Active Listening

Communication Technique for Counselling, Training and Conflict Resolution

Active Listening, first developed by Rogers and Farson, is a therapeutic technique designed to promote positive change in the client. Active listening is a communication technique used in counselling, training and conflict resolution, which requires the listener to feed back what they hear to the speaker, by way of re-stating or paraphrasing what they have heard in their own words, to confirm what they have heard and moreover, to confirm the understanding of both parties. It continues to have a lasting influence to this day.

"Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me." -Carl Rogers

About the Author

From 1935 to 1940 he lectured at the University of Rochester and wrote The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (1939), based on his experience in working with troubled children. In 1940 he became a professor of clinical psychology at the Ohio State University, where he wrote Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942). In it Rogers suggested that clients, by establishing a relationship with an understanding, accepting therapist, can resolve difficulties and gain the insight necessary to restructure their lives.

While a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago (1945–57), Rogers helped to establish a counseling centre connected with the university and there conducted studies to determine the effectiveness of his methods. His findings and theories appeared in Client-Centered Therapy (1951) and Psychotherapy and Personality Change (1954). He taught psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1957–63), during which time he wrote one of his best-known books, On Becoming a Person (1961). In 1963 he moved to La Jolla, California, where he helped to found and became a resident fellow of the Center for Studies of the Person. His later books include Carl Rogers on Personal Power (1977) and Freedom to Learn for the 80’s (1983).