Talk Less at the Gate

There’s an old piece of advice you’ll hear around just about any set of pens: the louder you get at the gate, the longer you’ll be standing there.

Anybody who’s tried to push cattle through an opening knows how it goes. The first cow walks up, sees the gap, and stops. Something about it doesn’t sit right with her — a shadow on the ground, a coat hung on the fence, a dog where a dog shouldn’t be. And that’s the moment most of us want to start hollering. Wave the hat. Slap the chaps. Crowd in close and make some noise.

And every time, it gets worse. She turns back into the bunch, the bunch turns with her, and now you’ve got forty head milling in a circle and a gate standing wide open with nothing going through it.

The hands who are good at this do almost the opposite. They slow down. They go quiet. They back off a step and watch what the lead cow is watching, so they can figure out what spooked her. They give her a minute to look the gate over and decide for herself it’s safe. More often than not she walks on through, and the rest follow her like they’d planned it all along.

Cattle go through a gate quiet or they don’t go through at all.

Swift to hear

We’ve been sitting with a verse from the book of James this week. It’s a short one, and it might be the most practical sentence in the whole letter:

“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” — James 1:19

Swift to hear. Slow to speak. Slow to wrath. Three things, in that order. What strikes us is that he doesn’t say never speak, or never get angry. He just puts listening first and asks the other two to wait their turn.

We’ll admit that order runs backwards for us most days. Somebody starts telling us about a problem, and before they’re halfway through we’ve already got the fix loaded and ready. Somebody pushes back on us, and we’re working on our answer instead of hearing what they actually said. It’s the same mistake as hollering at the gate. We get loud right at the moment things need to get quiet, and then we wonder why nobody moves.

People aren’t cattle, and we don’t mean to say they are. But a lot of folks walk up to a hard conversation the same way that lead cow walks up to the gate. They’re a little unsure. Something’s bothering them that they haven’t said yet. If the first thing they get from us is noise — advice, correction, a quick comeback — they turn right around and go back into the bunch. If what they get is a little room and somebody actually listening, a lot of the time they’ll walk on through and tell you what’s really going on.

What we’re learning

We’re pretty new at trying to live this stuff out, and this verse has caught us more than once already this week. At the supper table. On the phone with a customer who had every right to be frustrated. With a kid who wanted to explain something long before we wanted to hear it.

The pattern we keep noticing is that slow to wrath mostly takes care of itself once we get swift to hear right. It’s hard to stay mad at somebody once you understand what was really bothering them. Most of the anger we’ve carried around came from the conversations we only half listened to.

The small try for the week

Here’s the one we’re trying, if you want to try it with us. Pick one conversation a day — just one — and treat it like a gate.

Let the other person finish. All the way finish. Then, before you answer, ask one more question. “What else?” works. So does “What’s the hardest part of that?” Then wait, and let the quiet sit there a beat longer than feels comfortable. Watch what they’re watching. Most of the time, what they say next is the thing they came to say in the first place.

No speeches. No fixes until they’re asked for. Just a little less noise at the gate.

If faith is part of your life, James put this one near the top of his letter for a reason, and it’s worth carrying into Monday. If it isn’t, the idea still holds up out in the pens and around the kitchen table: folks go where they feel safe to go, and quiet gets them there faster than loud ever will.

We’re working on this one right alongside you — and if we’re being truthful, we’re still the ones waving the hat more often than we’d like.

Pew, porch, or tailgate — wherever you’re reading this Sunday, thanks for riding along. Same time next week.

— The Sackett Ranch Family