Ask someone if they’re a good listener, and nine times out of ten, they’ll say yes. They’re probably wrong.
Research consistently links 85% of communication breakdowns to failures in listening, not speaking. The issue isn’t that people are saying the wrong things—it’s that they’re hearing through the filter of their own assumptions and calling it understanding. Most conversations operate like this: you think you’re listening, but you’re really just loading your response. By the time the other person finishes talking, you’ve already decided what they meant and what you want to say.
There’s a technique built specifically to interrupt that cycle. It’s called looping, and it comes out of Nonviolent Communication, a framework developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960s. It works in three steps: listen for what actually mattered to the person, summarize it back in your own words, and then ask if you got it right. That last step—”what did I miss?” or “did I miss anything?”—is the one most people skip, because asking it means admitting you might have gotten it wrong.
Learning Looping Can Completely Change Your Relationships
What separates looping from regular paraphrasing is what you’re listening for. According to Psychology Today, the goal is to surface four things beneath what someone actually said: what they’re observing, what they’re feeling, what need is sitting under those feelings, and what, if anything, they’re asking for. Most people never get past the surface of what was said. Looping pushes the conversation into the layer where the actual problem lives.
Tone is just as important as technique here. If you say it wrong, the other person doesn’t feel heard—they feel mocked. Most people have been on the receiving end of that at least once, and they’ve never forgotten it. “So you’re upset because you didn’t get your way” and “I’m wondering if you felt left out of that decision—is that close?” is the same basic information. One ends the conversation. The other actually continues it.
Looping doesn’t belong in every exchange—no one needs to summarize normal casual convos. But for the conversations that actually have meaning, the ones where a misread could damage something, slowing down long enough to ask “did I get that right?” is something most people never do. It turns understanding into a question rather than an assumption. And for a skill that takes about thirty seconds to do, more people should be doing it.
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