Effective patient-professional communication is core task for all health professionals.  Whether it is the skill of illiciting a history, breaking bad news, helping people understand their condition, conveying treatment recommendations or developing coping skills, effective communication is essential.  Unfortunately, the empirical literature is replete with studies documenting problems with patient-provider communication, and on  effective training programs to resolve these problems.  This literature has focused the professional on listening to their patients or clients.  However, I would like to suggest that fundamental to developing all communication skills, is the ability to listen carefully to ourselves.  With our minds ability to justify, rationalise, deceive and forget, much of the way we listen to or reflect on our communication is in effective.       Therefore we need utilise some structured tools to help us listen, to hear what we actually say, rather than what we think we say.  This talk will explore these issues and describe some simple tools to help us develop effective self-listening skills.