Listening is generosity because attention cannot be given twice at the same moment.

Attention is genuinely finite, and giving it to someone means it is not somewhere else during that time. That is what makes real listening a gift rather than a technique: you are spending something that cannot be recovered or duplicated, and everyone can tell the difference between attention and its appearance.

Give one conversation this week your full attention with nothing else running. No phone, no partial focus, no composing. It is a short and demanding thing to do. The effect on the other person is usually out of all proportion to the effort, because so few interactions contain it.