It is often what we do not say rather than speaking all the time that defines us. We all I am sure know friends and colleagues who seem to want to talk all the time. They appear to assume that we all want to hear the minutiae of their last experiences, good or bad. We are all capable of this behaviour. I have for the last few weeks consciously tried to avoid visiting my latest minor commuting or work woes on the next person I speak to.
In fact, this doesn’t always go down particularly well with your audience. Dale Carnegie advised that the recipe for poor relations was “Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.” By contrast as Benjamin Disraeli said “talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.”
In professional life silence can be both threatening and useful depending on how you approach it. This article discusses silence as a tactic in negotiations commenting that: People who are involved in a negotiation really don’t like silence. It makes them feel uncomfortable. When a period of silence happens, they will start to talk just to break the silence. The result of this talking is that they may end up revealing too much or even backtracking from their original position.
This short blog has some good advice on the use of silence including Avoiding the desire to fill gaps. This can in my own experience be disastrous and lead to conceding a hard fought for position or giving away information without intending to.
Here’s a great quote on the subject in this article from Joanna Coles a former editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine:
"In any kind of negotiation, silence is often your best friend because you don't want to give too much away, and the truth is, actually, I normally hire someone to negotiate for me. It's just easier, and I don't always feel comfortable telling somebody quite what I want. But I'm always amazed when I'm negotiating with people from the other side of the desk, how people will rattle on and not stop talking. People talk a lot when they're nervous."
Pythagoras said A fool is known by his speech; and a wise man by silence.
It was Thomas Carlyle the Scottish philosopher, writer and historian who coined the phrase Speech is silver, silence is golden.
In fact, this doesn’t always go down particularly well with your audience. Dale Carnegie advised that the recipe for poor relations was “Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.” By contrast as Benjamin Disraeli said “talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.”
In professional life silence can be both threatening and useful depending on how you approach it. This article discusses silence as a tactic in negotiations commenting that: People who are involved in a negotiation really don’t like silence. It makes them feel uncomfortable. When a period of silence happens, they will start to talk just to break the silence. The result of this talking is that they may end up revealing too much or even backtracking from their original position.
This short blog has some good advice on the use of silence including Avoiding the desire to fill gaps. This can in my own experience be disastrous and lead to conceding a hard fought for position or giving away information without intending to.
Here’s a great quote on the subject in this article from Joanna Coles a former editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine:
"In any kind of negotiation, silence is often your best friend because you don't want to give too much away, and the truth is, actually, I normally hire someone to negotiate for me. It's just easier, and I don't always feel comfortable telling somebody quite what I want. But I'm always amazed when I'm negotiating with people from the other side of the desk, how people will rattle on and not stop talking. People talk a lot when they're nervous."
Pythagoras said A fool is known by his speech; and a wise man by silence.
It was Thomas Carlyle the Scottish philosopher, writer and historian who coined the phrase Speech is silver, silence is golden.
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