The Word We Skip

One word in this sentence matters more than everything else. We usually skip it.

“We’re pretty frustrated with our current system.”

We hear “current system” and start thinking about how our product might help.

Meanwhile, we’ve skipped over “frustrated.”

“What’s been frustrating?”

“Every time we need to make a change, we have to involve IT. Sometimes it takes two weeks.”

“How’s that affecting things?”

“It’s embarrassing. Marketing is constantly waiting on us.”

There’s another one.

“Embarrassing?”

“Yeah. I’m supposed to be leading this team and half the time I’m apologizing for things I can’t control.”

We started out talking about software and ended up talking about someone feeling like they’re letting their team down.

I catch myself missing this stuff outside of sales, too.

Jenna says she’s exhausted. I start thinking about how to make her day easier.

A friend says he’s excited about a trip. I start telling him about a trip I took.

Somewhere in there, I stopped listening and started preparing my contribution.

I don’t think the answer is memorizing clever questions. That just gives me more things to think about while someone else is talking.

Maybe it’s noticing a word with a little feeling behind it and staying there for a moment.

Not every conversation needs to become a therapy session, obviously. Sometimes someone’s frustrated because the printer is a piece of shit.

I’m trying to get better at giving people a little room to tell me.

Funny how much we can miss when we’re busy thinking about what to add.