"I'm just excited"

This is the belief I most want to be gentle with, because it's the truest of them. You jump because something in you leapt. The story reminded you, or you saw the answer, and the excitement went straight to your mouth.

The trouble is that excitement doesn't arrive at the other end as excitement. It arrives as an interruption, and interruptions are read in a particular way.

Jeff Youngquist, in 2009, had people listen to recorded dialogues into which six intrusive interruptions had been placed, and after each pair of interruptions asked them to rate the interrupter. As the interruptions accumulated, the interrupter was seen as more and more dominant. The word the study used was interpersonal dominance, which means roughly what you'd think, a person who takes control of the exchange. There were some findings about which gender combinations were rated most dominant, and I'm leaving those out, because the point for this chapter is simpler. Listeners hearing someone interrupt didn't hear excitement. They heard someone taking over.

That's the mismatch. Inside, you feel keen. Outside, they experience being overrun. And it's a mismatch that doesn't correct itself, because you never see the outside. You see your own enthusiasm, and you see the other person go quiet or say "anyway", and you read the quiet as the story having been finished, when it was the story having been taken.

It's worth knowing what keenness looks like from outside when it's delivered at the finish, because it's not muted. It's the same energy, the same leaning forward, the same "oh, that's exactly", and it lands as what it is, because the other person has reached the end and has room for it. Youngquist's listeners weren't rating enthusiasm as dominance. They were rating interruptions as dominance. Move the enthusiasm one second later and it stops being an interruption, and the rating changes with it.

I'm not asking you to be less excited. I'm asking you to notice that the excitement isn't what arrives. If you want it to arrive, it has to be delivered after the finish, when it's a reply and not a seizure of the turn. "Oh, I love that, that's exactly what happened to us" at the finish is excitement received. The same words two seconds earlier are an interruption, and Youngquist's listeners tell you what they'll be taken for.