Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to Work in Progress, a podcast series where I pick the brain of thought leaders within the field of people and culture. My name is Pernille Brom and in these talks we explore the latest trends shaping the future of work and the evolving landscape of modern organizations. In this episode, I'm speaking with Bastian Auergaard, who is a keynote speaker, a facilitator and an author of several books on how to create more effective, meaningful and energizing meetings through, amongst other things, silence. Welcome, bastian Auergaard. Thank you I thought about starting this episode out by being silent.

Speaker 2: 0:44

Great idea. I support that.

Speaker 1: 0:46

You probably know why, but the listeners might not know why. But why would that be a good idea?

Speaker 2: 0:54

Well, there are several reasons and we could talk about that for the whole podcast episode here, but one of them is that I have just rushed through city, first by car and then I parked and then by bike and you also just arrived. So this is a very good place to use the silence to land and connect with each other and what we're about to talk about and a lot of people. They underestimate the importance of that about and a lot of people.

Speaker 1: 1:26

They underestimate the importance of that. So if you were to lead this podcast, which I now allow you to do- how would you guide that?

Speaker 2: 1:36

What would you suggest that we do? So, first of all, I always say that there is no one size fits all. So, first of all, all I would start to think how would it fit in right here, in this setting, this context and with you? So, first of all, what I sense from you is that you wouldn't have any problem with silence. When I do this, I can have people that the experience of just a few seconds of silence makes them uncomfortable, and then I would have to adjust to that. But for you I could do a long time. But then there's the format. We are here to talk, this is a podcast and people are listening. So it wouldn't fit that we were silent for two, three, four, five minutes. So I think we could have 40 seconds of silence this time.

Speaker 1: 2:33

Yeah, and for any listeners who might want to follow us in this, we start this podcast by being silent and then we talk about it afterwards, why we did that and more context to that. Is there any advice you can give them before we dig into it?

Speaker 2: 2:48

Yeah, actually not to do what we're doing right now, Because what is very important is that you pre-frame the silence. People need to know the why, and I've just experienced so many times that leaders, managers, try to use it and they again underestimate how awkward it can be and how much the participants need some kind of why. So normally we would do that, but now we can take the why afterwards All right, let's try it so.

Speaker 2: 3:23

I'll grab my phone. Then one more thing I will have to tell you before we start. Since it's just you and me, we are alone in this room, it's a rather small room, then it can be even more awkward, slash, intimate, so I will try not to look you in the eyes, okay. So then we will start. 40 seconds of silence, starting now. Um, that was 40 seconds.

Speaker 1: 4:38

Awesome, thank you.

Speaker 2: 4:39

No, thank you. So then I would always, especially in the beginning, I would ask you how was that? What did you experience For me?

Speaker 1: 4:50

that was very nice because, like you said, I rushed into this room just minutes before you arrived and had to set up all my equipment, and this gave me an opportunity to just sit here and be grateful for the fact that we are going to talk to one another today. But it was also a cold start, right? So you didn't get any chance to introduce yourself, or who are you, bastian?

Speaker 2: 5:16

I have been working primarily with larger companies and organizations for the last 10 years, and I've become kind of known for one thing, one topic, which is silence, but many people still don't really know exactly what it is, and so, to tell you who I am, maybe I should just start to explain how I stumbled upon silence, where I got my eureka moment that ignited a fire inside me that has made me pursue this rather strange career.

Speaker 1: 5:57

Path of silence. Is that okay?

Speaker 2: 5:59

Yes, yeah, and I'll try to make it short, but still just for the context. So I've been self-employed for 25 years. In the beginning of this millennium, in 2003 to 2005, I was a producer and a little bit of a TV host on a national TV program called Rundfunk, and I had a small segment every Tuesday, five minutes, and my little segment was called Club 180. And Club 180 was about turning your world, your life, your habits 180 degrees upside down. I used humor. I did these challenges to be able to do the opposite of what they would expect in a situation. For example, I made a poetry reading in a pizzeria. So because I thought that's probably not what people would expect when they come in, for like a fast food place.

Speaker 2: 7:02

Probably not no, and I just did this. I also one time I interviewed a famous pop star in the middle of like a walking street here in Copenhagen and then I whispered to her because there was a lot of fans lining up young girls and when some of them they were leaving, I whispered to this pop star. I said now go and run after them and ask for their autograph.

Speaker 1: 7:28

So that's the complete opposite of what would usually happen.

