I have an almost-impossible time not interrupting people when they’re going on a long spiel but I can already see a mile away what their final line, the real meat of the message, is.
This is especially the case with my father, who often takes 3-5 minutes to say what could be said in twenty seconds. It’s almost impossible for me to endure the 3-5 minutes waiting for the final conclusion/main point/punchline/moral when it’s already readily apparent a mile away, in the first few seconds. He’ll repeat an old tale or story as if he’s telling it for the first time when in fact it’s been multiple times, or give far more information than is necessary to prove a point, along with two or three detours from the main path, before eventually arriving at the Destination.
Not just my father, but some elders at church, or elder relatives, too.
I know it’s highly rude for me to interrupt, so I’d like to fix myself. I’ve read that interrupting people is a symptom of possible ADHD, too. But I don’t know how, other than developing a steel will of internal self-control. I also wonder if there is a polite way to get other people to condense their speech down and deliver a 1-minute message in 1 minute rather than 6 minutes.
If they are telling a story, they are telling a story, not imparting information. Do you skip to the end of a detective novel because the only thing that you want to know is who did it?
In the case of oft told stories, often from older people, I sometimes will “push” them along by telling the next line of the story.
But, if it’s something you haven’t heard before, what you think you see coming a mile away may not be correct. You may be interrupting them so you never do get their final line, the real meat of their message.
The trick is to listen to what they have to say, they are putting out the effort of telling you, the least you can do is to listen. If you don’t care, or have heard this before, then think about something else while smiling and nodding.
What you shouldn’t be doing is thinking about what you want to say next, because then you are going to interrupt them, often times with something tangential or even orthogonal to what they were saying.
I can be a slow talker because I choose my words carefully. Most of the time, my spouse listens patiently. But, she can also get impatient and interrupt to finish my thought. I think about a quarter of the time, what she jumps in and fills in for me is very much not where I was going.
I also can be impatient in the way you describe. It really bothers me that I think of someone talking to me as wasting my time. I’m trying to change my attitude toward that so I can focus on enjoying the interaction, the connection with the other person, and not focus on getting to some point or end.
I very much enjoyed, and learned a lot from, the book We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations that Matter by Celeste Headlee. I listened to it as an audiobook, which I think is fitting. Learning to be present, and not have an agenda while listening can be extremely challenging.
My wife can be a slow talker at times (meaning, carefully and deliberately choosing her words) and is one of those people who can take fifteen minutes to tell a three minute story because of all the tangents, asides, and unnecessary detail she throws in. I try not to blurt out “Get to the point!” and have often wondered if it’s a problem with her not knowing how to relate a story, or a problem with me being too impatient to sit there and listen to the whole thing. Maybe it’s a little of both? Anyway, I can sympathize with the OP but don’t really have anything to offer. But I hope to learn something from reading this thread!
I think I have a more finely calibrated sense of what details a listener does and does not want to hear. Maybe it’s a benefit of social anxiety that I worry about putting people off with excessive detail.
The ADHD of it is that long-winded people are hard to follow.
My wife doesn’t really talk slowly, but she frequently stops in the middle of a sentence and restarts, to rephrase it in a way that makes no difference to the meaning. She may do this several times in the same sentence. She will also interrupt a sentence to go off on a tangent or two or three, and then may or may not return to the main point. It’s irritating sometimes, but I don’t think people can change how they talk. It’s part of her personality, and I accept all of her.
From the other side, my one friend taught me to just stop talking. Whenever someone interrupts me, I go on the assumption that whatever they have to say must seem to be more important than what I am saying, so I just drop it completely.
Except when telling a story is their way of imparting information. My SO sometimes does this: instead of just telling me something succinctly, like “I was going to buy cat food but I forgot,” she’ll tell the story of her day which includes the account of how and why she forgot to buy the cat food. Only she’ll bury the lede, so I’ll be wondering what her point is and why she’s telling me that story.
I find her hard to listen to sometimes, for reasons that are partly her fault and partly mine. She will often talk slowly, with long pauses between words, whereas I find it easier to follow and pay attention to someone who’s talking quickly and fluidly. (I typically listen to audiobooks, podcasts, etc. at around 2.0x speed.) She, with her ADHD-ish brain, will sometimes abandon a sentence in the middle and start a different thought; and she will, as I said, sometimes take quite awhile to come to the point and let me know what it is she’s trying to tell me and why.
I am often tempted to tell her to hurry up and get to the point, but I resist this temptation, because (1) I love her and don’t want to make her feel bad about herself, (2) I don’t think it would help—it’s not as though she consciously chooses to communicate this way and could easily do otherwise, and (3) I have my own, completely different, issues with talking: I can be slow to speak because it takes me a long time to figure out what I want to say and how to say it, and I worry perhaps too much about whether what I’m saying is something my hearer would need or want to know.
With your father, at least, it can be pretty easy. Just keep in mind that before you know it he is going to be dead and gone for twenty years and you would trade almost anything to hear one of his rambling stories again, but you never will.
I sometimes have this problem. I came to understand the conversation is not just about being right or getting your points across, but also about being respectful and trying to find a degree of consensus - if only in part or in principle. But interrupting can be perfectly valid in some cases.
I really hate that argument. And for many, it isn’t true. Even if they love their parents dearly, they would not trade “almost anything” to re-experience said parent’s most annoying (to them) traits.
There is an art to listening that has helped me work on interrupting and taking over the conversation for various reasons. One is active listening, where you repeat back what you heard, but in your own words. This can sometimes jog the speaker’s memory and they remember what they wanted to tell you. Another is passive listening, where you pay full attention to the speaker, but say nothing. This one is hard because we are so used to listening to respond, rather than just listening to the other person. Passive listening may not be the best tactic when you are listening to someone who is long-winded, though. But with both active and passive listening, you can learn things about the other person that you didn’t know about and that they aren’t aware that they are revealing. I am learning to be more concise in my speaking, but it is also hard to filter out what I think is vital information.
