From a young age, I’ve been a storyteller. I would perform on stage with my own stories or a Dickens story. Nowadays, everyone is a storyteller in some way or form. From Twitter, to Facebook, to Instagram you are curating a narrative. Those narratives are often short form. Extremely short form. As such, when people are talking, I have found them to go the other extreme. Whether it is at a bar or a team meeting on Zoom.

Because of such changes in storytelling or narrative building, I have found that there is a need to learn to “interrupt”. There is an art to interruption.

You have to listen intently in order to find the right word that would allow for you to step in and maybe change the course of the conversation. You have to follow the story and comb through your own arsenal of stories to throw in. You have to have courage to pause the person. As well as perhaps note it’s time to move on. You have to be quick-witted. There’s much to navigate and do in a mere second or two. You also want to, at times, follow rules of etiquette to do so in a way that doesn’t cause pain or bring rudeness to the situation.

The art of interruption. There is such a thing!