From the author: The article is dedicated to my new, recently published book, entitled: “Stay in contact: the basics of effective communication.” It contains years of practice on working on yourself and developing successful communication skills. Any interpersonal communication begins with communication between oneself and oneself. How far can we do this? What are the difficulties? The book was written with great love and a desire to help all people experiencing communication difficulties learn to communicate successfully. Antoine Saint-Exupéry once said a phrase that became a catchphrase, which was well remembered throughout the world and Russia for a couple of decades, but has now been forgotten: “the luxury of human communication.” I think that only very big misanthropes can challenge the very idea that communication is the greatest pleasure in the world. What could be more pleasant than immersing yourself in the elements of a variety of contacts with similar and at the same time such uniquely individual creatures as people? Who besides people will help us see and understand ourselves better? With whom can you share your troubles and your joys? Not with trees and animals (although poets and mystics knew how to do this), but with people. But communication is not only luxury and joy, it also means serious problems, difficulties, pain and experiences. Hundreds of millions of people suffer from negativity inflicted on them by other people. Many people feel very bad when communicating. Perhaps they simply do not know how to communicate, but it is very likely that their communication partners are good at this skill (only with a minus sign). In such cases, you don’t want to interact with a trained aggressor or manipulator. Among people there are geniuses, or at least communication talents, and there are people who are not doing so well. Interestingly, talented communicators usually do not read books on the psychology of communication. Everything they own, they received from nature and from their parents, who in childhood managed to instill in them a taste for confident communication. Those who have problems with communication love to read psychological literature, but not in all books they can find the advice and methods they need to develop communication skills. Is it possible to learn to communicate correctly from books? I am convinced that it is impossible - you need daily practice and life training. Why are books needed in this case? Then, they equip a thinking person who is determined to work on himself with the right strategy, helping to build the communication process more harmoniously and successfully. My long-term practice of consulting people on a variety of topics has convinced me that psychotechnics alone are ineffective, and without a conscious strategy, communication is doomed to failure. In this case, any slightly stronger and more arrogant person will defeat us in communication. I won’t be original if I repeat a generally banal thought: man is a social being. We are not animals (although there is this part of us) and we are not gods (although some very small part of humanity has advanced in understanding the divine reality). We humans occupy an intermediate position. A person becomes a person only when he looks into the soul of another person as if into a mirror and sees the reflected image of himself there. This maxim has been repeated more than once by various philosophers and people thinking about human nature. It means that in order for us to transform into a harmonious and, even more so, a perfect person, we need to communicate as much as possible with a wide variety of other people. Our communication partners - close to us and far from us, positive or negative, smart or stupid - they all taught us something, willingly or unwillingly. And above all, they taught us the ability to communicate. Communication can be compared to air for the social part of a person. Without such air, a person suffocates. This concerns not only the topic of turning a person into a human being, and not Mowgli, and not only loneliness, but also life in modern society. That,