Mindfulness when we communicate

There's a bad habit I've been thinking about a lot lately, and that's anticipating what people are going to say, you know, when someone forgets a word and we start throwing out options for what they might mean. That bad habit of not letting people take a few seconds to remember a word or organize their thoughts.

In my case, I noticed how I started doing it often when I began playing videos, audios, and other media at double speed. It seems silly, but I felt that at normal speed everything was slow, so when a person paused normally, I unconsciously began to interrupt to "speed up" the conversation. But on the other hand, and at the same time, there was the fact of speaking without really being present, without thinking carefully about what I was going to say.

Mindfulness when talking to others is something I learned as a child as part of the rules of good speaking and good listening, where we were taught what is required to listen and what is required to speak. And while this is one of the first things we are taught, life, its speed, and stress make us forget something so basic that used to come naturally.

Being aware of this, I did several things, starting with not changing the playback speed of a video or audio, so as not to distort in my mind the way the normal world should be heard. And now I consciously strive to listen, pay attention, and let the person organize their ideas or remember what they need to remember without pressure, because forgetting many things is now also part of our normality.

At the same time, I had to learn not to think that people are getting frustrated when they hear me speak, because, for example, it happens to me a lot that I constantly forget a word I'm going to say or get distracted by a small sound or whatever and lose track of what I was saying, and I need a little time to get back to the idea of what I was saying, and immediately I am interrupted by a list of possible words I was going to use, and they even finish everything I was going to say by process of elimination.

This used to make me feel bad, because I thought people were bored when I talked to them, but being a little more aware and seeing them from my own experience, I understood that today everything goes very fast and paying attention to what we think and then what we say takes time, and that time doesn't allow us to speak so quickly. At least not me, because I speak slowly and think about what I'm going to say.

So I'm trying very hard to apply mindfulness when listening and also when speaking, because for me this is a sign of sincere interest, when listening because we allow the person to express themselves and when speaking because I am careful not to say anything that might hurt them in any way. For me, it's a way of exercising the mind correctly and ensuring that interactions with others are not affected.