Listening Should Not Turn Another Person’s Story Into Your Own

A conversational opinion on sharing a relevant experience without taking over the encounter in which someone else came to be heard.

A connection can become a change of subject

A person begins describing something that happened to them. You recognise a familiar situation and remember an experience of your own. Sharing it could offer connection. It could also quietly move the encounter until the original speaker is listening to you and their unfinished account has disappeared. The distinction depends on what the contribution does to the conversation.

This essay is a practical ethical opinion, not a claim about a universal style of communication. Its argument is that a relevant personal story should remain accountable to the purpose for which it was introduced. Recognition is an invitation to understand more, not automatic ownership of the subject.

Find out what kind of encounter is being requested

Someone may want advice, a witness to an experience, help deciding what to do or simply an opportunity to describe a day. You do not need to classify the exchange perfectly before responding. A small question can clarify whether your own example would be welcome and what role it might play.

Consider a hypothetical colleague describing a difficult presentation. They may want to examine a particular decision in the preparation. A long account of your worst presentation could bypass that question while sounding closely related. Asking what they most want to think through gives your experience a possible purpose. Without that connection, similarity of topic can conceal a substantial change in who is being helped.

Use the smallest example that does the work

A personal experience can be offered briefly enough that the other person can accept it, question it or return to their own account. You need not tell the full history merely because the opening detail is relevant. The useful unit is the part that helps the current conversation, not the entire story you have been waiting to tell.

For the hypothetical presentation discussion, you might describe one preparation choice that proved useful to you and ask whether it bears on the colleague’s situation. That leaves room for a difference. Their constraints may not resemble yours. A limited example offers something to consider without requiring them to recognise your whole experience before they can continue describing their own.

Do not make similarity a claim of complete understanding

You may know a comparable event without knowing what this event meant to this person. The words “something similar happened to me” leave more room than declaring that you know exactly how they feel. The latter can close the very question the conversation was beginning to explore.

A respectful exchange allows the speaker to identify what is different. Perhaps the practical facts resemble your experience while the relationship, timing or available choices do not. Those differences are not obstacles to connection. They are part of what you came to understand. Your story becomes more useful when it can be corrected for relevance, rather than defended as a complete explanation of someone else’s situation.

Notice when reassurance asks the speaker to disappear

You may want the person to know that an awkward or difficult experience does not make them uniquely flawed. That intention can be kind. It should not require reducing their specific concern to a generic event that everyone has already survived. The person may be describing a consequence that still needs attention.

Before offering a reassuring comparison, ask what remains unresolved. A fictional colleague might not be worried about having made a mistake in public; they might be worried that a customer received incorrect information. Saying that everybody has bad days would answer the first concern while leaving the second untouched. Listening means allowing the actual problem to determine the response, even when a more comfortable interpretation is available.

Return the conversation explicitly

After sharing a relevant example, give the original speaker a clear way back. You can ask how their circumstances differ or return to the question they were considering. The transition should not depend on them interrupting your story forcefully enough to recover their place.

This matters particularly when your example invites further questions about you. Those questions can be welcome without becoming the only possible direction of the encounter. You can answer briefly and acknowledge that you do not want their original subject to be lost. Such a return is a simple act of conversational responsibility. You introduced material for a purpose; you help maintain that purpose after the material attracts attention of its own.

Let your experience remain incomplete evidence

A personal story can suggest a possibility. It does not establish that the same choice will work in every setting. Presenting it as one experience preserves the other person’s authority to decide what applies. You can describe what you did and what you believe mattered without claiming a rule the story cannot support.

The speaker may choose a different response after considering it. That need not be treated as rejection of your effort or disrespect for what you learned. The value of the contribution lies partly in giving them another way to think, not in securing imitation. Advice becomes less burdensome when the person receiving it is not also required to validate the adviser’s identity.

Measure the contribution by the room it leaves

An attentive conversation can contain both people’s stories. The issue is not a rigid rule about who speaks for how long. It is whether a contribution expands understanding or replaces the account it was meant to meet. A short interruption can redirect the entire encounter; a longer example can be useful when the speaker has genuinely asked for it.

Before adding your own story, identify what it offers. While telling it, remain willing to stop. Afterwards, return the question to the person whose experience opened the exchange. These modest choices allow recognition without appropriation. You can be fully present as yourself while leaving someone else enough room to finish being understood.

Gabriel Nicolaev — CyGuru

Editorial photograph for illustration.

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