I agree with Joe about hugs.

Which reminds me: back in the 1980s, I was a volunteer at a social-service agency, a telephone hotline that dealt with suicide prevention and other emotional or mental-health crises—rather like the Samaritans in the UK and Ireland, but this was a local organization in Minnesota.

When we were undergoing training to become one of the hotline telephone answerers, we went through lots of exercises including various touchy-feely physical-contact stuff, such as group hugs, and giving each other backrubs, and probably more stuff I have forgotten. All this was, I think, supposed to make us more sensitive and empathetic, and build up trust among the group, so we could give and accept advice and correction (they called it feedback) without getting defensive, and so on.

Now those goals are all well and good, but I doubt that all the touchy-feely stuff really helped. We were going to be talking to people on the telephone, for Pete's sake, so all that sensitivity and empathy had to be conveyed with the sound of your voice and your choice of words. Some people are good at that and some people not so good, and I don't think it has anything to do with your ability to hug people.

It's like in music: If you want to be good at playing the mandolin, you've got to practice on the mandolin. Practicing on a guitar might help a little, but not as much as practicing on the mandolin.

I haven't been in touch with (no pun intended) that organization for many years now, so I don't know if they have changed their training methods. I hope they have.

Oh, I don't want to give the impression that it was all physical. We also did role-playing, which is an excellent way to learn, or to demonstrate the skill you already have, but I think at the beginning of every session we did warm-up exercises that were often physical.