Now I think I understand it: the language of advice invisibilizes the advised. It requires them to abandon their own self and to conform. It is an interruption of independent thinking.

People want to think for themselves more than they want to think as someone else. Offering people ideas, only when they ask us, and only through the language of information and experience, keeps them thinking for themselves. And ironically that language increases the chances that our ideas will penetrate. The language of information and experience is not an interruption. The language of advice is.

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.

This kind of attention, this rare kind of listening, as we know, is different. Thinking pairs are not conversations. They are not consulting or counselling or even coaching in its usual modes. Thinking pairs are a unique structure in which the human mind can venture forth with no shackles, no leash, no collapsing into the listener’s lead. That is why they are so fruitful.

The promise changes our listening.

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.