were listening”—and reinforce her point. “Exactly,” she tells them. “You’re listening, and it’s so much work.”
Most of us don’t think of listening as energy-dependent, but it is—and the cues that send positive signals to a speaker require active effort. The reward for that work is the speaker walks away “not just feeling like they’ve been heard, but that they’ve been felt,” Arias says. “They feel like there’s an emotional component to the listening.”