Silence may be golden, but sometimes it comes at a cost. When you stay quiet, you can’t effect change. Holding your tongue means internalizing your feelings. Silence also keeps you from building meaningful relationships. From physical, emotional, and productivity standpoints, silence can undercut your ability to do things and do them well, says Elaine Lin Hering, author of Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully.
“It’s ‘suffering in silence,’” she says. “The feeling of not being able to say something keeps our nervous systems on chronic high alert, which our bodies were not meant to do. You get compromised immune systems or some tangible health impacts.”
Staying silent also keeps you isolated. You internalize the message that you’re the problem. “If we’re staying silent, there is no opportunity for connection,” says Hering. “There is no opportunity for course correction. There is no opportunity for good intentions to translate into positive impact. Until we solve for silence, we’re not actually going to reap the benefits of all that other work and investments around our skills.”
Why Stay Silent?
So, why many of us tend to keep quiet? Silence is a control technique, says Hering.
“We learned it far too early,” she says. “From the time you were sitting at the dinner table, and someone shot you a look that said, ‘That’s not appropriate’ or, ‘We don’t do that around to here.’ Some of that is warranted, and other times it teaches you to edit out parts of yourself because they’re not welcome in the context that we’re doing.”
In adulthood, silence can be taught in the workplace, often subconsciously. For example, you may learn to keep your ideas to yourself if you offer them during a meeting and they go unacknowledged. Another way silence is valued at work is if your boss or your boss’s boss never pushes back on the CEO.
“It’s what organizational psychologists call ‘organizational silence,’” says Hering.
Unlearning Silence
The first step is to understand that silence is a learned behavior. Then you can start to challenge your assumptions and figure out which are operating as norms, says Hering. Ask yourself, “What assumptions do I hold about when it’s okay to use my voice or whether I even have a voice?” Also ask, “What behavior around speaking up is allowed or valued here?”
Once you call attention to the assumptions that have been driving your actions, ask yourself, “How well do these assumptions suit the person I want to be? The leader I want to be? And the workplace team I want to create?”
“What am I perpetuating?” asks Hering. “In what ways am I actually silencing myself that I might not have realized? What requests might I make of the people around me to build more of a culture of voice rather than silence? Then, make intentional choices going forward from there.”
Learning to Speak Up
Speaking up involves courage, but courage alone is not sufficient. “Traditional speak-up advice says, ‘Be more courageous. Be more confident,’” says Hering. “I’d argue it is also a matter of calculation. Does it make sense for me to speak up? Is it worth it? To me, that is the power of unlearning silence.”
Hering says you can determine if it’s worth it by asking yourself three questions: What are the costs of choosing voice? What are the benefits of staying silent? What makes sense for me?
“As we look at the cost of choosing voice, we often overprioritize the immediate short-term discomfort,” she says. “We think, ‘I don’t like the feeling of that awkwardness or that potential discomfort, therefore, I’m not going to have the conversation.’ What we fail to realize in that calculation is, what are the costs if I don’t have the conversation now? Because usually problems don’t go away by themselves, and things get worse over time.”
Instead of just weighing short-term costs, Hering suggests looking at long-term costs, too. There are times when silence makes sense, such as preserving your own peace, energy, self-care, and survival.
“All of that is legitimate,” she says. “Each of us gets to have agency to make our own choices, because only we know all that we’re carrying.”
Whether you choose to speak up or make a calculated decision to stay quiet, understanding and challenging the silence you’ve been taught is an ongoing process. But it’s a worthy one. By learning your unconscious patterns, you can make a intentional decision about how you want to show up at work and at home.
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