You always know when in a conversation if somebody is listening to you or not. I mean really listening. The interest is written all over their face, their body is slightly mirroring your own and you can almost feel the invisible connection you have with this person, as though you are both joined in some other morphic world. This is intentional listening at its best.

When you are in a relationship, any relationship, whether you are a couple, work colleagues, shop assistant, therapist, teacher or politician, the key to positive relations is being a good listener. When you really listen, you hear, not only what is being said verbally, but also what is not being said. A good listener is a good communicator. A huge amount of our communication is done using body signals, including eye movement and facial expression. If you can read these ques, hear the story and stay emphatically tuned to the other person, then you have yourself the start of a positive relationship.

Quite often however, the opposite is true. In a conversation we will fade out, think numerous other thoughts, drift off or look away. All these actions break our connection. It only takes on slight movement of the head to be distracted by another scene, the eyes are seeing another story and our imaginations start telling our own story- we all mostly live inside ourselves.

How to a good communicator is an art form, the ability to listen intently is a gift. Imagine how much a relationship could improve if you spent time and effort on listening, really listening to your partner, child or even colleagues. From this basis, so much is occurring. As a new born baby we learnt through the senses, touch and feel, then we very quickly recognized that eye contact kept our mothers attention only on us, pure bliss.

These basic instincts allowed us to build trust. The expression ‘look me in the eye and tell me the truth,’ says a lot about the art form of communication, we even know when someone is lying to us! Positive communication involves a whole series of events, such as eye contact, mirroring body language, matching voice tones and that invisible sense we feel when two people are truly sharing an energy.

So next time someone you care about is needing to talk make it a habit to listen intently, respectfully, empathetically and you have the recipe for a positive relationship.

-Fiona