I have said that we have also very recently begun to understand that the mind seems to think in ‘waves and pauses’, not in ‘parts’. (Formerly I thought the road to the incisive question consisted of ‘parts’ and could be mapped. I was wrong. The mind is not so predictably linear.) It then determines in the pause the ‘just right’ question among those ‘innate questions’ to generate a new wave. As the listener, we are now able to navigate that same ‘pause’ process to determine the right question when the person cannot do it for themselves.

Let’s start with the first component’s question:

Where is your attention?

That is the groundbreaking question. Change where your attention is, and you change where another person’s mind is.

Attention generates thinking. Think about that. But maybe don’t think too hard about it because it will make you feel a bit sick remembering how absent it was from the things you were probably taught about being with people.

In the moment when the thinker looks back at the listener, they register the degree of accuracy in the listener’s response to their signals. They see that response in the thinker’s eyes and face. And here’s the bombshell: the degree of accuracy of the listener’s response to the signals may determine the level of psychological safety for the thinker. The more accurate the listener’s response, the more convincingly the thinker reads, ‘You matter.’ And the better they think.

So it could be said that the definition of truly generative attention, the thing that makes generative attention generative, is the perfectly calibrated eye-and-face response by the listener to the micro signals in the eyes and face of the thinker. The more accurate, the more generative.

The listener’s accurate response to the thinker’s changes seems to raise the quality of attention to a generative zenith. And even more extraordinary things seem to happen for the thinker because of it.

We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.

Sometimes this difference is not even substantive. Sometimes it is a shift internally that the listener cannot see, but the thinker can feel. Sometimes it is a new emotional relationship with the thought.

So I have become impressed by those thinker-‘repetition’ moments, now understanding that, yes, it matters what the thinker says, but it matters more what happens for them because they say it.