Speaker 2: 7:32

Yeah, and my goal with this was to create small mind explosions, because imagine being that teenage fan and then your idol comes and asks for your autograph. It's mind blowing. So I love these small things. And then at one point I was like, oh, what can I invent? I've been through so many creative 180s, as I call them and then I got the eureka moment, the first eureka moment out of a few, that when people meet we speak, no matter when, like when we met at the reception we speak immediately. So I started to conduct experiments with people, two and two groups, people who knew each other, people who didn't know each other, and I did kind of my own research on that to see what happens when we are silent for a few seconds, a, a few minutes, a few hours in different contexts. And I have to say it never, it never became like a real tv program, because it's boring tv in itself in itself.

Speaker 2: 8:36

But but what I experienced when I did this experience was something that, just like the feedback, was the same again and again and again. I feel calm, I feel present, I feel relaxed, I feel excited, I feel like I know the others better. That was the participants Interesting. I feel I know you better, like at one point a lady. She said I feel that I like you better after we've been silent together. And that's where I got the big eureka moment, because think about how many billions that has been spent on team building exercises to go out in the forest or build whatever, like something. You could just be silent together for a very short time and you will kind of go behind the wall of words, you will break that comfort zone but go into some kind of intimacy where you will feel that you know each other behind all the words. And then we just go. A lot of years past that and I was in a silent retreat in a monastery in Thailand.

Speaker 2: 9:47

I wrote a book about meditation, made some meditation courses, found out how stressed people could become when they had to meditate, and that's where I started to think okay, why don't I just introduce silence, this co-created facilitated silence, in the way that I did it, and that started my journey?

Speaker 1: 10:09

So it's your own touch on how to use a methodology which is actually very old and very profound.

Speaker 2: 10:17

It's very old and it's very profound, and still it seems groundbreaking and new when you put it into a context where people they they don't expect it.

Speaker 2: 10:25

So that's what I did. Um, I combined it with my work as a facilitator. I facilitated innovation workshops, strategy workshops, all these things, and I I started to turn up the dial of silence, to spend more and more time on on silence, like at one point I did a three-hour workshop where 80% of the time was in silence and afterwards, in the feedback from the employees, one of them said it was kind of like we were all heard in the silence.

Speaker 2: 11:03

Like everyone had a word in silence and that just again. That was a eureka moment again. Just like everyone has to know this. This is so profound. So I spent 10 years talking about silence and that gives a lot of jokes to talk. So much about silence as I do.

Speaker 1: 11:21

Yes, and we have to talk more about that today as well.

Speaker 2: 11:26

But that was the context. Yes, that's the context.

Speaker 1: 11:29

And that's a little bit of an introduction to you. I would like to bring up something that you did when I invited you for this podcast, which was also a big surprise to me. It was a small thing, but it was a twist that I hadn't expected, so it kept me alert as well and also made me look even more forward to doing this podcast with you today. I invited you through LinkedIn messaging just hi, bastian, would you like? Blah, blah, blah. And then I got an answer pretty soon after, but it wasn't the usual answer. It was like oh, thank you for inviting me, I'll have to think about that. And then three dots and a line underneath. You said and now I did and I would like to participate. It's such a small thing. So you kept me on my toes, kind of, by doing that little twist of answering in that way. Why did you do that?

Speaker 2: 12:26

That's a good question, but I really not only enjoy, but I also think that it is very important to do these small, quirky things, because that's where we wake people up from the autopilot. You certainly got me, yeah, and that's the basic of my work.

Speaker 1: 12:43

We wake people up from the autopilot. You certainly got me.

Speaker 2: 12:44

Yeah, yes, and that's the basic of my work and that's why I think also, I've had success with what I'm doing, both as a keynote speaker but also as a consultant, to help create better meeting habits and meeting cultures, because if it's just boring, it's just boring and you just follow. Oh, we expected that, we got that. We expect that. I really like to surprise, so I think there was just a spontaneous, improvised way of saying that I actually really wanted to talk with you.

Speaker 1: 13:19

Interesting. So it's kind of turning off the autopilot, and you already said a little bit about it, but go back just to talking about meeting cultures and meeting efficiency.

Speaker 2: 13:47

There's so much autopilot going on that we go into the meetings, we do exactly what we do, we know exactly who's going to talk first, who's going to talk the most and what we're going to say almost, and we kind of just like go to sleep. So we are kind of in a trance mode in many ways. I know I'm very provocative when I say it like this, but I also feel that all the talking that we're doing, from meeting to meeting to meeting it, creates some kind of unconsciousness, that we are getting carried away by all the words so we actually miss the big picture. And that is the primary. The foundation of my work, I think, is to stop all the talking. Yes.

