You Were Right, and You Stopped Listening

“You knew where the conversation was going four sentences in, and you were right. You also stopped listening, and nobody has told you what that cost.” – Stephen Scott Johnson

#4 The Nine Expressions of Frequency: From Pattern to Power series

You know the moment. Someone is explaining a problem, and before they're halfway through you can already see the shape of it and what they should do. You wait, politely, for them to arrive where you've been sitting for two minutes. You're usually right. That's the part that makes this hard to see.

This is the Sage, one of the Nine Expressions of Frequency in the cosmology of my latest book, Ascendant – How To Reshape Reality From The Inside Out. With the Sage, clarity arrives early. A situation is still forming, people are still adding to it, and somewhere in the middle you can already see what matters and what's noise. You don't have to work for it. It's simply there, the way weather is there. People come to you for the one sentence that makes the mess make sense, and you give it to them, and things get simpler around you.

The problem is that the seeing happens so fast it closes the conversation. Something makes sense and your attention settles there, and from then on everything else that's said gets sorted into what you already know. Your partner is telling you about their day and you've placed it by the second sentence. A friend is working something out aloud and you hand them the answer before they've finished the question, and they take it, and the thing they were about to work out for themselves never gets worked out. You're right there at the table and you're not in the conversation at all.

Researchers found that people who reach a conclusion stop gathering evidence for it, and that the one thing that reliably reopens the mind is being made to consider the opposite of the first thing that seemed true (Lord, Lepper & Preston, 1984, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.47.6.1231).

The first true thing becomes the only thing, even while a truer one was still on its way.

A client of mine noticed her adult daughter had stopped calling. When she asked why, her daughter told her: you finish my sentences, and you're always right, and I leave every call feeling like there was no point in me talking. So she tried ten minutes. When her daughter called, she held whatever she'd already seen for ten minutes and kept listening. She said the first call was like sitting on her hands. By the fourth, her daughter was calling twice a week and telling her things she'd never told anyone, and what surprised my client most was that her own read had been wrong about half the time.

When the Sage expression is coherent, the clarity still arrives early. Only now you don't close the conversation around it. You see something and you say less than you know, on purpose, and the other person gets to finish arriving at it themselves. Nobody gets summarised. The conversation stays open long enough for something to turn up that neither of you would have reached alone, and you get to be in it rather than watching it.

So here is this week's practice...

Next time you know the answer early, and you'll know it within a sentence or two, hold it for ten minutes and keep listening. Don't hint at it. At the end of the ten minutes, notice what the conversation added that your first read of it missed, and how it felt in your body to stay present when you already knew.

To what matters most,