A Shoutout To The Quiet People Among Us  

by Kevin Burton

   The story goes that an opera singer, seated next to Calvin Coolidge at a dinner said she had made a wager that she could get him to say three words.

   “You lose,” said the famously taciturn 30th US president.

   Mr. Keller, my history teacher at Wichita South High was the first to recount that story to me. Great story, widely quoted, but not true. Coolidge said it never happened.

   Well if “Silent Cal” didn’t embrace the story, I do.  Call me “Silent Kev” if you will, but I think there is entirely too much chatter going on, and precious little of substance (and these days of truth) being said.

   Coolidge was president from 1923 to 1929 and I would have voted for him had his name appeared on the Nov. 5 presidential ballot, despite the fact he died on that date in 1933.  He would have been the better choice.

   “Coolidge allowed his naturally quiet, thoughtful nature to be embellished into a persona of a leader who said and did no more than he had to,” reads a feature on Coolidge on whitehousehistory.org.

   “The words of a president have an enormous weight,” Coolidge wrote in his autobiography, “and ought not to be used indiscriminately.”

   By contrast, my words have the weight of the shadow cast by a drifting feather in a gentle Kansas breeze. But I try to use them as judiciously as Coolidge did.

   Once in a while I have something to say that actually adds to a discussion, or maybe a clever joke people would appreciate. If not, I will almost always stay quiet.

   My wife Jeannette is a talker, and will carry the conversation at a dinner with family or friends. Me? I’m the one eating left-handed so it will take me longer to eat, so I can be seen to be busy and excused from the small talk.

   I am listening carefully though, for something I can respond to, just so I don’t appear too quiet so as not to un-nerve the poor extroverts around me.

   Silence is golden for sure, say psychologists.

   “The effective use of silence can bestow many gifts,” writes Alex Lickerman, M.D. in Psychology Today. Among them:

1. The ability to listen effectively.

   Few do it well. Most of us engage in listening only as a way of waiting until it’s our turn to speak. If you can’t resist thinking about what you want to say when listening, focus instead specifically on being silent. You’ll be surprised how much your ability to concentrate will improve. And if you can stop focusing on what you want to say when listening (don’t worry; it won’t go anywhere you can’t find it) and instead concentrate entirely on what’s being said to you, then silence won’t just bring you a new skill; it will bring you new knowledge. Remember that listening is far more powerful than speaking. You learn nothing by saying something (which by definition you already know). Besides, how often are we really able to influence another’s behavior or beliefs by what we say?

• A clear view into the hearts of others. 

   Silence gets you out of the way and creates a space others will fill in with themselves. A person’s personality becomes apparent in mere hours to days. Assessing a person’s character, on the other hand, takes months to years. But people remain themselves at every moment. An offhand comment made when you first meet someone may be, in retrospect, obviously representative of a large character defect (or virtue).

   If you employ silence to listen carefully to not only what people say but how they say it, you’ll find they’ll give themselves away to you constantly and enable you to understand their character far sooner than you would be able to otherwise.

   Having had years of practice interacting with and observing nuances in our fellow human beings’ expression and tone has made our intuition far more accurate than we often believe. It only requires your silence to give full play to its power.

• Attractiveness

   People want more than anything to be heard and understood and will find anyone who provides them that feeling powerfully charismatic.

• Self-control.

   Think how much more in control you’d not only appear but actually be if your first response upon hearing or seeing something that sparks a strong reaction in you wasn’t to lash out emotionally but instead to become—silent.

   Silence is a terrific substitute for self-control, not only creating its appearance, but over time and with practice its substance as well.

• Wisdom.

   When facing a new challenge, making silence your first response gives you a chance to reflect before you speak, increasing the likelihood that what you say and do will be on target, intelligent, and useful.

   Further, silent reflection promotes the appropriate use of what we call in medicine a “tincture of time.” If you resist the urge to leap into action at the first moment a problem arises, the problem often fixes itself. In medicine, as in life, sometimes the wisest action is none at all.

   Friday: a Time Magazine piece about the growing trend (which I endorse!) of consumers requesting silence, at barber shops and other businesses.