Module 10 · Foundation
Communication craft: listening, writing and presence
Listening, writing and presence — the raw skills under every technique.
What you’ll learn
- Listening as a technical skill — levels of listening, what "active listening" means in practice, note-taking that doesn't kill rapport, how long to hold a silence, and how to summarise without sounding like a chatbot.
- Questions that open people up — open and closed, funnelling, the follow-up that gets the real answer, labelling and mirroring, leading questions, and where curiosity becomes interrogation.
- Writing that gets replied to — the clarity rules, the "so what" test, and three worked before/after rewrites.
- Phone and video presence — pace, pitch, volume, filler words, smiling on the phone, camera and lighting, nerves, and recovering from a stumble.
- Structuring what you say — the 30-second version of anything, the pyramid principle, the rule of three, story shape, and how to answer a question you can't answer.
- Reading the room — buying signals versus politeness, disengagement on video, when to stop talking, multi-person dynamics.
- Deliberate practice — how to actually improve, with a concrete four-week plan.