Someone's telling you about a hard week, and you can feel it happening in real time, your own mind already assembling a related story about your own hard week, polishing it, waiting for the exact millisecond of a pause to slide it into the conversation. You tell yourself you're relating, building connection through shared experience. A more honest look might suggest you were never actually listening to theirs at all.
There's a Real, Measurable Difference Between Relating and Redirecting
Here's the hard truth: sociologists have a specific term for this pattern, conversational narcissism, the habitual redirection of a conversation's focus back toward yourself, often through what looks, on the surface, like genuine relating. "That reminds me of when I..." can be a beautiful bridge toward deeper mutual connection, or it can be a hijacking, depending entirely on what happens next. Does the conversation actually return to the original speaker's experience, enriched by the shared connection? Or does it simply stay redirected toward you, with the original speaker quietly relegated to the role of audience for a story that used to be theirs?
This distinction is subtle enough that most people who do this regularly have genuinely no idea they're doing it, which is precisely what makes it worth examining honestly rather than assuming it's someone else's problem to worry about.
Picture It Like a Relay Race Where One Runner Never Hands Off the Baton
A healthy conversation functions like a relay race, the baton, attention and narrative focus, passing back and forth between speakers, each person getting a genuine turn to run with it. Conversational narcissism looks like a relay race where one runner takes the baton and simply keeps running, lap after lap, occasionally gesturing toward the other runner without ever actually handing it back. The other runner is still on the track, technically present, but they've stopped actually running the race a while ago, resigned instead to standing on the sidelines of what's become a solo performance.
Signs You Might Be Waiting to Speak Rather Than Listening
- You're mentally composing your response while the other person is still talking.
- Your follow-up questions tend to lead conversations back toward topics related to your own experience.
- You struggle to accurately recall specific details from what someone just told you, moments later.
Pause and Reflect: Take ten seconds and think back to your last conversation. Can you recall three specific details the other person shared, without connecting any of them back to your own experience first?
Why This Pattern Is So Easy to Miss in Yourself
Here's a micro-insight worth sitting with. Conversational narcissism rarely feels, from the inside, like self-centeredness. It usually feels like genuine enthusiasm, real eagerness to connect and share something relevant. The redirect feels generous in the moment it's happening, an offering rather than a hijacking. This is exactly why the pattern is so persistent and so hard to self-diagnose without deliberate, honest attention, since the felt experience and the actual impact on the other person can diverge so significantly without any obvious internal signal alerting you to the gap.
I worked with a man whose wife described feeling perpetually unheard in their marriage, despite his genuine, sincere belief that he was an engaged, attentive partner. When we recorded and reviewed an ordinary conversation between them, the pattern became undeniable: nearly every time she shared something, he responded within seconds with a related story about himself, and the conversation reliably stayed there, on his experience, for the remainder of the exchange. He was genuinely shocked watching it back, since none of it had felt, in the moment, like anything other than normal, engaged conversation.
Why Certain Personalities Fall Into This More Easily
If you're higher in Extroversion, your natural enthusiasm for sharing and verbal processing can make this pattern especially easy to fall into, since the impulse to relate through your own story arrives quickly and with real energy behind it.
If you're higher in Openness, you may find genuine intellectual excitement in connecting someone else's experience to broader patterns or your own related experiences, which can unintentionally shift focus away from the original speaker's specific, individual need to simply be heard on their own terms.
Practicing the Handoff
The fix here isn't eliminating your own contributions to conversation entirely, which would create a different imbalance. It's building the habit of actually completing the handoff, returning the baton clearly before deciding whether or when to take your own turn.
A Simple Practice Worth Building
- Before sharing a related story, ask one genuine follow-up question about what the other person just said.
- Notice the specific urge to relate, and consciously delay acting on it by a few seconds.
- After sharing your own related experience, explicitly return focus: "but I want to hear more about what happened with you."
Let's be honest, this takes real, sustained attention to build, especially if the pattern has been running unnoticed for years, reinforced by genuinely positive intentions the entire time. Recognizing it isn't an indictment of your character. It's simply useful information about a habit worth adjusting.
What Changed After Watching the Recording
The husband from that recorded conversation described the experience of watching himself back as genuinely humbling in a way no amount of his wife simply telling him about the pattern had ever managed to be. Hearing about a habit and watching yourself perform it, in real time, with someone you love visibly deflating slightly each time the redirect happened, are two very different kinds of evidence, and only one of them actually changed his behavior afterward.
He started using a small, private practice following that session: after his wife finished sharing something, he'd silently count to three before responding, specifically to interrupt the automatic reflex of jumping in with his own related story. He told me the pause felt agonizingly long at first, almost unnatural. Within a few weeks, it had become simply how he listened, and his wife, without any further conversation about it, started sharing more, and sharing more easily, once she trusted the baton would actually stay with her long enough to finish the lap. He told me the count-to-three habit eventually stopped feeling like a technique and simply became how he listened, which is usually the sign that a deliberate practice has finally become a genuine, lasting trait rather than something he has to consciously remember to perform in every single conversation he has. His wife later told him, half-joking, that she could tell exactly when the shift had become permanent, because she'd stopped noticing him listening differently and simply started noticing that she felt heard, which she said was a far more meaningful measure of progress than any technique he could have described to her directly, and a far more convincing proof of real change than an apology or a promise ever could have been on their own.
Understanding your own natural conversational style and where your attention tends to drift can help you become the genuinely attentive listener you likely already believe yourself to be. The MyTraitsLab Personality Test can help you see that pattern clearly in your own wiring.
