The Promise That Changes Everything: I Wont Interrupt You

Those answers are developments of ten ways of being with each other. I call them ‘the ten components of a thinking environment’. We will explore them in depth in a little while because when we live them, as a system of being, we and the world around us do begin to change.

This ‘thinking environment’ starts and ends with the promise not to interrupt each other. It really does. I know that sounds too simple a thing to change a life, much less a world. But that simple promise is loaded. Like an atom. Take it apart and you see an unimaginable force, a force that generates the brilliance of life, in this case the brilliance of independent thinking.

It reflects the experience we all have every day. We interrupt. And we are

interrupted. We may be inured to its ravaging because it is just the way life has become. But each time it happens, we wince. Often we rage. It registers.

Polarization is not a result of disagreement. It is a result of disconnection. When we disconnect from each other, when we see each other no longer as human beings but as threats, we polarize. And the first, most forceful disconnector is interruption.

Crucially, they have arrived having promised to stop interrupting. They have agreed 1) to start giving attention, 2) to stay interested in where each other’s thinking will go next and 3) to ‘share the stage’ equally.

Delusion takes some doing to undo.

First, we need really to get that interrupting is a violent act. To begin with, we need to understand what interruption is. We have to recognize all of its

pernicious and artful forms.

And then we have to examine it at a ‘cellular’ level. We have to see the untrue assumptions that drive it, take them apart and start over with true ones.

Keeping the promise of no interruption is a tough job.

Tough because this promise is an unspiralling galaxy of a thing.

Finally, I returned to those two simple things: be present and don’t speak. I promised. And I kept the promise.

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.

During that time we discovered that inside this promise not to speak, this

simple three-faceted agreement to stop interrupting (to start giving attention, to stay interested and to ‘share the stage’), there is a lot going on. Inside this promise there appears to be a kind of ‘coding’ for removing blocks in thinking. It appears that the mind, when not interfered with, asks itself a range of catalytic, almost ‘innate’ questions when it gets stuck, breaking through blocks for itself, so it can be on its way again. All of that seems to happen when the promise of no interruption is in place and the mind is soaring.

And in that promise, too, there is a rich colony of catalysts. There are at least ten conditions – the ‘components of a thinking environment’ I mentioned, conditions we are providing when we give attention and don’t speak. These ‘components’– attention, equality, ease, appreciation, feelings, encouragement, information, difference, incisive questions and place – we will explore in fresh detail later. The point here is that they actually generate thought. To decide to live them is to decide to cherish independent human thinking.

They had asked themselves a spectacular breakthrough question. And they had gotten there by asking themselves a cluster of other questions first. It was a logical and beautiful sequence, supple and able to leap from one snare to a question to a different snare to another question until it arrived finally at that most liberating question of all. In later years I would label that one an ‘incisive question’, because it was, indeed.

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?

We speak at approximately 115 words per minute, but think at approximately 825 words per minute. My own experience aligns better with an even starker view offered by a psychologist on one of my courses. His working hypothesis is that ‘for every thirty words we say, we don’t say 300’. If he is right, even when I am listening to you beautifully, I don’t have access to 90 per cent of your thinking. So surely we both benefit if you can develop your thinking fully before I speak. At least the 10 per cent I am responding to will be more accurate and fully formed, so my response can be, too.

This is what I think it takes.

Two things.

One, we have to get it, really get it, that one person’s generative attention produces another person’s new thinking.

Don’t rush that.

Two, a person’s generative attention loses its power the very second it wavers. Attention like this has to be continuous.

Take that in, too. It defies 3,000 years of instruction in how to listen.

That’s all it is. Just a little zing. An ‘if’ feeling. A ‘this might not work but no one will die’ feeling. It’s not a ‘jeepers what have I done and who will I be after this?’ feeling. To let go, even for a minute, of the thing that is familiar for the thing that is really not is only to shift from ah to hmmm. And that is actually kind of nice. And the good thing is Plan B. We can always go back to the familiar. It is there, arms crossed.

