Don't Talk At People

5 strategies to make others feel heard rather than handled

I’m sure you know the feeling of stepping away from a conversation where the other person was standing in front of you and saying words, but it still didn’t quite register as two-way communication.

In those cases, it’s possible that you were talked at.

Most people have been on the receiving end of this, but far fewer notice when they’re doing it themselves. This piece is about both sides: what “talking at” looks like in practice, why it’s so common among otherwise strong (and well-intentioned) communicators and what it takes to build exchanges where meaning is genuinely shared.

We misunderstand each other all the time

Misunderstanding in conversation is a structural feature of how language works, and one we tend to wildly underestimate or at least overlook.

First of all, communication is not the transfer of a thought from one head to another, because that is simply impossible. When you say something, you produce a set of words whose meaning is shaped by context, relationship, shared history and more, far beyond the literal content.

“Can I have a word?” never means “I would like one word from you.” The same five words can be a friendly aside, a request for your input or a summons that makes your stomach drop, depending entirely on who’s saying it and the tone. This kind of misunderstanding is especially common when using expressions just like this one, where the meaning is not literal and people who simply grew up in different places cannot reliably infer it.

Then there’s the problem of common ground, which we tend to assume far more of than actually exists. We routinely treat our own knowledge and assumptions as shared when they aren’t. The nod you get from your colleague doesn’t mean that they have interpreted your words in the same way as you intended. More often than not, it just means they’re tracking the conversation, which is quite a different thing.

Conversation also has a power economy. Who gets to finish a thought without being redirected? Who gets interrupted, who gets summarised? I am confident that a vast majority of readers have stopped talking in a given context or group because their contributions were too often abbreviated or steered back towards someone else’s framing.

In short, talking at people is what happens when one person tries to make their meaning certain rather than aiming for mutual understanding.

Sharing your opinion should not feel like this.

Some patterns you should learn to recognise

The trickiest thing is that talking at people doesn’t feel that way from the inside. It tends to feel like efficiency or helpfulness. Or maybe like being especially good at moving things forward.

Here are some patterns worth recognising in yourself.

⛔️ Pre-loaded conclusions. You open a conversation by presenting the outcome you have already reached, inviting the other person into a conversation that is, functionally, already over. The structure looks collaborative, because you’re asking, after all, but the content and tone have already determined where this is going. The other person can agree, defend a contrary position or correct a factual detail. The first of these things is often unhelpful, whereas the others are uncomfortable (which means people are less likely to do them).

🏁 Questions with built-in assumptions. “Don’t you think the timeline is the real issue here?” is technically a question, but it has loaded the frame, picked a culprit and positioned disagreement as difficult. Whoever answers has to do extra work just to reopen what should have been the starting point.

🚗 Topic steering. This is the quick pivot after someone says something that doesn’t fit where you wanted the conversation to go: things like selective hearing, parking something until later and never returning or redirecting to your preferred frame. These moves are easy to miss when you are in front of an expert speaker. But the pattern is harder to ignore once you’ve seen it, especially as some particularly manipulative people do this all the time.

✂️ Premature summarisation. This is probably the most common and the most well-intentioned pattern. You’re trying to show you have understood and to give the other person a sense of being heard. But the difference between “So what you’re saying is X” as a landing point and “So what I’m hearing is X, is that right?” is huge. Also keep in mind that people who get cut off too often will just stop contributing, so I would argue that this behaviour is especially harmful when you’re trying to invite new voices in a conversation.

Let us also spend a minute on the idea of “active listening,” because its use in corporate training has turned an otherwise helpful concept into something rather problematic. The nodding, the paraphrasing and the “I hear you” have been trained into so many professional development programmes that they have stopped doing much work. Many professionals have learned to signal listening rather than do it. But a fluent reflection delivered in a warm tone is really unconvincing if what you are saying doesn’t match what they other person shared. Or when your next sentence in the exchange makes it obvious that nothing has gone in.

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Language and words matter more than we think

When people talk about “professional communication,” they tend to describe it as if it were simply clear, correct and neutral, a standard any competent adult can meet if they bother to. But professional language is not neutral. It was shaped by particular groups and their norms, and people who were socialised into that register from an early age tend to be heard as more credible and authoritative, regardless of what they’re actually saying.

Code-switching is the adjustment some people make to be taken seriously in that environment. They modify vocabulary, sentence structure, formality, accent and the degree of emotion they allow themselves to show. This takes real cognitive effort and makes it feel impossible to improvise and contribute naturally to a conversation.

So if you assume everyone starts talking with the same ease of expression, you will misread people. You might read a pause as uncertainty; careful phrasing as evasiveness; or a less polished register as a proxy for weaker ideas. But what you’re actually witnessing is someone do extra translation work in real time.

Genuine listening, then, includes creating enough room for meaning to emerge without penalising the speaker for how they’ve packaged it. And clarity is something you build together, not a minimum standard someone else has to meet before you take them seriously.

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In a recent live with Claire Barrett, we explored why a well-structured, well-delivered message still lands differently depending on who delivers it and how gender shapes that gap. 👇🏼

Good Advice, Wrong Assumption

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What to do differently

The tips below need some serious practice, because they run against the grain of how most conversations are structured. But they really do work and are worth the effort!

1. Invite repair early. Create a norm within your exchanges that being corrected is welcome. Something as simple as “If I’m off here, tell me” changes the social permission structure of what happens next. Most people won’t volunteer a correction to someone who appears certain.

2. Offer a candidate understanding. Paraphrase what you’ve heard as a test rather than a conclusion. “What I’m getting from this is… is that right?” does something different from “So what you mean is…” The first positions your reading as provisional and invites adjustment; the second positions it as complete and moves on.

3. Delay solutioning on purpose. This is the hardest one in time-pressured environments. The instinct to offer a fix is a good instinct in the right moment, but if the solution arrives too quickly then the other person will feel cut off. By the way, holding the silence a little longer and asking a follow-up rather than rushing to close are some of the most effective coaching techniques, because they create space for others to figure things out themselves.

4. Ask what kind of response would be useful. Some moments need problem-solving, some need help seeing a situation more clearly and some simply need another human being to witness what’s being said without offering anything at all. Asking “Are you looking for thoughts on this, or mainly to think it through?” takes about five seconds and prevents you from delivering a careful analysis to someone who needed something else entirely.

5. Imagine what might be at stake for the other person. What feels risky in this conversation? Might they feel like they need to protect their credibility? Is there a significant power dynamic? You don’t need a precise answer, but asking yourself these questions makes you infinitely more empathetic over time.

What we’re after is a conversation that ends with both people holding a more reliable picture of reality than either had going in. That requires exchanges to evolve and flow until what each person actually means has a chance of coming through.

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