I often get accused of being silent. In another dimension my team accused me of being manipulative with my silence – especially when they came to me with a problem to solve. What they didn’t really get was that I am a reflective thinker. And therefore, need some time to assimilate the information that was given to me, before either asking for further clarification or determining a course of action.
However uncomfortable that pause for thought was for them, it was very important to me. Over the years the team came to recognise that there is more than one option for action. And even when they had identified two there was, quite often, a third that had not yet been considered. More often than not, this was a middle ground that saved face on both sides of the dilemma!
Perhaps silence is instead golden http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n03g8nsaBro&feature=fvsr
Readability statistics 8.1
