Shhhh!! Let That Message Sink In

My audiences, whether university students, lifelong learning participants, or conference attendees, tend to learn early on that when I say something and then shut my mouth of a 2-4 seconds, the message I just sent was intended to be impactful.

That is, students learn that the use of silence is an indicator that what I just said might well be on an exam or may need to be an integral part of an upcoming paper or project. In any event, it is critical to their overall learning. Conference audience members, likewise, seem to innately understand that what that last statement might have been was intended to “stick with them” and/or was a very important part of my keynote address.

The overarching goal of human communication is shared meaning. We achieve that shared meaning through verbal and nonverbal messages being sent and received in specific contexts and channels, using symbols (words and visuals) that the sender and receiver both understand. Silence should be included in our understanding of messages.

In the U.S., however, we are often quite uncomfortable with silence and frequently don’t understand that silence is a part of sharing meaning and signaling the importance of an utterance. When a conversation stalls, we often blurt out SOMETHING to break that silence, even if that utterance is inappropriate or has nothing to do with the topic at hand. We sometimes just can’t handle that silence and can’t control our discomfort with silence.

In my classrooms, silence serves two primary purposes. First, it gives those learners a moment to digest what I just said, put it down in their notes, and underline it as potentially very important (especially at exam time or when preparing a project for that course).

A secondary use of silence is to capitalize on that distaste for silence to the speaker’s (my) benefit. I throw a question out to the class. Sometimes, it is a critical thinking question. Other times, it may be seeking opinions or determining what they have learned about a particular fact or definition. In either event, someone USUALLY speaks up when the silence becomes too deafening for them to tolerate, and the conversation gets a kick start.

Silence is said to be golden, and it generally CAN be. Using our cultural distaste for “dead air” can lead to extraordinarily effective shared meaning. Instead of trying to fill every second of a conversation or a public presentation, silence can be a fantastic tool to strengthen our message while not weakening our shared meaning.