Making time to hang with the girls takes hours of planning, sometimes weeks, even months. When the time comes, Hallelujah! It is on. The time to laugh at sidesplitting gags, toast over long awaited accomplishments and cry over heart-rending defeats has finally arrived. There is nothing like getting together with your girls. But how much of our “girl time” is spent enjoying the girls? How many times do we tune out tales of the latest crush to check messages, respond to the pinging of our social media notifications or pause for a selfie or two? Too many to count. Girl time quickly turns into me time with our girls as a pretty backdrop. Seriously? Surprisingly, our biggest distractions don’t come from our electronic devices. Our biggest distraction is focusing on self. It’s not that we don’t care or are not excited about girl time. It’s more about a little thing, well a big thing obviously, I call the “Shift and Drift.” We could be eagerly listening and before we know it, BOOM! Our minds shift, and we drift off into our own thoughts. No warning, no alarm, just gone.

 Have you noticed how hard it is stop your wheels from turning, even when you are engaged in a conversation with someone else? Right in the middle of your girlfriend’s gut-wrenching story, you find yourself drifting off into your own life chronicles. Happens every time. You’ve become so consumed with your own thoughts that you check out of the conversation completely. This subtle leave may last a minute, sometimes more. At any rate, you are just not there. And whether or not you believe the girls have taken notice, to them you’ve been gone for pretty much the entire conversation.

 I had a recent visit from someone very close to me. She wanted to talk, get some things out in the open and off her chest. She thought I’d be a willing participant-listener. It wasn’t until I was recounting the events of the day that I realized that I must have cut her off at least five times during her sharing. Had I become so self-absorbed that her need for girl talk didn’t matter? She wanted to talk about her feelings, her heartbreaks, her goals, her wonderings, her…life. Instead, I took the opportunity to talk about me and my personal accounts.

 Pause. Check yourself, girl! Life isn’t all about you. Sometimes you just need to be there to listen-with intent! When we are attentive and intentional in our listening, we are not attempting to solve or advise. And we most definitely are not there to relate every bit of someone else’s story to something we have going on in our personal lives. Give someone else the floor for a change. Resist the urge to insert how you just experienced the same thing last week. Making someone else’s thoughts mirror your own takes you away from their narrative and off into your own. Thus, you end up not listening at all. It’s okay to be able to relate and understand what your girls are going through. After all, this important detail is probably why you love being in their company. It is not okay; however, to demand the leading role of every gathering. Take a seat and enjoy the scenery while someone else guides the tour.