[woodandsteel]

Former interpersonal skills trainer here.

The comments have a lot of good suggestions. I would like to reinforce the emphasis on listening, and the idea of practicing one skill until you have it down, and then moving on to another. Also it is good to take a training course where you actually practoce the skills under the guidance of a teacher.

Also it is good to think afterwards about an interaction that went good or bad, reviewing as close to word-for-word if you can, and see what you can learn that you can use in the future. Also think of situations you have a hard time handling and see if you can think of how the skills you are learning can help, and again plan out what you might say word-for-word, and run though it a number of times, maybe even out loud, to make it more automatic.