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.

Or for brevity I might have formed the question in my mind this way:

Can I be sure that what I as the listener am about to say will be of more value than what you are about to think?

If I were to ask you one of my favourite questions, ‘What are you not facing that is right in front of your face?’, you would know. But most likely you would immediately cram it back into its Houdini trunk. And sit on it. And try to think from there.

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.

The question can be made even more potent if it allows for feelings and for the censored to be said (and, conversely, for the thinker to know that saying something is an option, not a requirement):

What more do you think, or feel, or want to say?