"I know, I know"

It's dinner and your partner is telling you about the car park. They got back to the car and there was a note on the windscreen, and they started to say what the note said, and you said, "Was it that woman from number twelve again? I told you she'd", and your partner stopped, and looked at their plate, and said, "No. Anyway." And the story ended there, and you never found out what the note said, and you didn't notice that you hadn't.

At the Tuesday meeting, Priya is presenting the figures for the north region and gets to the part where the numbers dip, and you know why the numbers dip, and you say it. She waits. Then she says, "As I was saying," and carries on, a little flatter than before, and everyone in the room registers something that nobody names. At lunch, a friend rings, and they're telling you about their mother, and you say, "Oh, my mum did exactly that, she", and there's a pause on the line, and then they say, "Right. Yeah." Later you'll think the call was a good one, because you talked for twenty minutes. They'll remember that they didn't get to say the thing about their mother.

These are invented, but I'd guess you recognised at least one. Notice what they have in common. In each case you were listening. You weren't bored or distracted. You were following closely enough to guess where the sentence was going, and the guess arrived before the sentence did, and out it came. You'd say you were engaged, and you were. It's just that the other person didn't get to the end.

Some words, so we can talk about this plainly. I'll call the moment of coming in before the other person has finished the jump. The end of their turn, the point where they'd have stopped if you'd let them, is the finish. The part of their sentence that the jump cuts off, I'll call the tail. The thing you thought they were about to say is the guess. When you both talk at once, that's the overlap. The thing you're waiting to say while they talk is the held thought. What you do when you catch yourself mid-jump and give the turn back, I'll call the hand-back. And the small pause after the finish before you speak is the half-second, which is roughly what it should be and roughly what most people leave.

Before you read on, do one thing. Tomorrow, keep a tally. Every time your voice starts while someone else's is still going, make a mark. If you can manage it, make a second mark when your guess about what they were going to say turned out to be right, meaning they got to say it, or said it after you'd stopped, and it was what you'd thought. Don't change anything yet. Most people who do this find the first column longer than they expected. The second column is the interesting one, and I'll come back to it in chapter 4.