Helping others
If you find yourself helping someone, and talking in a single turn for more than 30 seconds, you are probably talking to yourself / enjoying hearing yourself speak more than you are actually helping him/her (I did not say it comes from a bad intention). The best way to help someone is by asking questions. That way, the person in front of you gets the chance to organize his thoughts, verbalize them, confront his assumptions and logic, and admit the thoughts out loud. Good questions are hard to come up with, especially as the conversation evolves. A nice exercise to get better at it is this: next time you have a point in any conversation, try to ask questions such that the other conversee will derive it and say it in his own voice. Then, you’ll get the chance to walk over the logic that led you to think about that point in the first place, which is itself often a surprising and self-revealing experience.