Skip main navigation

Active listening skills: questioning and summarising

Active listening – verbal communication skills of summarising and questioning.

Questioning

We use questions in everyday life as a way to gather information. They are often asked to enable us to clarify or get something clear in our own head about what is being said. In other words, the asking of questions is for our benefit and not the person on the receiving end of the questions. Being asked too many questions, in quick succession can feel intimidating, with little room for feeling heard and listened to.

In any helping or counselling relationship (and arguably in all relationships!), questioning should be used sensitively and wisely, with awareness of why we are asking the question. It should not be about satisfying our own need for knowledge, but about a desire to truly understand a person’s experience of things in their life. When that is the focus, then questioning can be a useful counselling skill to use.

There are many different types of questions that are used to find out information. For example, closed questions invite a short, often a yes or no answer, whereas open questions invite a more in-depth response. Other types of questions include leading, multiple, probing, Socratic and rhetorical questions. For now, we are going to consider how we may use closed and open questions.

Closed Questions

There are times in any kind of relationship when we need to gather some factual information from the person we are talking to. Think about some of the relationships that you have in your lives. These may be relationships with family and friends, work colleagues or professionals that you meet, for example, at the GP surgery or the bank. In these relationships we will ask or be asked closed questions multiple times a day. Examples might be:

  • Would you like tea or coffee?
  • Please could you clarify your address?
  • Are you left or right-handed?

Each time, a short response is invited. In counselling or helping relationships, closed questions are especially useful when trying to elicit important information such as contact details, medical or family history.

Open Questions

In contrast, open questions are used when we are inviting a more in-depth response. In a helping relationship, used sparingly and with the correct timing, open questions can be useful in encouraging the talker to explore their issues of concern in greater depth and in a more specific way, whilst inviting an expression of feelings that is often absent in everyday interactions.

The way we ask questions is also important. To minimise feelings of interrogation, it is best to avoid starting a question with ‘why’, as this may encourage a defensive or resistant response. Questions that begin with ‘why’ can be difficult to respond to, as people usually don’t know why, and may be seeking help for that very reason. Instead, try questions that will encourage the talker to explore deeper into what is going on for them. For example, ‘You said that you have always managed these types of situations before, I’m wondering, what is different this time?’

Timing

A final word about timing of questions. As helpers we should gauge whether it is the correct time to ask a question. For example, if a person is overly distressed, they will probably be too overwhelmed to answer. Equally, we should never interrupt a person to ask a question, but instead wait until they have finished what they are saying.

Always ask yourself if the question is necessary – consider what your motive is for asking the question. Sometimes we can ask questions to avoid really listening to the talker, when really all they want/need is someone to hear and understand them.

Summarising

When we think about summarising, we may think of it as something we do when we want to pull together information we have been given in a succinct manner, whether that be in written or verbal format. For example, if we are writing an essay, we use a summary (or conclusion) at the end to briefly outline the important points we have made in the work. In verbal communication, we summarise (usually at the end, but not always) the pertinent points that were discussed, drawing them together in a more coherent framework.

When we use the skill of summarising in a helping relationship, we do all these things, but also many more. For example, summarising can be used to convey to the talker that we understand and validate what they are saying to us. It is also used as a way to seek clarification, in that when we summarise, we are often inviting a response from the talker to check our own understanding about what has been said. This then gives the talker the chance to add anything further or emphasise some of the points that the listener may have failed to highlight.

Through summarising, we are identifying important themes in what has been said, which can then lead onto further exploration of those themes. As with the use of any of these counselling skills, to summarise well requires the listener to demonstrate empathy to the talker (more about empathy in next week’s content) as well as ensuring that they stay in what Rogers (1959, p.29) called the client’s ‘internal frame of reference’. By this he meant that we stay close to the client’s story, and their unique perspective of the world and their problems.

As a listener, it is our task to try to understand the talker’s world from their perspective, to really see it through their eyes. Using all these skills in an empathic and sensitive way goes a long way to portraying to the talker that we are genuine in wanting to be with them and trying to understand their situation.

Reflect & Reply

This activity invites you to consider how you might apply both the verbal and non-verbal skills we have spoken about to the hypothetical scenario outlined below. How you approach this activity is up to you, but you might want to rehearse how you might use each skill (e.g., paraphrasing, reflecting, summarising, questioning, as well as non-verbal skills) if you were the listener for somebody presenting with the issues in the scenario. Consider if there are some skills that would be more suitable than others, why might that be? Make some notes about your experience of completing this activity and discuss with your peers in the comments below:

Talker: I’ve been wanting to apply for a counselling course for a while now. I had my own counselling five years ago and as we approached the end of the work, I thought that I would quite like to become a counsellor. It had been such a helpful experience for me but I worried whether I’d be able to do it. My counsellor was such a wonderful support during one of the hardest times I’ve been through – could I offer the same to someone? I find that I’m going through cycles – one minute I feel really motivated and then my self-doubt and inner imposter kicks in and tells me that I could never offer the same experience that my counsellor offered me! So, I feel stuck, stuck between a growing desire to ‘go for it’ and a fear of not being god enough! I just don’t know how to move forward…

Reflect & Reply: further activity

You might like to experiment with or consider how you would use the counselling skills we have been learning about in your personal and professional relationships and make a note of any changes you may notice in these relationships.

Feel free to share in the comments section about any observations you made about those interactions.

References

Rogers, C.R. (1959) ‘A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client-centered framework’. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science (Vol. 3, Formulations of the person and the social context). New York: McGraw-Hill.

This article is from the free online

An Introduction to Counselling Skills

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now