Do you bring joy to other people’s lives or do you suck it out of them?

My daughter is getting lot of attention these days. At 14 months she turns eyes and gets lots of comments at the store. She is already developing good conversation skills.

However, yesterday her and I were shopping and people were looking and then breaking eye contact.

Why?

Usually she is cheerful.

The Free Dictionary says cheerful means to:

1. Being in good spirits; merry.
2. Promoting a feeling of cheer; pleasant: a cozy, cheerful room.
3. Reflecting willingness or good humor:

Normally, she smiles makes eye contact and has this happy spirit.She brings joy to those who interact with her.

Not yesterday. It was one hour past her nap time and she was cranky and fussy. People avoided her and she was not getting the attention she normally does. She was being a joy sucker.

An important lesson here.

Are we cheerful and bring joy to others? Or are we grumpy and suck the joy out of other people’s lives.

I don’t have to tell you that if you are a joy to be around its going to benefit your relationships and your career success.

Learn more about being cheerful in the Conversation Success System

 Social conversation skills are important for everyone. It will make a person more successful at dating, at work, or in family. Every person can get better conversation skills and social skills. Here are three tips to help.

3 Tips for Improving Conversation Skills

First, be nice. This is very fundamental. If you just be nice to people or treat people how you want them to treat you, then you will have improved your social skills. It’s like the old quote: if you want to make a great friend then you have to be a great friend. So, the first tip is to be nice.

The second tip is to show interest in people. What that means is that when you’re talking with someone, you show interest in their life and what they are saying. Now, so often we like to do the opposite, we want to only talk about ourselves. But no, if we use conversation starter questions and show interest they are going to enjoy us and that is going to improve our social skills.

The third tip is that you need to listen. And how do we listen? Well, you look at the person, you nod in agreement that you’re listening, make some comments. And listening will make you great at conversation. You will have mastered the art of conversation and of small talk that matter also.

Recently, I shared these three tips with an individual and they started applying them. What happened was they were able to confidently talk with about anyone. And their social conversation skills improved greatly at the same time.

Being clear in conversation is important. Many struggle with this in one way or another.

  This next reader asks:

 "My English listening and speaking are very poor, could you please tell me how to improve English listening and speaking?"

How to Improve English Language Learning for Free

I feel your pain, as this can be challenging. Here are few ideas that have helped many people. 

Practice, Practice, Practice

Turn on the radio or tv and listen to a sentence from the speaker. Then repeat the sentence. Or maybe you can have an audio book cd and listen to a couple sentences and hit pause. Repeat out loud a couple times. There is also online audio. Doing this for about 20 minutes every day will help increase your English speaking ability.

If you know how to read English, read books out loud. I heard of one guy who came to the US and wanted to improve his English speaking. Every night he would read aloud from a book. This not only improved his English reading skills but also helped improve the clarity of what he was saying.

If you are ever unsure of how to say a word, just go to http://www.dictionary.com and listen to the word.

Practice tongue twisters from this  ESL website: 

Take 30 minutes a day to practice this and you  will see an increase in your language skills.

Here are some free resources:

Learn English for Free with Online English Learning

http://www.bellenglish.com/

http://esl.about.com/cs/onlinecourses/a/a_ecourses.htm

How to Get Better English Skills with Inexpensive resources.

I did some research and found a couple English learning products that are relatively inexpensive. I have not tried them, but they do have a money back guarantee.

English Survival Kit

77 Tips to a Better English Using the Internet

Hope this helps. Like every thing else in life it comes down to practice, practice, practice.

Have a great Day,

Austin,

PS. We are only on day 5 of our thirty day "Your Questions Answered Marathon". Submit your question here: