There are people who like to hear their own voice so much that they would never stop talking. These people choose for themselves the career of the professor (preferably university, middle and high school kids today are too irreverent…), the salesperson (yes, you often find them among the chatterers), the consultant (how nice to see […]

It is a serious matter for all of us, particularly when we hold positions of responsibility as well as power. Listen to what Plutarch thinks about it. The phony, like an octopus, adapts himself to situations. He who wants to expose his ruse must show to change his purposes, blaming the lifestyle he was praising […]

Yes, when you are with people whose interest you want to catch, the best you can do is to keep quiet. Why? Silence, in these cases, offers some advantages: it keeps you safe from saying things that do not fit the situation; it allows you to get useful information from the very person whose attention […]

There are two kinds of lies: the unconscious ones and those that are built to provide a falsified version of facts and circumstances. Today I want to tell you about the second ones, beginning with the definition of a lie. A lie is a statement that does not correspond to facts and circumstances made to […]

I think we can share the idea that listening is an essential function of communication that multimedia has substantially damaged, because we are systematically urged to devote attention to more than one thing at the same time. Is this all the smartphone’s fault? Absolutely not, because long-standing habits affect listening skills perhaps more profoundly than […]

The situation in the cartoon strip seems to be paradoxical? Let’s analyze it carefully. For Mario and Julie, Tom is hardly on time (“he is always late about everything“) and also not so cooperative (“as soon as he can, he puts a spanner in the works“): a person like anyone happened to work with at […]

Keeping attention while listening is becoming increasingly difficult for all of us; conscious listening, the kind that makes us fully appreciate the speaker’s message and enables us to take appropriate action, is getting rarer and rarer. And difficult! For, we easily realize that people are not listening, but we are not so aware of the […]

Some time ago I came across one of the Schegge, articles written in 1971 by Giovanni Papini, a controversial Italian intellectual, for Il Corriere della Sera. Listen to this. Some say nothing but say it well. Others say a lot but say it badly. The worst are those who say nothing and say it badly. […]

Interpersonal communication is a critical issue in people’s private and professional lives. That’s why today I want to introduce you to what I consider the ten main rules to follow when you want to communicate effectively with the person in front of you. Let’s get right into it. Here are my ten commandments of effective […]

The world is getting ever smaller, and it is more and more common to attend meetings with people from different cultures; meetings where communication takes place in English, among non-native speakers. The difficulties we may face are of different types, and overcoming them might not be so easy: Difficulties that may be even more robust […]