Weirdness is not weird if it is announced ahead of time and grounded in the ‘why’ of itself.

Things work in context, not in the spotlight.

Dr Paul Brown, Faculty Professor at Monarch Business School in

Switzerland, explained this to me. He had noticed that these ten behaviours not only work; they work every time.

He said that the reason for this dependable quality of thinking is that generative attention, uncorrupted and sustained, calms the brain’s amygdala, the emotional ‘control centre’ of the brain, producing hormones like serotonin and oxytocin. These hormones then ‘bathe’ the cortex, the cognitive ‘control centre’ of the brain, allowing a perfect interplay between these ‘approach’ hormones and cognition. And because the listener’s attention doesn’t waver, and we know it Wont, the amygdala stays calm, and thought-disturbing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline stay at bay.

Particularly elegant is the research by Riana Barnard presented in her dissertation, ‘The notions of “attention” and “belief” in coaching for change – a conceptual study’ (University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa, 2019).

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.

I interrupt. And when I do, it trumpets: ‘I am better than you. I matter more.’ It has to mean I do not see you as my equal. Why else would I interrupt you?

I think we have to face it: to interrupt we first must abandon equality. We

must first assume that no matter what the person is saying, no matter what they are thinking, no matter what they are about to think, what we want to say is more valuable and in that moment we matter more than they do. We’re better.

And get this nuance: we are not assuming just that our idea is better; it well may be. We are assuming that deep down we deserve more than they do to speak right this second. If we didn’t assume that, we would listen. We would not speak until they had finished their thought. We would even stay interested in where they would go next, and where they would end up.

And consider this, too: praise, appreciation, expressions of respect – all

develop human thinking. They unwrap confidence and let it saturate talent and will and buds of ability. You know this. Every time someone mentions a quality they admire in you, you do even better at just about everything for a while. And you feel good. And you think better.

And that’s the point. That good-feeling phenomenon is a good-thinking

phenomenon. So says the chemistry at least. Appreciate someone and, as with attention, the hormones in their brain change. Oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine dash around their cortex; and before they know it, they think better and better. We have noticed this repeatedly in all of our work.

So what’s the problem? Why don’t we do it more? It’s not that difficult. We can just notice what is good and say it. That’s it.

In fact, the next time you are with a human being, anywhere at all, notice

something you respect about them, or like about them, or just think is a plus for that moment, and tell them. Even strangers. Their day will change, and when they start to think about something, they’ll be better at it.

I’ve seen and heard a lot of feeling in my listening life. And I have yet to see anything but good from it. It seems only to heal and to allow the mind to work less impeded. Unexpressed emotion, on the other hand, seems to block both thought and health. So I am unbothered when people cry or say how angry or scared they are. I am pleased, actually.

Most important is that feelings are so interwoven with thinking that to allow one and not the other is to diminish both. We can listen to words and we can listen to tears. It is all the same thing. I know that at the moment the world of brain talk is full of the separation of these two systems. But that will pass soon enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is everything all at once. Even space is stuff that hugs us. Life is one lavish act of touching. Thinking and feeling are no exceptions. So we can rejoice.

And when someone is thinking along and starts to cry, let’s just be glad they felt psychologically safe enough with us to do that. And then watch the fresh thinking that follows. And the bright eyes that say so.

The point is that release of feelings should always be a choice. It is not all of the picture, and it does not need to be the sole target of our attention or skill in listening. And feelings are not usually a reliable guide for intelligent decision-making (although they are in practice the root of most people’s decisions).

But release of emotion does help us think better and more fully for ourselves. You can probably remember times when you expressed your feelings with people who listened, who did not silence or interrupt you, or inject their own feelings. Most likely you were able then to think more calmly, and more clearly.

The principle I use to sum up the component of feelings in a thinking environment is not just a quip: crying can make you smarter.

It really can.

