The Power of Pause: Emptying Cups and Other Tools to Win
By Katie McConnell Olson, CPA, PHR
Have you ever sat in complete silence with a stranger for ten whole minutes? It feels like a really long time. Sometimes two minutes of silence with a stranger can feel like a lifetime!
The good news is that there is real power in harnessing that quiet and blank space, and you can use it as a tool in your business to increase effectiveness, success, interview process and sales.
Human tendency, especially when we are trying to connect with new people and build new relationships, is to talk. We want to fill blank space. A good sales person also wants to deliver solutions and add value because that is how to close a deal (and give our clients what they need). An interviewer sitting across the table from a candidate wants to keep the conversation flowing.
We all want to talk and to connect. This means that interactions with other extraverted people are really natural. Either they do all the talking and then make a decision about us, or we compete for the floor and hopefully in the process we find some common ground and decide we like each other. When we are interacting with others that are a bit slower to respond and take pause to think, we can find ourselves in the muck.
Let me demonstrate with a story.
