One of the major skills that we've talked about in class, and tried to practice in our hospital placements, is active listening: trying to really listen to what a person is saying and, maybe more importantly, appearing as though you're really listening.

Several months ago, I spent some time with a person who was able to guess that I'm on the autistic spectrum (something that I generally prefer not to talk about, having trained myself to a point where most people can't tell,) and she said that one of the main tipoffs was that I seemed like I had studied and practiced active listening, rather than having grown up never thinking of listening as a skill to be learned.

It put me in mind of My Fair Lady, where a linguistics expert concludes that the main character, a Cockney woman who's undergone intensive training to adopt upper class speech, must be a non-native speaker, because she sounded like she had studied the language academically.