What it is
When you badly want to be heard, the temptation is to flood: say everything you've been collecting, all at once, fast, so that surely some of it lands. From the inside it feels like finally saying the thing. From the outside it's an ocean delivered to someone who asked for a glass of water. This practice is the opposite move: deliberately leaving space in conversations, with real questions, actual pauses, and room for the other person to take things somewhere you hadn't planned.
Why it matters
Flooding solves the immediate, measurable problem, the feeling of not being heard, and creates a slower, unmeasurable one. The friend stops asking follow-up questions. The colleague learns to nod and wait. The conversation never deepens because there's no room for it to. None of that shows up as a single event; the relationship is just drier than it used to be and nobody can say when it happened. The repair works the same way ecosystems recover: not in one big move, but in small returns of what got crowded out. One real question. One pause you don't fill. It's slow and unglamorous, and it's the only thing that works.
What to practice
- Notice the urge to say everything at once; that urge is the signal to slow down
- Ask one real question before adding your next point, and wait for the whole answer
- Sometimes people don't want solutions; they want someone to sit with them in it
- After you share something, stop; resist the second and third examples
- Watch for the follow-up questions returning: that's the relationship rehydrating
Go deeper
- Blog: Managing The Flood
- Blog: People Want to Be Heard
- Social Product: Questions For Humans