Your listening is only a way of waiting until it is your turn to speak.

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

If you can not resist thinking about what you want to say when listening, focus instead on being silent. You will be surprised how much your ability to concentrate will improve.

And if you can stop focusing on what you want to say when listening and instead concentrate entirely on what is being said to you, then silence will not just bring you a new skill; it will bring you new knowledge.

Listening is far more powerful than speaking. You learn nothing by saying something.

Silence gets you out of the way and creates space others surely will fill with themselves. A person’s personality becomes apparent in hours to days. A person’s character takes months to years.

If you employ silence to listen carefully to not only what people say but how they say it, you will find they will give themselves away to you constantly and enable you to understand their character.

It only requires your silence to give full play to its power.

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.

Silent reflection promotes the appropriate use of the possibilty of self healing, self resolving. If you resist the urge to act at the first moment a problem arises, the problem often fixes itself.

Sometimes the wisest action is none at all.