How does impatience affect listening?

• A. Fosters empathy
• B. Speeds up comprehension and accuracy
• C. Improves recall
• D. Causes you to hear what you want, not what's said

Answer: (D)

Impatience in listening shifts your focus to what you want to hear rather than what is actually said. When you’re rushed, you start filling in gaps with your own assumptions and expectations, and you tune out details that don’t fit your agenda. That bias makes you interpret the speaker’s message through your own perspective, so you end up hearing “your version” of the message rather than the speaker’s words. Listening well requires taking time to process content, tone, and nuance and to encode the actual information into memory. Impatience undermines this, reducing understanding and increasing the chance of misinterpretation, which is why it doesn’t foster empathy, speed up comprehension, or improve recall.