Silence, Listening and PSP

Listening and being comfortable with silence have never been my strongest skills. They may need to be.

I move fast. I speak quickly. I say what I think. And too often, I don’t truly listen. Silence has always felt uncomfortable. Even waiting for responses to something I’ve written can make me restless. It is something I have lived with, and something I have tried, not always successfully, to improve.

As if to prove the point of my restlessness, I’ve written four books, countless posts and recently, I started a LinkedIn campaign to share lessons from my years in consulting. It began strongly, with around 5,000 impressions on the first posts. Since then, it has tailed off. That forces a different behaviour from me. To pause. To listen. To reflect on whether people cannot keep up with the pace, whether the message is unclear, or whether I simply need to improve.

That restlessness brought me somewhere I didn’t expect.

PSP.

Silence is no longer theoretical for me. It is becoming real.

I used to live a life filled with noise and momentum. I was a partner in a leading firm. My days were packed with meetings, travel, decisions, conversations. From a religious perspective as well, life was structured and full. There was always movement, always interaction, always a sense of being heard.

Now, my calendar is effectively empty.

And it is quiet and I need it to be that way because noise and light are a major trigger for freezing.

For now, I still have my writing. But I know that over time, I may find myself behind a wall of silence. And in that world, listening is not optional. It is everything.

It is a skill I will need to learn in a completely new way.

And it is a skill my caregivers will need to master even more than I do.

They will need to notice the smallest signals. A movement. A glance. A flicker of attention. A pause. Communication may no longer come through words, but through presence, intuition, and deep awareness. There are tools that can help – storyboards, pre-planned signals, clarity of wishes in advance. But ultimately, it will come down to something far more human: the ability to truly see and understand another person without relying on speech.

That is not an easy skill. Not everyone has it.

I am not sure how good I will be at this. But I am certain that my wife, who is far more patient than I am, will be better at it. That is a blessing.

This journey is forcing me to confront something I should probably have learned much earlier.

Listening is not passive. It is not waiting for your turn to speak. It is an active, intentional effort to understand what is really being communicated – through words, through tone, through silence.

Most of us are far more comfortable filling silence than sitting within it.

With a little more patience, a little more observation, and a little more willingness to sit in silence, we might begin to understand each other far more deeply than we do today.

My LinkedIn campaign for anyone interested can be seen here –LINK