From Be interested, be curious, hear what’s not said: how I learned to really listen to people by Annalisa Barbieri in The Guardian:

Listening, I discovered, wasn’t just about waiting for the other person to stop talking, or asking good questions, or even not interrupting. It was about really hearing what the other person was saying, and why they were saying it. Being interested, but also curious. Sometimes that means looking for what’s not said, what’s left out, which words are used to mask emotions that are hard to acknowledge. Likewise, good listening is about approaching what has been said as if you’ve never heard it before. Put simply, it’s about paying attention.