As someone who talks for a living, I know silence is powerful!

I am a talker! If you have spent any time with me, you know that I am a talker! As a kid, sometimes we would go pick up my dad’s car from the bus station. If my mom thought he was tired she would put me in the car with him and tell me to tell him stories all the way home. It was my job to keep him awake and I took it very seriously! Turns out, I turned this skill into a career. Well, talking paired with listening. One of my super powers is listening to what someone shares and then reflecting back to them the parts that they did not hear themselves. I notice where their voice gets louder or quieter, I notice where they pause, I notice what they do with their body. Another one of my super powers is using all of those elements when I am talking. I’m always intentional with my word choices, you know that our language is so powerful. In my individual sessions and when I’m talking from stage, I am intentional with my body language, my energy, and my use of silence.

The Power of Silence One of my golden rules is to mean what you say and say what you mean. Our words are so powerful! Yet, the words we use are less than half of our communication. The other half is all non-vocal communication. How we sit, where we look, our volume…the list goes on and on. One element that is often misunderstood is silence. We often get worried and make up negative stories when someone else is silent. Yet, when you understand silence there is so much information to learn from it. There is so much to learn from silence that I was recently hired to create a LinkedIn Learning course about it. In it I share the different parts of communication, the reasons people fall into silence, and of course actions steps when silence happens. I wanted to share this course with you, so you can learn with me! Here is a link for free access to the course! I believe that it gives you access for 24 hours. The course is about 30 minutes total, broken up into 11 lessons. Small digestible lessons!

Golden Nuggets of the Week 1. Go watch my LinkedIn Learning Course: Silence and Emotional Intelligence: The Power of Pausing  2. Share the link with a friend so that they can learn about silence also or share on LinkedIn about your experience (and tag me so that I can hear your thoughts) 3. Hit reply to this email and tell me which step you are going to start with from the course. There are so many different action steps, I am excited to hear what you start with!

One step at a time Sometimes what makes silence hard is the story we tell ourselves about the situation. So maybe, before you take the course, you notice moments of silence during your day. How do you feel when a colleague takes a long pause? What story do you make up when a friend is silent for longer than you like? Do you get worried if your kids are too quiet? This noticing is the first step to changing. The story we make up in our head is not necessarily true. Maybe your colleague is collecting their thoughts. Maybe your friend is simply enjoying the moment together. Maybe your kids are having fun together. There is so much power in the words we speak. There is also a lot of power in the silence we experience. Maybe this is the start of you embracing more silence!

Happy Listening!

Want to learn more with me? Check out other trainings here.