How do you know if it's your conversational skills that are holding you back?

Most people instinctively know when something is wrong. I'm guessing, but I'm almost certainly right, that if you're reading this you've come to the conclusion that your conversational skills could really do with a boost if you're to get more matches.

Your instincts are generally right. Your 'instinct' is your own conscious or more likely sub-conscious reading the body language of your conversational or dating partners and listening to their side of the conversation. If the signals you get back are consistently that your partners lose interest quickly when you open your mouth, then it's definitely time to work on your conversation.

You know how it goes:

• They come back with short answers.
• They don't ask you many, if any questions.
• Their eyes wander around the room and their body positions shift to point elsewhere.

You sense that you've lost their full attention and, as a result, your conversation starts to accelerate down that grease coated slope – closely followed by your self esteem!

Little conversational skill tweaks? Or big shifts?

So you know you need to improve your conversational skills. But just what do you need to do? Are we talking a few subtle changes? Are we talking throw out the old style and start all over again?

To be honest throwing out your old style isn't really an option. Improving your conversation, like many things in the dating arena, is a skill. And it needs to be practiced to improve.

If you've purchased some of our other programmes you may have been exposed to a more workbook format. We normally do that because it's so much more important to learn one thing and practice it till your competent than to learn 100 things and do none of them well. That's the case here.

Forget where you're starting from. Forget where you want to go. Just read, learn and go and practice just one thing that you know you must improve in your conversation. When you've mastered it, come back and go through the cycle again with the next piece of learning.

I used to be in awe of one of my colleague. He is such an eloquent, witty and dynamic speaker, I wanted to be a lot more like him! In the beginning I couldn't work out how he got to be so much better than me at entertaining people.

For a while I hoped that just being around him would make me more like him but as you probably know it doesn't quite work like that. You see he'd spent years practicing his skills at business presentation clubs. He'd write out and test new phrases and stories, just for his own amusement. He was forever experimenting with new methods of speaking with women on dates and you can't even begin to imagine the amount of fun he was having. He'd even attended a course on stand up comedy. He was forever practicing new ways of bettering himself and his conversation and it became clear to me that his brilliance was not accidental.

If you want to master your conversational skills in the same way, then take the same road he did. Practice, one little bit at a time. Practice it till you've mastered it and then move on to the next bit. And don't assume because you've 'hung out' with this book that you'll instantly transform your conversational skills and yourself from the average Joe (or Joan) to Mr (or Miss) Charisma overnight.

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