After several years of stabbings in the dark I tried: ‘What more do you think, or feel, or want to say?’ It worked. They kept going, and I kept out of it.

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?

The first turn starts. The thinking partner asks this question (or one so nearly like it, it might as well be this one):

What do you want to think about, and what are your thoughts?

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.

We also have seen the power of repeating a question. And we know about the importance of using the thinker’s own words if we refer to their thinking. People think in their own specific words, not just in their own language.