Comment by Godel_unicode

I have a good friend I speak with many hours a week who makes an especially interesting case for our discussion here. He is the person I know who most strongly alternates between both of these styles: when he's in a good mood, relaxed, and so on we have these great fast-paced conversations with pure information flow, frequent interrupts (and counter-interrupts and interrupt-denies). But, there are other times where we'll hang out and he's in an insistent no-interrupt mode; when this happens I spend significant lengths of time listening to him tell me about things that I know thoroughly, or waiting several minutes for him to finish speaking about something I can't follow because I needed to clarify something that was said earlier.

Because I respect this person, I still take the time and listen to what he is saying because I know he's just not in a great mood or might be feeling down about himself and so on, and wants more to be listened to than to really communicate something specific. What I was describing is quite literal: it is difficult to continue paying attention to information that you are already fully aware of, or which can't be made sense of without some pre-req info.

I am confident that I am not a poor listener, but I am also intimately familiar with the inefficiencies of interrupt-averseness.