Silence Is a Technique, Not an Absence

New coaches are taught to tolerate silence. Wait, they are told; do not fill it; the client will speak. This is good advice and it treats silence as a gap — an unfortunate interval to be endured until the useful part resumes.

The contemplative traditions treat it as the useful part. Not as a technique for producing speech, but as a distinct mode with its own texture, its own failure states, and its own things you can do badly in it.

A Quaker meeting distinguishes at least three kinds of silence: gathered, empty, and the one where somebody is working up to saying something they are frightened of. They feel entirely different from inside, and a practised clerk can tell them apart within a minute.

What that gives a coach

Mostly it gives you a reason to stop counting. Coaches who have been taught to tolerate silence are usually, internally, timing it — waiting out a duration rather than attending to a quality.

The question is not how long. It is what kind. If the room has gone empty, the silence has ended and you are now both just sitting there; say something. If someone is working up to it, anything you say costs them the run-up they were taking.

I am not proposing that coaches adopt a spiritual practice. I am proposing that a field which spends a great deal of its time not talking might reasonably read the people who have thought hardest about it.