A confession about listening, failing, and the ongoing work of getting out of my own way
I need to tell you about a crime my brain commits. While you’re mid-sentence, my processor has already modeled three possible endings, evaluated the most likely one, and queued up a response. Before you finish speaking, I’m already starting.
You probably know someone like this. We finish your sentences. We solve the mystery in the first act. We blurt out "the sister did it" while you're still admiring the establishing shots.
For years I rationalized this as a feature of my neuro-spicy brain—which, technically, it is. But here’s what I’ve had to confront: understanding why I do something doesn’t exempt me from responsibility for its impact. The wake of interrupted sentences, the flash of frustration when someone realizes I wasn’t really listening—I was just waiting for my turn with extra steps.
That’s on me.
And the particularly maddening part? I’ve known the solution for decades.
The Cure I Can’t Seem to Take
There’s a practice called active listening. Carl Rogers and Richard Farson coined the term in 1957, and Thomas Gordon brought it to millions of parents through his Parent Effectiveness Training programs in the 1970s. The paradigm shift is almost insultingly simple:
Stop listening with the intent to respond. Start listening with the intent to understand.
I can explain this concept beautifully. I’ve taught it. I know the neuroscience—how interruption triggers threat responses, how feeling unheard activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. I have the theory down cold.
And yet, virtually any time I’m excited by a topic, or activated in any way, my switches trip. The established patterns take over before I’ve consciously chosen anything. It’s not that I forget the practice—it’s that the practice requires a calm I don’t seem to have access to in the moments when I need it most.
The Triggers
Let me try to be specific about when I fail, because vague confession is just performance.
I fail when I’m excited. When a conversation touches something I care about deeply, my brain starts racing down multiple paths simultaneously—and somehow, despite all that parallel processing, I become more distractible, not less. The enthusiasm that should make me a better conversational partner makes me worse. I’m so eager to connect, to build, to contribute, that I forget to receive.
I fail in confrontation. When there’s conflict, my instinct is to solve. To fix. To find the answer that makes the discomfort stop. But here’s what I keep learning and forgetting: most conflicts aren’t puzzles waiting for my solution. They’re people waiting to be heard. And when I rush to solve a problem I don’t actually have the solution for, I’m not helping—I’m hijacking.
I fail when I’m uncertain. You’d think uncertainty would slow me down, create space for listening. Instead, it often speeds me up—as if talking faster might outrun the discomfort of not knowing.
The Turbulent Ocean Problem
Here’s what I’m trying to describe: imagine trying to calm a turbulent ocean so you can see what’s beneath the surface. That’s what active listening asks of me. Make room for new ideas. Welcome them. Stop churning long enough to actually receive what someone is offering.
But my ocean doesn't calm on command. The waves are the thinking. The turbulence *is* the processing. Asking me to still the water is asking me to stop being the thing I am, at least temporarily—and I haven't figured out how to do that reliably.
Toffler wrote that the illiterate of the future won’t be those who can’t read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. I think about this constantly. The unlearning is where I’m stuck. I know the new pattern. I can describe it eloquently. But the old pattern has fifty-plus years of momentum, and it reasserts itself the moment my attention wavers.
The Preschool Teacher in My Head
Sometimes I imagine a gentle, corrective voice—like a patient preschool teacher speaking to a room of wiggly four-year-olds. Let’s sit quietly now. Let’s think hard about what our friend is saying. Let’s not let our minds wander from that task.
There’s something in that image that I find both humbling and oddly comforting. Humbling because it reminds me that what I’m working on is basic. This isn’t advanced interpersonal dynamics. This is kindergarten-level stuff that I somehow never fully learned—or learned and unlearned through decades of rewarded interruption.
Comforting because that preschool teacher isn’t angry. She’s not disappointed. She’s just gently redirecting, over and over, with infinite patience. Let’s try again. Let’s listen to what Marcus is saying. We’ll have our turn.
Maybe that’s what self-compassion looks like in this work. Not excusing the pattern, but also not flagellating myself for it. Just noticing when I’ve drifted. Gently returning. Trying again.
What I’m Actually Practicing
I don’t have this figured out. I want to be clear about that. But I’m trying some things:
- I’m trying to notice the moment before I interrupt—that almost physical sensation of a response trying to escape. Sometimes I can catch it. Often I can’t.
- I’m trying to ask myself, in confrontation: Do I actually have a solution here? Or am I just uncomfortable with the silence?
- I’m trying to treat my failures as data rather than verdicts. Each time I railroad a conversation, I can ask: What triggered that? What was I feeling? What would it have cost me to wait?
- I’m trying to remember that the goal isn’t perfection. It’s shifting the ratio. And extending grace to myself when I fall short, the same way that patient preschool teacher would.
The Ongoing Work
This is where I am. Not transformed. Not healed. Just practicing. Failing. Noticing the failures. Trying to fail slightly less often, or recover slightly faster.
There’s a particular kind of growth that happens at this stage of life—less revelation, more repetition. Less breakthrough, more showing up. You don’t transform overnight. You just keep returning to the practice, the way you’d return to a meditation cushion after your mind wanders for the thousandth time.
It’s me. I’m the problem.
And I’m still here, working on it.