Left speechless? Tips for responding better + 6 phrases to cirkle back to something

A snide remark from a friend, criticism from your boss, an off-color joke: in the moment, you’re left speechless, and the perfect comeback only hits you later. Responding straight away is something you can learn—just like circling back to it afterward in a helpful way.

Picture this. You speak with someone, but despite of carefully prepared arguments, you just cannot find the right words. But once you got home, you suddenly have the most eloquent, convincing sentences at the ready—but by then, the moment had passed.

It’s happens to all of us. You only realize what you should have said after a difficult conversation has ended. It’s called secondary responding. ‘Or esprit de l’escalier,’ says Roos Vonk, professor of social psychology at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. This ‘staircase wit’, as it’s also known, comes down to thinking of something witty only after you’ve already left. ‘When you’re caught off guard in a conversation, it’s actually quite hard to respond on the spot,’ she says. ‘You’re expected to react immediately, while a good answer usually just requires a bit of time to think of.’

Tips for responding better

Try to really listen to your feelings and your body. When you’re in touch with them, you’re more likely to respond in a way that’s right for you. A racing heart, a tightening throat or muscle tension are signals that something doesn’t feel right to you.
You can practice delaying your response with phrases such as: ‘Let me think about that’ and ‘Would it be okay if I got back to you?’ When you frame it as a question, you’ll rarely hear a no. You also involve the other person, which helps maintain a sense of connection.
If you want to buy yourself time when someone asks something of you, you can do so with questions such as: ‘What exactly do you mean?’ and ‘That’s great, and how kind of you to ask me.’ Or simply let a silence fall—that also signals that you won’t automatically say yes.
If someone crosses your boundary—or that of someone in the group—with, for example, an inappropriate remark, you can address it effectively if you strike the right tone. Short, face-saving sentences (without labeling the other person) work well. Things such as: ‘Hey, that’s not okay.’ Or: ‘Don’t.’ And the ‘spinach tone’ can sometimes work wonders too: just as you might gently and discreetly tell someone that they’ve got spinach between their teeth so that others don’t hear, you could whisper: ‘Hey, that sounded a bit inappropriate…’