In a thinking environment ‘encouragement’ returns to its literal meaning: to give courage. It gives us courage to go to the unfamiliar edge of our thinking. In order to do that we have to trust that there will be no competition between us as thinkers. We have to champion each other’s mutual excellence as thinkers. And so you could say that the component of encouragement converses steadily with the component of equality.

My bewitchment with information is different. It is with the mind’s hunger to understand, ‘its desire to know’ as Aristotle said. And that kind of knowing seems to require three things: 1) supplying the facts, 2) seeing the social collective context and 3) dismantling denial.

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.

Importantly, too, information prevents adoration, one of the most dangerous forces against the independent human mind. The choice to see no flaws, the choice to justify every inconsistency or contradiction by saying it isn’t happening or by sewing in an interpretation that allows it to fit the dogma of the adored. We see adoration in the same-stepping rallies of worshippers of any sort: of politicians, fashion, deity, battle, wealth. When reality does not fit the narrative and the narrative is substituting for our own stories of meaning and purpose and significance, we worship. We ignore facts. We term ‘fake’ what is real. We have stopped thinking for ourselves. We have stopped thinking, full stop.

I would ask many times a day, what is real? What uncomfortable actualities can we uncover today to fill in the picture more accurately? What is right in front of us? What new land can we traverse to arrive where the veracity lies? How brazenly can we seek a wider truth when it disquiets our narrow own?

Tell me what you really think. Tell me what is really happening. Tell me what you have actually found. And I’ll tell you. We Wont interrupt. We will learn and change and build together.

Information is that much a friend, that much a wand.

Valuing difference is a big job. It takes more than a department or a sermon or a march to embed it. We live in cultures; and cultures resist difference. They are set up to draw a circle around sameness and close it with a secret handshake.

Difference is all there is. There is no such thing as same. That’s the curious thing. All this clubbiness, all this we/they super-construction in our rituals and rites, all this being-an-exclusive-member-of drive we learn as we grow up – none of it is real. Inside every group there is so much difference we would drown trying to slosh through it all. So we pretend. Here is your medallion. Now you are one of us. We are all the same. Thank goodness.

Difference is often so deeply threatening we cannot bear to listen to it. Much less embrace it. We cannot bear to imagine that we might be wrong and they might be right and, heaven forbid, at least as good in every way as we are. Or better.

The culprit here is an unavoidable sequence of childhood. When people are brought up to fear difference, especially difference of thought, they are easier to control. And society adores control.

We need to adore difference so that we can all finally, in fact, be the same in the only sense that matters: as human beings. And what magnificence that sameness is.

So how about we walk across the road and listen? And soon ask to be listened to, too. And promise never to interrupt. Only to learn. And eventually to respect?

And then, who knows?

To love?

So here in one sentence (albeit dense) is what this life-restoring kind of question seems to do:

An incisive question, through a playful hypothetical construct, replaces an untrue limiting assumption with a true liberating one, and connects it to a desired outcome.

And here is why (even denser):

The key block to a desired outcome is an untrue limiting assumption lived as true that can be removed only by replacing it with a true liberating assumption inserted into a playful (because hypothetical) question using the subjunctive tense.

E.g. if you knew x, how would you do y? The mind can play inside that construct. And in playing, it embeds the new true assumption and decides on actions and/or changes its feelings. Everything. The brain likes to play, not obey. And the incisive question construct lets it do that. Playful because hypothetical. Wonderful to know.

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.

It does, though. Obviously, our brains are in our bodies, and thus depend on body chemistry in order to work. Too much sugar, sluggish brain. Too much wheat, compliant brain. Too much artificial stuff, fearful brain. Too much alcohol and drug stuff, collapsed brain. But the impact of our bodies on thinking goes beyond this chemistry question. When we try to think inside a body we disrespect, it can hear only, ‘You don’t matter.’ And that assumption practically anaesthetizes the cortex.

The body, then, is the place where we think, not only because it contains our brains, but also because it tells us whether we matter.

