SILENCE IS GOLDEN

For the better part of my life, I have been a musician. For all its complexities, music has always come easily and felt so natural to me. So much so that at the ripe old age of 29, I enlisted in the military as a musician! I could talk all day about how amazing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto is, or how Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is one of the greatest works ever written, or how Barber’s Adagio for Strings can make even the strongest of us tear up with its intensity…but I won’t. I will save those conversations for my fellow music friends!

Being a musician has taught me many things over the years. Not the least of which is that music is a form of communication. Like music, communication (more specifically, conversation) is made up of many moving parts. These include phrases, ideas, themes, emotions, and silence. All of these components are parts of any musical piece and any conversation.

Phrasing and emotion are inherent in our ability to communicate. The words we choose, the emotions they can invoke in us, and those listening to us are powerful parts of the communication process. However, one less-appreciated aspect of communication is silence.

For some strange reason, humans get uncomfortable in silence. We don’t like the way it makes us feel and we do everything we can to fill the spaces between words when we talk with others. But silence is an important part of the communication process.

In the silence, you gain clarity. You get a moment to process what you have heard, to internalize it, and to form an appropriate response if needed. Silence can give you a brief moment to reset or to breathe and can give your mind a few seconds to relax. All of these are gifts of silence, yet we do everything possible to reject them.

Today I want to share four of the many reasons that you should embrace the silence and use it to help your words have a greater impact.

1. Rest. A well-placed pause can give your mind, your audience’s mind, and your audience’s ears a chance to rest. Constant bombardment with noise can make the brain tired and you will start to lose your audience if you don’t give them a break. Whether it is an audience of one or one thousand, giving them a break of a few seconds when you are speaking can help their minds stay sharp, their ears alert, and your message clear. When you don’t allow for quiet time (again, this is just a few seconds between ideas or topics, not a major intermission), you can lose the attention of your audience and once lost, it is exponentially harder to get that attention back.

Pro-tip – when you need to give pause in a speech or conversation, count slowly to three in your mind. The pause will seem much longer, but it will be just the right amount! Think of your silence as a verbal punctuation mark – just like we use punctuation in written text to show the reader when to pause, we use silence in spoken text to give the listener pause.

2. Reset. Just as important as rest, the ability to reset your thoughts is one very important reason why you should not shy away from brief silence when communicating. This is especially handy for those that get nervous when speaking to groups or on a stage. When you are nervous and your adrenaline is pumping, it can be easy to lose your train of thought or lose your place on your cue cards. You might even start rambling and lose your topic all together. If you feel this nervousness creeping in and threatening to derail you, finish your thought, and take a brief pause of 1-3 seconds. That is just the right amount of time to quickly refocus and tell your nerves to settle down so you can get back on track and finish strong!

3. Response. Silence helps with the response process. When you pose a question to your audience, giving silence after the question allows them to form a deeper response. If you expect a response immediately, it may not be as well-thought out as it could be. Silence can also encourage others to speak up when they otherwise may not. On the flip side, if you are asked a question, don’t be afraid to offer a few seconds of silence as you formulate your own response. We are only human after all, we cannot just spit out responses to commands like a computer. Give yourself and your brain a chance to process and formulate a response before you blurt it out.

4. Reflect. Perhaps the biggest reason to include silence when you speak is reflection. Silence helps to mark the end of a thought, idea, or question. By allowing silence to follow your words, you give yourself and those listening to you a chance to reflect on what you have said and prepare themselves for what you are about to say. If you want to allow your words to sink in and have an impact on those listening, provide a period of silence. Give your listeners the gift of space that will allow them to internalize your words, reflect on them, and then develop a deeper response or reaction to them.

Some thoughts to leave you with today:

Just as silence makes music more powerful, Silence makes your words more powerful.

“Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.” ~Marcus Tullius Cicero

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