#28 Silence as a Practice

#28 Silence as a practice
Welcome to Different Points, episode 28, with me, Catherine Llewellyn, and my co-host, Roy Colan. Welcome back, everybody. Today, we are talking about silence as a practice.

Silence as a practice. So I'll say something very quickly and hand over to Roy, because immediately in that sentence, the word practice usually suggests that we're actually doing something, we're practicing something, whereas silence suggests we're not doing anything. So immediately, that's quite an interesting sentence.

So, Roy, I'll let you run with this one. I mean, there's a few angles you could go with this, but I mean, you can talk about in work, having the silence to take a break as well, just no distractions, no phone, no noise, no nothing, that can be one. But the other could be engaged in conversation.

A lot of the times people, they're thinking what they're going to say, or they're just interjecting the whole time, instead of just being silent and understanding everything, and then coming back. And I've noticed there's not that many people have that ability. Usually, they're thinking in their head, what am I going to say? What's next? Which in turn, doesn't make really listen to what's being said.

So it's not that we don't know what we're going to say, because it's there. It's just the files open up and out comes the information. So I think being silent in a conversation, you will understand what the other person is saying.

And then you can react better rather than going on having things going on in your head and thinking, how will I answer that? Oh, I must remember this now. And sometimes people are going, I'll write that down so I don't forget it. I think just being silent, being present is what, and then you will get your best answers.

Beautiful. I completely agree. I just remembered a client project I was doing.

I showed up for day one of this project, and I was going to be working with a group of, it was board members and HR, a couple of other people, there was about eight people in the room. And I was supposed to kind of teach them how to do a diagnostic in their organization. And I said, right, we're just going to start by just sitting here for five minutes in silence before we get into the session.

And they really reacted, and they spent about 15 minutes trying to persuade me why we shouldn't do that. And then I said to them, do you realize you've just spent 15 minutes telling me we shouldn't waste five minutes sitting quietly? And they went, oh my God. They realized that they'd been triggered in some way.

They'd really reacted to this idea. They said, all right, let's give it a try. And we all sat there for five minutes in silence.

And it felt like ages and ages and ages and ages. And then we started. And they told me afterwards that the project was really good, but the most memorable thing for them was that moment when they realized how they really resisted being just quiet and just, in a way, not defending themselves from whatever might come into their mind, you know, not filling themselves up with ideas and actions and stuff, but just being there.

And they said they couldn't believe how much refreshed and clearer their brain felt, but how much they've resisted doing that in the first place. So today, silence as a practice, you've probably got an opportunity to do that. Maybe give it a try.

One other thing to mention is that I first discovered this when I was working as a trainer. So I was speaking to big groups and I discovered that what felt like a really long moment of silence to me, to the people I was talking to, it felt like just a breath. So that's a good thing to remember that if we think, oh my God, I've been silent for hours on end.

No, you've just taken a breath. You've taken a pause. So that's a really good thing to remember.

So thanks for watching and listening and have a wonderful day with peace and silence in it from time to time. And do give us a thumbs up and a review and all those lovely things. Help us with this, you know, as we're growing this new show and see you next time.

Take care.