Comment by westoncb
3 years ago
Ironically it sounds like you didn't actually read my comment at all, but if you wouldn't mind providing a little more detail on how you derived your stance from what I said I'd be happy to take a listen.
3 years ago
Ironically it sounds like you didn't actually read my comment at all, but if you wouldn't mind providing a little more detail on how you derived your stance from what I said I'd be happy to take a listen.
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.
I think what the commenter is referring to is this:
" I often get so bored it's hard to pay attention because either 1) they left something out that I wanted to ask about so I can't follow what they are saying, or 2) I already had a thorough understanding of something they insist on giving a long explanation of. "
This leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, of arrogance.
To me this sounds like a bad listener: short attention span, short memory: ergo, judging the other speaker as using an "inferior" mode of communication. There's a judgement built from a prejudice which is incurred by personal shortcomings. Fix the shortcomings (by practice) and the judgement goes away (potentially, because I'm not a mind reader).
Your other comments have made it very clear that your assertion of a superior mode of communication relies on context, but that assessment doesn't jive with this paragraph. Hence, it is indeed a "doozy".
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Even if it were true that instant/counter were the most efficient way to communicate, being unable to listen to the interrupt averse would still make you a poor listener.
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