 In this Engineering Manager 80-20 Shorts video, I have with me Tony Munson, author of People's Skills for Engineers. Now, we did a full podcast episode with Tony, which we'll link to in the comments of this video. But in this short video, Tony, I'd like you to share with our viewers, as an engineer or technical professional, how can one listen more effectively? Because we all know how important that is to success in engineering. Well, everyone who's listening, this might be time to put on your big boy pants if you have them sitting around, because I think I'm going to get at the crux of what makes people good listeners and bad listeners. As I was thinking about this last night preparing for this podcast, I realized that I think the source of listening or being a poor listener is we simply don't care what the other person is saying. Flat out. We haven't connected the dots. We're more interested in either one upping someone in a conversation. When is our time to speak? Is it now? Or just flat out thinking about something else? And that to me is just not caring about what the other person has to say. And we know this to be true, because if I pulled someone in a room right now and said, I'm going to give you the six number winning lottery numbers right now, guaranteed you would be able to remember it. Why? Because it's important. It's important to me. It's important to you. If we took that same, I don't want to call importance level, but you get the point. If we took that same, okay, I'm focused. I'm present. And move that into our individual conversations that we have, I think things would change. I know most people are like me. It's like, okay, I have this laundry list of things. Someone wants to talk to me. Okay, get it over with so we can go. And then two weeks from now, I end up having to ask the same thing that somebody already told me, because I wasn't physically present. We consciously need to make the decision to be physically present. You know, there's all sorts of physical things that we can do like, you know, listen with your body and give the correct verbal signals and things like that. But I think the core of it is simply not caring. I know that sign's kind of harsh, but if we cared more, we would listen more because we've all had points in our life where somebody's speaking to us and we know it's important and we're like that lion on the plains of the Sahara, like eye of the tiger on it. And so if we just make a mental effort to be more present, listening becomes so much easier.