Silence feels longer from the inside.

Especially when you’re the one standing at the front of the room.

You’re mid-talk.
You’ve just finished saying something that matters.
​
And for a moment, the next thought doesn’t arrive.

It’s not that you don’t know what comes next.
It’s that stress has briefly made the path harder to find.

Your heart pounds.
Time stretches.
The pause feels exposed—like everyone can see it happening.

That happened to me when I spoke at Compassion Revolution last year.

I’d rehearsed the talk so thoroughly I was dreaming it. I knew the arc, the rhythm, the landings. And still, in front of an audience, there were moments where the next line didn’t come immediately. A small surge of adrenaline. A flicker of limbic hijacking. A blank where a sentence should have been.

So I paused.

Inside, it felt like forever.
Like I’d dropped something and everyone had noticed.

Afterwards, people told me how much they loved the pacing.
How the words had time to settle.
How the pauses made the talk feel thoughtful. Calm. Intentional.

The silence I feared barely existed for them.

💡 ONE IDEA WELL

Time doesn’t pass the same way for speakers and listeners

When you’re speaking, your brain is doing something demanding.

It’s retrieving information.
Monitoring your performance.
Reading the room.
Regulating emotion.
Trying not to rush.

That combination distorts time.

Psychologists have long known that time perception changes under stress. When attention is turned inward—when you’re self-monitoring or emotionally aroused—your internal clock speeds up. Pauses feel longer. Silence feels louder. Seconds stretch.¹²³

Listeners are not in that state.

They’re not tracking your script.
They’re not aware of what you were about to say next.
They’re not measuring the pause against an internal plan.

They’re simply processing what they’ve just heard.

Studies of time perception show that observers consistently underestimate the duration of pauses compared to speakers. What feels like an uncomfortable gap from the inside often registers as a brief, even unnoticed moment from the outside.

In other words:

You experience the pause as loss.
They experience it as space.

And space is useful.

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🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE

Silence is not empty.

We tend to treat pauses as problems.

As evidence of forgetting.
Of unpreparedness.
Of losing control.

But silence doesn’t arrive in a vacuum.
It arrives after something has been said.

For the listener, a pause is not an interruption.
It’s an invitation.

An invitation to let meaning consolidate.
To register emotion.
To decide what mattered.

What feels like forgetting often reads as thoughtfulness.
What feels like exposure often reads as care.

A rushed speaker feels safe to themselves.
A paused speaker often feels safe to everyone else.

Silence is not the absence of communication.
It’s part of it.

🧭 TRY THIS

A small experiment in trusting the pause

The next time you’re speaking—teaching, presenting, or even answering a question—try this.

When you lose your train of thought, pause.

Don’t apologise.
Don’t rush to fill the gap.
Don’t explain what’s happening.

Just pause.

Count one… two...three silently
Then continue when the thought arrives.

Notice what actually happens in the room.

If that feels tolerable, try one more experiment.

After an important sentence, pause on purpose.

Not to perform calm.
Not to look confident.

Just to give the idea room to land.

Pay attention to the audience, not to your internal clock.

​

​
​Not every pause needs filling.

​

Andy

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References

1. Droit-Volet S, Meck WH. How emotions colour our perception of time.Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 2007;11(12):504–513.
2. Zakay D, Block RA. An attentional-gate model of prospective time estimation. In: Time and the Dynamic Control of Behavior. 1995:167–178.
3. Eagleman DM. Human time perception and its illusions.Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 2008;18(2):131–136.