Listening

I didn't fully understand until the other day, how important listening is our communication with others. I thought I had the concept of listening down, but what I was really doing was "hearing". Listening is taking in the information and actually... caring? Yeah. We did an example in class where we talked with a partner and told them a problem and they did the same, while listening we had to listen and not offer advice but try to help them solve their problem by having them sort through their feelings. It was super beneficial to me. I'm terrible at listening to a person's story and always comparing it to a moment I had similar to theirs. So now I'm trying to listen to what people have to tell me and ask them more questions about it and how they're feeling towards it. Vs. moving the attention from my friends to me.
An example:
Yesterday my good friend was telling me about this guy that she likes and they text frequently and he hadn't texted her in a hour or so. She was upset about this. I thought instantly of a moment where the same thing happened to me and was just about to share this moment, when instead I decided to ask her how she felt about that? She continued to explain and sort through her feelings. In the end she ended up being happier about her situation vs just hearing a dumb story from me. It was great!
I'm going to try to implement this in my everyday conversations from here on out.