The Soft Power of Silence

Finding Wisdom in a Sea of Endless Information

I’ve been quieter on social media this year than at any time in recent memory. Every day, events in the world give me new reasons to share my thoughts. Yet, I had a clear sense that silence was the best response I could—and should—offer. That, at least in the initial barrage of change and disruption, it was a moment to pull back and be considered rather than contribute to the chaos. It is advice I have been giving other people. It is so easy to be caught up in every move, every decision. But what is happening is not temporary; this is the new world order. Instead of being pulled into the vortex, we need to play a longer game. One in which we take more control when it comes to directing our attention and energy.

Distraction is now the tactic of choice. The volume and sensationalist stance of the choices and the onslaught of information is not accidental. Part of the tactic of inundating the market, airwaves and our minds is to ensure we cannot escape it. When we are naturally drawn in, we spend time shocked by it, discussing it, and posting about it. With our attention flooded, our capacity to discern is diminished. We are becoming a society drowning in information but increasingly starved of wisdom.

Knowing this, I didn’t want to spend my time, my creativity or my energy writing about any one announcement that would be obsolete in a day as the next crazy news cycle arrived. Rather, I made a commitment to concentrate on my real work. My real work is not whether I can offer an opinion today or tomorrow which will be easily forgotten. My real work is what I am focused on building which can be of impact over a longer time period. Rather than allow my inner resources to be pulled towards the immediate, I have used this moment to drill down on the ideals I hold for our world and gain clarity on where I want my focus to be for the medium term. Part of my role, and yours in your life and work, is to ensure while we recognise the magnitude of what is happening today, we remain intentional enough to have a longer-term plan.

There is a lot of pressure today to use your voice. In many instances, I agree with that. Too often people with the ability to do so don’t use their voice, fearful that it will disrupt the safety their privilege or position offers them. But equally, the speed at which opinions and ideas are driven out to the world today tells me depth of understanding and the quality and power of using our voices is being lost. The only winners in this quantity-over-quality approach are those who wish to divide us and the platforms that profit from increased online traffic. I had a conversation with someone last week who was insistent that what they were telling me was true. It didn’t add up so I looked it up after our conversation and it was, you guessed it, not true. When we use our voices but we stop caring about the truth, we become couriers for the chaos. Inflamed with a sense of urgency of everything wrong in the world, we enter the conversation before checking if what we have to say is informed. If anything is definitely true today, it is that the world does not need another uninformed opinion.

All great sages teach there is soft power in silence. It is laced with potency. Silence gives you power. Power over yourself, power over your attention and power over your choices. In the new world order, you will need that inner power to be more intentional and strategic if you want to make a real difference.

Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton describes silence not as the absence of sound but an absence of noise¹. The distinction I feel is relevant to our modern world. We need to rid our environment of noise so we can hear what is important. The point of silence is not the silence itself but what it enables us to hear. In music, silence is used to complement and enhance the quality and experience of the music². A pause before a high note, an injection of silence between verses all heighten the experience for the listener. The aim of the silence is to make the listener pay attention more. In this way, silence is anticipatory. It heightens our senses so we are aware and attentive that something new is about to arrive.

Silence makes us present. It grants us the ability to listen more deeply to ourselves, each other and the world. Across all wisdom and contemplative traditions, silence has always been seen as a resource. In psychology, the use of silence and solitude is recognised as a developmental resource. Maslow, for example, identified a positive approach to solitude as a trait of self-actualising individuals. One reason I love hiking expeditions is the chance to go off-grid and escape the noise of the world. People go on retreat for the same reason. To retreat from the world and gain clarity on the way forward. It is not just the literal noise we escape but all the distractions and things in life blocking us from hearing, seeing and feeling the connection to ourselves and the world around us. When we gift ourselves silence, we sense everything more clearly. In silence, we sharpen our perception and ability to make sense of our life and our place in the world. In the gap from information, we make space for wisdom. Wisdom is embodied. We access it not by consuming more but by creating space and silence to listen more.

To hold silence is to increase your ability to hold uncertainty. Silence and uncertainty share the quality of not knowing what will come next. This is a reason we resist silence. We fear the uncertainty of it. We avoid silence because we are afraid of what it will show us. We sit on the noisy surface of life rather than dare to create the space silence invites. To be silent is to sit at the well of who we are, individually and collectively, and not be afraid of its depths. To know it acts as a mirror and when we are quiet, it will reflect back what we need to know. If we want to be afraid of anything, we should be afraid of where not sitting at our depths has led us.

In the day to day challenges of the real world, silence helps you observe what is really happening. Presenter Emily Maitlis, when asked how she prepared for her famous interview with Prince Andrew, said she went into the bathroom and sat alone to get into the right headspace. 'A good interview is made in the 5 minutes of silence you spend on your own before it³.'

This is relevant because what is happening in the world right now has not arisen from nowhere. If we are surprised, it’s because we simply haven’t been paying enough attention. In all the noise and information, we lost the ability to observe. Personally, I don’t find it shocking how quickly certain companies are changing policies or that those with the most power and money are using this as an opportunity to acquire more. What shocks me more is that we didn’t see this coming. The one positive I take from the backpedaling of more socially-conscious policies is that any pretense has been dropped. And with that, at least we can see the truth.

Only we can decide to bring our attention back from being distracted towards what we truly want our impact to be in the world. When we are distracted, we forget we are the most powerful resource the world has. Blindly, we give up control over our attention and energy. We allow the potency of who we are and what we have to offer to be diluted. I don’t buy the story that AI or technology is going to save us from all the problems of the world. Rather I can see the overwhelming amount of talk about AI is blinding us to the obvious: WE are the resource the world needs most. We should spend less time worrying about how AI might threaten us and more time worrying about how we are letting the world distract us from what AI can never be: human, embodied, connected, and wise. It is these uniquely human qualities that need to be leveraged in the world today.

If there is one thing my silence has offered me in the last couple of months, it is clarity about all of this. It has given me the opportunity to regroup my inner resources and direct them with greater intention. My new mantra? Informed but intentional—aware of everything that is happening, but very clear about how best to direct my time and energy.

References:

¹Gordon Hempton — Silence and the Presence of Everything | The On Being Project

²How the Silence Makes the Music - The New York Times

³Emily Maitlis: The Truth About THAT Prince Andrew Interview, BBC Exit & Future Of Journalism