All right, in this section of the course, we're going to look at becoming a better listener. Part of becoming a better listener is probably pretty obvious. It's listen more and talk less. But there's some other things that you can do to help improve your listening skills. So to help you be a better listener, you should maintain a relaxed but alert posture, minimize distracting gestures. So if you're a person that uses your hands a lot in conversation, or you chew on a pencil, or you do those types of things, you want to minimize your own gestures, so that you're paying more attention and staying more focused on what's being said by the other person.

Acknowledge the message, right, acknowledge the person using head nods, smiles, things like that. Again, make sure that you are not as we talked about in a previous chapter. Make sure you're not smiling when there is approval being asked for something because a smile during that moment can indicate that you're giving approval, face the person squarely instead of from the side whenever possible. Sometimes when you're in a situation, you're in a conference room and you're sitting around a table, that sometimes isn't possible, but try to do that where you can lean slightly towards the person instead of sitting stiffly upright, or slouching, right either one of those is not good. But again, don't lean in too far so that you don't end up in their personal space and make them feel like you're being aggressive. The other thing that I want to point out here is if you really notice that you have trouble kind of paying attention and staying on topic when other people are speaking.

I think I've mentioned this previously in the course one of the things that you can do to help with that is to take notes while the other person is talking. So You may not then of course be able to do some of these other things because you're looking down at your paper but you also want to make sure that you are frequently looking up from your paper making eye contact with the person, letting them know that you're not just basically sitting there randomly writing things you are taking notes because you are paying attention to the conversation that is happening at that moment.