As follow-up thoughts:

- It's important whom you listen to. Consider it a gift you're giving and give it only to those who you think deserve and not abuse it or make you consistently feel bad about something.

- Those listeners are also very healthy in/for a group,e.g., at work.

- Listening is a big part of managing a team. People's thoughts are often all over the place and it's your job (partly) to structure these, within a person and a across a team. People that feel heard are much more inclined to listen.

- For starters: Just make an effort to ask five open-ended questions in every conversation you have. You will see how people open up after some time. This also works for family, dates, colleagues, ...

If you can be intentional going in to a conversation then I think the chances to serving the other person through listening becomes much higher.

It’s truly a gift…offering someone your time and attention. Possibly the most valuable gift you can give - I don’t mean that facetiously.

The Gottmans talk about bids for attention. It’s random comments inviting the other person to engage.

This sounds really similar.

In section 2, you wrote,

“Have you tried asking the <lecturer> if you can get <marked> just for your section? Or if that person can be removed from the group?”

In my mind, I swapped those 2 words- Lecturer and Marked with Professor and Graded

It made me feel like I'm talking with someone role-playing a therapist; it's just my worldview but if I want to talk about how something made feel I will talk about it but dislike to be directly inquired, is evident that this is way of thinking is more common in men than women of course.

On a completely unrelated note, many autistic people express compassion by sharing similar experiences to communicate "I understand how you feel because I can relate to your experience".

I guess the author is a good example for why this tends to upset people (and especially allistic/non-autistic people).

On an also completely unrelated note, the example phrases/questions the author gives at the end read like having a conversation with ELIZA.

If you “talk about yourself” by sharing a similar problem, that is called commiseration. This can be a comforting move because it doesn’t put pressure on the other person to respond, yet implicitly expresses that you understand the feeling (assuming you are choosing a good example from your own life to share).

The particular technique of responding doesn’t matter as much as establishing the kind of relationship where either side can assert themselves as needed, and feels that the other side will let them. That way, the person who feels more need gets what they need.

My wife and I are coming up on our 35th anniversary. She’s very quiet and I am loud, so I have to force myself to leave a lot of space for her to assert herself (this has become easier over time, partly because I know that she will always give me what I need in the end, so suppressing myself never feels like a penalty).

I like the technique suggested in this post (draw her out by asking inviting questions about her situation). I only object to labeling the sharing of oneself as “egocentric.” In a loving relationship, your ego automatically serves your love-sworn. Offering of yourself can be exactly what she wants.

“Oh so pretended to be ELIZA”

Not sure how far off it is.