What to do?

Consider these questions.

About the room:

What are three things you can do before your next meeting so that when people arrive they feel, just from the room, that they matter?

About the listener:

How can you communicate to your listener the importance of their keeping their eyes on your eyes so that their eyes and their face respond accurately to the micro signals of change in your thinking?

About your body:

What one thing do you know you need to do so that your body can say to you, ‘You matter’?

This puzzled me. But then I thought about this: on screen the promise of no interruption is broken, yes. But not by the listener. It is broken by the platform. And it is the listener’s promise, not the platform’s, that ignites the thinker’s mind. It is the thinker’s trust in that human promise that allows them to claim their own intelligence and fly. And although this means that one of the three aspects of the component of place – the room – is deeply compromised, the most important aspect – the listener – holds steady and perhaps does ‘double duty’ to make up significantly for the interruptive room.

I mention this because one’s chosen philosophy of human nature is vital. It determines where we focus. And our focus determines where we go.

I think we can, however, assert that our capacity for ‘good’ is of a higher order than our capacity for ‘bad’ and, therefore, merits our focus. I say ‘higher order’ because the science of the brain suggests that only the ‘good’ feeds human development. The ‘bad’ limits, even derails, human development. For example, when the human is born, the brain arrives not fully formed and needs further ‘processing’. That ‘processing’, as it turns out, is a form of the ‘good’. Key in this is sustained generative attention supported by the other components of a thinking environment.

The point is not the interruption just of the person’s sentence or question. The point is the interruption of their thinking. When we interrupt people’s sentences, we interrupt their thinking. Realizing that can be sobering. When we see interruption as breaking only into people’s words, we do it and scoot off. When we recognize it as demolishing their thinking, we stop. Or at least pause.

And that is what matters here: interruption as the demolition of people’s thinking. Interruption of thinking comes from a number of sources. These are the most pervasive:

Ourselves

Others

Occurrences

Assumptions

Systems

We say things like, ‘You could … You should … I would propose that you … You’d do well to … If I were you, I would …’, ‘Do this, think that, get on with it just as I say.’

That ‘language of advice’ is itself an interruption of the person’s independent thinking. When we use that language, we are requiring the person to think like us, in essence to become us. So the person’s mind becomes defensive. People resist having to think just like someone else. This requirement is demeaning; it is diminishing of the self. And so, what is offered in the language of advice is usually only partially heard and often rejected, sometimes out of hand.

But if instead we use the language of experience – ‘I discovered that … In my experience, I have found that …’ – or the language of information – ‘the law says that … research is showing that … so far the facts here are that …’ – or even, ‘if I were in your situation, I would …’, the person engages readily, accepting bits, rejecting bits, questioning bits. They keep thinking for themselves. They keep their own mind. They have not been required to become us.

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.

Seeing people as people and not as the assumptions about their identities that society branded into our child brains is exhausting. No wonder we sit down after we say hello.

The untrue assumptions we live as true. They interrupt our thinking on a regular basis. I didn’t use to see untrue assumptions as interruption. But, of course, they are. We can be thinking along, generating insights and possibilities and bold choices; and suddenly, just like that, we’re back where we started.

In fact, it is the one we have to solve. It looks innocent: it’s flashy and immediate; it rewards us; it makes us feel we are in control. It seems to be nice to us.

But it is a liar. It controls us. It does this by being an intricate, intentional, invisible, social ‘system of interruption’. We have seen how devastating our relationships of interruption are. But social systems of interruption are an even beastlier beast.

Holding on to the self that parked the car. We should see behind the mall to its expression of a systemic, snaking stealthiness of purpose, and not let it sneak into our decisions. We should see the massive system of interruption of self and thinking that it is intended to be. And we should ask ourselves, right now, in this moment, in front of this thing and that thing so like it, and these things we are required to like in order to be liked, what do I really think? What do I really want?

And an even bigger deal, according to James Williams in Stand Out of Our Light (one masterpiece you should read immediately), is the hacking of our brains that the injection of ads into our visual field does entirely without our agreement. This colonizing of attentional space is depleting our cognitive autonomy. Our default is no longer to focus. It is to collapse into ads and newsfeeds and profoundly mind-altering distraction.

And even this architecture of distraction is not the molten centre of the problem we are facing. That core is the fact that multiple distractions chemically kill discernment. Distractions, as we have seen, raise anxiety, i.e. cortisol and adrenaline, in the brain. These hormones in turn reduce our ability to think for ourselves. They make us want to give in to the wandering hands of distractors. This design of distraction is, therefore, not an oh-I-apologize, just-ignore-me-please by-product of the platform architecture. It is the goal of the architecture. It sets out to generate the hormones that make us want more distraction.

I moved gradually to this action. I had watched the connections among my delegates and their connection to their learning dissolve as soon as the breaks began and the phones came out. After a few years I had become unwilling to foster this loss any more. And I realized I was willing to lose business if necessary in order to stop this infiltration of the platform system of interruption. I wanted to restore the full, attentive, undistracted human mind to every minute of our study and practice. I have lost no business.

In fact, just the other day I was sent an analysis of this phenomenon by Alan Lightman, physicist and writer:

By not giving ourselves the minutes – or hours – free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us. The destruction of our inner selves via the wired world is a subtle phenomenon. The loss of slowness, of time for reflection and contemplation, of privacy and solitude, of silence, of the ability to sit quietly in a chair for fifteen minutes without external stimulation – all have happened quickly and almost invisibly.

The situation is dire. We are losing our ability to know who we are and what is important to us. We are creating a global machine in which each of us is a mindless and reflexive cog, relentlessly driven by the speed, noise, and artificial urgency of the wired world. I would like to make a bold proposal: that half our waking minds be designated and saved for quiet reflection.

We need a mental attitude that protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner self; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.

This secondary sensing phenomenon is actually erosive. Matthew Crawford, in his The World Beyond Your Head (another masterpiece you should read before you do a single other thing), says that one of the ways we lose our ability to think is to surrender it to secondary sensing devices. We stop thinking when we obey the perceiver that is not in the room.

But the actual problem is the shifting of dating culture, which is a culture of listening, to a marriage culture, which is a culture of interruption.

I first began to understand this system of persuasion through the research and writing of Professor Charles Cialdini (Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion) and Scott Adams (Win Bigly) whose books have become for me two more don’t-leave-the-house-before-you-read-it musts.

We do need to accept that the power of persuasion at its worst lies in its design to interrupt. It is supposed to interrupt us, our independent, cogent, thinking selves. And it does.

Unthinking rejection is the same thing as unthinking embrace. In both cases we are gone.

All four systems cause interruption. But polarization is also directly caused by it. And so to stop it, we have simply (although, of course, not easily) to eliminate the cause: we agree not to interrupt. If we can do that, we will not polarize. We will disagree. Even deeply. We may fight. Even fiercely. But we will not disconnect. And if we don’t disconnect, we will keep thinking.

To think afresh about an issue by listening with interest to an extreme opposing view feels, therefore, like risking personal annihilation. This assumption of ‘core difference’ is nothing less than the fear of ceasing to be.

If I become interested in your view, I will have to adopt your values, and so I will stop being me; I will be an inferior person.

We, therefore, become afraid to hear the other person’s thoughts because to consider them would be, we feel, to betray our deepest selves. So we make sure that no idea can develop in either of us that does not fit our certainty of who we are and who they are. We stop them. We interrupt.

In particular, we all need to read and absorb the analysis of Michael Hogg, professor and chair of social psychology at Claremont Graduate University (see Scientific American, September 2019, pp. 79–81). He shows that a state of ‘self-uncertainty social identity’ is fodder for the internet ‘information nodes’ like Twitter and Facebook. These ‘I-do-belong-here’ platforms keep participants feeding on the amplified disinformation that everyone inside the group is better than everyone outside it, and that only inside are we safe. This repetitive, stupefying experience is its own kind of interruption of independent thinking, if not a killer of it.

Bill Godwin, American scientist and philosopher, sees something additional at the heart of polarized entrenchment:…

… One needs to begin with the assumption (obviously true if one thinks about it) that they may well be right and it is we who are wrong because of our own ignorance or assumption or biases or cultural and life experiences. It’s amazing what one can learn about other people’s lives, other people’s experiences, other people’s assumptions and biases, and other people’s cultures with this approach. And it is amazing how often that new understanding will modify one’s own views.

Discipline produces freedom, nearly always. And this act of attention does exactly that. It restores respect where derision had moved in and begun to rot the premises. It liberates.

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.

It worked. Nick said that the biggest change was immediate: there was less fear in the room. The promise of no interruption does exactly that: it defuses the fear. In its place, gradually, is safety. And from safety grows better thinking and clearer conveying of thought and feeling. And from that grows understanding, and from that the threat of polarization shrinks.

Each person had five minutes.

There was fervour this time; people’s emotional connection to their views was deeply personal. And at a few points I sensed they were holding on for dear life to the promise not to interrupt. In those moments the promise seemed to be the only thing between them and disintegration of the person’s turn and the whole group’s integrity. For me these moments are reassuring, not alarming. The promise is rugged and soon reinstates the ingredients of attention and interest.

And because the promise in that way holds back the touchpaper of adrenaline and cortisol, the grounding of serotonin and oxytocin gradually increase, and those near-death moments subside. The speaker keeps thinking, and the others start again to understand, and even to learn.

From there people can risk factoring in to their view a few bits of the other’s view, knowing somewhere without words that their own identity is safe and sometimes even that their own identity can branch out a bit, consider this or that additional perspective, develop a new does-this-fit nuance. The fear of losing who we are at our core no longer calls the shots. Our freed minds do.

I am not like you. I am just like you.

How can both be true at once? They just can. They just are. Life is like that: maddeningly and mercifully paradoxical. In fact, nested inside this paradox is another one: we are the same, but difference is all there is. We are different inside our sameness. The strong and deadly pull, though, is to think we see difference in our humanity when all we are seeing is difference in our experience. When we give in to this societal pull to dehumanize, we pull away from each other, judging, condemning, ostracizing. This we can stop.

Instead of describing ourselves in nouns or adjectives – ‘I am a liberal’, ‘I am a conservative’ – we would use verbs to say what we mean: ‘I want a smaller pay gap between the top and the bottom’ or ‘I want small government’.

Posts are not real connections. They are airings. They can be delightful, and they keep each other in mind; but they do not allow us truly to be present. And so they do not allow us to think with each other.

And so it is entirely predictable that on digital-posting platforms, including the single-dimension email platform, people say things they just would not say if they had to witness or hear the effects on the recipient of their words as they deliver them.

Of course, we say horrible things to each other in person. But there is an instant feedback loop that tells us to stop. If we defy it, we witness the painful result instantly. We know we are doing damage. And that picture of pain usually pulls us back, and eventually stops us. We see the human being we are assaulting. We see the blood we are spilling. And that does something to us.

There is nothing real about ‘likes’. It is not meaningful respect or admiration, nor is the absence of ‘likes’ meaningful disrespect or exclusion. It is platform numbness caused by platform nonconnection. And yet we live it as real. And we defend it.

Crucial in all of this is that it is not just the posts and pictures that go viral. It is, long term more devastatingly, the interruption of our independent thinking that goes viral. Interruption online is becoming the lived culture. It is so lived, in fact, that not only is it unquestioned, it is unseen.

But fifteen minutes a day of a ‘thinking pair’ will. Guaranteed.

Fifteen minutes every day. Three minutes to say hello and get settled. Five minutes to think. Five minutes to listen. Two minutes to appreciate a quality in each other and say goodbye. Done.

When the practical or emotional investment in the outcome of a thinking pair is potentially high, the chances of its working are potentially low. And with independent thinking you just never know what territory it will wander aimfully into. So I would look somewhere more lateral for this partner.

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?

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.

The point of the five minutes is to keep the thinker going for themselves. Not to turn their self into yourself. Nothing prepares us for this challenge. If the thinker does not need your brilliant insights to keep them going, what do they need?

They need a catalyst. That need can be met with a question. But not the one you might think.

And this is the best way I know of to check. Ask the question that will generate more independent waves. I know of only one that does it magnificently:

What more do you think?

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?

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.

Appreciation. But not as we usually understand it. Appreciation at the end of a thinking pair is not a thank-you-for-your-service thing. It is far bigger than that. It is a recognition of a quality in a person. Now I know you were probably told not to do this. We all were, one way or another. We might get a ‘big head’. (What is that?) Or become ‘too big for our boots’. (Boots?) Or grow conceited. That stuff sticks. So we need to replace it with a better take on reality.

Also, the best appreciation is about a quality in the person that is not based on the content of the person’s thinking turn. It needs to be a quality you’ve noticed in them generally.

And it needs to be free of any mention of the dynamics of the session like: ‘Your listening so well made such a huge difference to me,’ or ‘Your thinking was marvellous.’ Appreciations like that can register subtly as assessments. They can weaken the safety for the next time.

I agree with Carl Rogers who asserted that the human baby arrives complete with unconditional self-regard and expects to find that as the culture of their life. Children have to be cudgelled into giving up this expectation. We grow unwillingly into adults who disdain and withhold appreciation. Fortunately, thinking pairs can restore both our experience of it and our expertise at it. And before we know it, we live it.

We’ve seen a lot, and we continue to watch, to notice, to see more. What we call a ‘thinking session’ is not a methodology because it is never finished. If it is anything, it is a kind of life form. Nature is too complex for us to penetrate fully or entirely accurately. So we cannot complete it. We can only keep our eyes open.

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.

Interest or Curiosity?

This may not seem important. But the more I think about it, the more salience I think it has. You often hear that to listen well we have to be curious. I disagree. I think we need to be curious in all sorts of ways in life. Curiosity is vital to human progress. But when we are listening to ignite people’s thinking, we need to lay aside curiosity and replace it with interest. They are fascinatingly different things. Curiosity is subtly self-focused. Interest is subtly other-focused. So as we listen, curiosity can be curtailing. Interest is freeing.

The key block to thinking is an untrue assumption, lived as true.

The key block to thinking is an untrue assumption, lived as true.

The key liberator of thinking is a true liberating assumption.

An assumption is often the answer to why we do or feel something.

The criteria for assessing the truth or untruth of an assumption are:

Information (is the assumption factually provable?)

Logic (is the assumption logically provable?)

Assumptions have their most severe impact as the key blocks to human thinking. Untrue assumptions lived as true are what block us nearly always. And so we can bypass the usual question about blocks (‘What is stopping you?’) and head right for the key block by asking:

What might you be assuming that is stopping you?

And not only that, the untrue one actually has a relationship with the true one. It causes the true one to stop us. So it is not just some random untrue assumption hiding in the true one. It is an untrue one that causes the true one to stop us.

Knowing those two things: 1) that there is an untrue assumption hiding inside the true one, and 2) that the untrue one causes the true one to stop us, we can work out what the question is that will reveal it. The question will have to contain this causal relationship between the untrue assumption and the true one. So the question is likely to be this:

It is true that some people might think you are not as dynamic as you were. What are you assuming that causes that to stop you from becoming a relaxed person?

If you knew’, is hypothetical. So the question has to start that way. And ‘how would you’ is hypothetical. So the question has to end that way. And in the middle has to be the truth: the true liberating assumption. It is not hypothetical.