On Intentional, Deliberate Silence

I recently got these incredible headphones with remarkably powerful noise-cancellation capabilities for my birthday (thank you to my amazing wife). I now have the ability to plunge myself into sweet and absolute silence whenever I need it... and I need silence a lot.

Do you ever turn the music off when you're driving because you got lost, or maybe during a sudden downpour, or as you were approaching your destination and looking for an address? It's actually a really common instinctive reaction to reduce the volume and number of inputs when attention and focus are particularly needed. Our brains normally switch between inputs very rapidly with what feels like simultaneous processing, and we instinctively eliminate inputs when we're looking to get a bit more focus. I did a Twitter search for who was talking about this effect prior to writing this post and it's amusing how many people mention doing it without really understanding why.

When I receive a message or a thoughtful response on a post, if I'm listening to music at the time, I'll often turn it off and put myself in silence so that I can read the message carefully and compose a reply.

I can passably draft text and take notes with background noise going on much of the time, but in order to really focus, I need silence. Sometimes, the standard, un-aided variety of silence is sufficient. Sometimes I benefit from a super-silencing boost from my amazing new headphones. Sometimes, I'll walk out of the shared office at work carrying my laptop and all my cords to go find a quiet room somewhere so that I can read or write. I am very aware of my frequent need for silence. I notice noises and how they affect my already fragmented focus. It's a real pain, but I like knowing what I need so that I can accommodate and set myself up for optimal performance.

I also suspect that we all need a lot more silence than we allow ourselves to experience, both as individuals and as groups. I recently encountered this tweet from Jehad Affoneh about the usefulness of silence. He says when you ask a group for inputs, you should embrace the awkward silence, and let it last as many as 30 seconds, because people might not actually access questions or comments within a shorter period, even though they might have had them.

I am a big believer in holding space like this. Our brains often don't just respond like computers to a search function. We require space and time to really step into what's being asked of us, to process it maybe in a few ways and see if anything comes to us. It's not even like there either is or isn't something in our minds to bring up. We might generate something to bring up if you give us a bit of time. If I were to pick an analogy for the experience of searching my brain for a response, rather than an orderly query of an indexed repository, I'd say it's like looking for pieces of metal on the floor of a shallow swamp with a few hand-held magnets. It's a slow and fairly random process, but the longer I'm at it, the better chance I'll snag something.

I'll add to Jehad's recommendation to embrace the awkward silence and say that if you give people the right priming tasks, you can probably increase the chances they'll have a response for you, if you really want that sort of thing. At the very least hold space though. Create and embrace silence together and see what happens. Perhaps the worst that can happen is you get better at being in silence together... and that feels like an upgrade to me, if only because it helps us resist our urge to fill the space with noise when reflection might be what's most warranted.

I remember when I first discovered facilitation a few years back, one of the earliest and most effective practices I learned was what's called "silent generation". Basically, if you want to get a lot of useful, honest, reflective inputs from a group of people and make sure you hear from everybody, one of the easiest and most accessible ways of doing so is to give them a few minutes of silence to write their ideas down, often on sticky notes, before you open it up to group sharing. (Want especially reflective and personal inputs? Prime them with the powerful little Spiral Journal Liberating Structures exercise.)

Silent generation is one of those facilitation practices that very effectively levels the playing field, particularly for introverts and other cognitive types. You get more honest inputs because people don't hold back when they're writing things down rather than blurting them out, and then when everybody else starts sharing honest inputs, people feel more comfortable sharing their own. You get more reflective inputs because people don't limit themselves to sharing the first things that come to mind. They dig deeper and turn ideas over in their heads, refine them, build on them in chain-reactions of ideas or inputs. One of my favorite applications of silent generation was our innovation team's weekly retrospective every Friday, which opened with a period of reflective silence as we all just sat together in a quiet room and thought about how the week had gone--all the things to celebrate and things to admit and things we didn't know how to feel about but wanted to process with the rest of the team. The next step was to silently place our inputs up on the wall, offering an opportunity for others to add a mark to "plus one" any inputs before we talked about them out loud, one by one with the group.

That practice was what first sold me on the idea that silence was something that doesn't only enhance individual cognition, but somehow enables a kind of collective connection and processing that I can't quite figure out how to articulate. If I want to focus alone, I can put on my new headphones and close myself off from those around me. But something even more powerful happens when I take off the headphones and intentionally occupy space with others, and together we mindfully refrain from filling that space with noise, simply being and reflecting together. When was the last time you shared a good, awkward silence together with others? Personally I've always found awkward silences oddly electrifying and often hilarious. I cherish and delight in them.

What might happen if you got really good at embracing and sitting in silence with your team, your friends, or your family? What kind of upgrade might that be? Do you have any fond or favorite memories of something that happened in absolute silence with others? Why not make some?