Speaker 2: 14:37

To make us race above that autopilot.

Speaker 1: 14:41

And the noise.

Speaker 2: 14:42

perhaps us race above that autopilot, and the noise perhaps that's why I use the word noise also and noise-free, noise-free leadership, all these things because we create, we produce so much noise and of course there are many kinds of noise. There are the mental noise, the auditory noise and the verbal noise, and what my focus point has been is the verbal noise. Yes. Because that just fills up so much of our ears and our brains, our cognitive bandwidth and our time because, it takes so much time. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:16

So that's what I am just like, completely focused on to try to revolutionize how we hold meetings.

Speaker 1: 15:23

Yes, to try to revolutionize how we hold meetings. Yes, and there's something about the word twists. You do so well in Danish that sometimes it's even difficult to translate it. So a few of the words you used in the first book which was translated to noise-free leadership was åneni in. Danish. What other words did you use in that context and maybe just for the English listener, how would you explain that word?

Speaker 2: 15:52

So I can give some kind of really bad translation of these words because, as you said, it has some kind of funny player words in Danish and it doesn't make sense in English, but one means actually masturbation.

Speaker 1: 16:09

With words.

Speaker 2: 16:11

Yeah, because I put another syllable into the word, so it becomes word-stubation in a way. So that's just one of it. Word stoppation in a way, um, yeah, so that's just one of it. And and the definition of it is actually quite important, because the definition of doing that is that you, you talk without actually being conscious of who is sitting with you, like you just talk, like you could just talk to the wall, and you probably seen that experience, that being with people where you feel, wow, this person is talking to me, but I could just walk out the door and come back an hour later and that person would still be talking. Then it's just as masturbating for yourself.

Speaker 2: 16:54

With words there's no love, there's no relation, interaction. You also see it with people going and maybe not professional keynote speakers, but a lot of people who has to go on stage and talk. They just talk and talk and talk and they don't connect with the audience and you just fall asleep, like where I really want to try to connect, be present with people, have that intimacy, and that's also where silence comes in and that's why silence can really break that word stubation. So you said there were other words and one of them is.

Speaker 2: 17:29

skakmet is a danish word for when you are checkmate yeah so so it's actually and and met is also being very tired, so it's a play on words again that you can be completely checkmate from all the talking again. And I just have these difference and my new book, Mødelagt, which is the word destroyed, but it just fits so well with having that you can start with the word meeting in English.

Speaker 1: 17:58

So it's meeting destroyed. Yeah, meeting destroyed by meetings or overloaded by meetings, but in one small word, some would even say maybe preach about, in order for meetings to be more efficient and for the organizations to thrive and the people in the organizations to thrive. So how, maybe can you talk a little bit about how do you partner up with HR or leaders and managers in order to help them do some of what you do? I know we can't clone you, but when you're out of the door, how do you make?

Speaker 2: 18:55

sure that these methods and methodologies stick. So spoiler alert it's by making it as simple as possible, first of all, but then secondly, it's also to create this collaboration, this mutual energy, this mutual focus, that it has to be a collective thing. It's not just one manager, one HR that has to go to a course to learn how to have an effective meeting. It has to be everyone who reminds each other.

Speaker 2: 19:26

I use silence like first of all. There are many other ways, but silence is my primary, that's what I'm known for, so that's what we're talking about here. You can use it in so many ways. So, first of all, because we did 40 seconds of silence like this, it's not necessarily going to work for you in other places. So I educated them in where we could use silence, how we can use silence, and then following up on it because that's the important part where to see how does it fit in with you, how can we adapt it to your organization. But what I also do when you say how do you get it in, I also try to sell it internally.

Speaker 2: 20:08

So sometimes it can be time, because if you use it, you can actually have shorter meetings. It sounds like a paradox, but if you very consciously, and also rhythmically almost, and ritually. You stop many times during a meeting. You will actually limit the noise. You will limit the verbal noise production. It's just important for me to say there's not a one-size-fits-all. What is the culture, what is the storytelling that will make most of your colleagues buy in on this? That's actually, I think, a more important answer.

Speaker 1: 20:50

Yeah, to exactly how it walks you through yes, and so let's say that an hr department knows that this might be a good idea because it will increase efficiency at meetings, for example. How do they then get buy-in for that idea? Do you have any experience with helping them with that?

Speaker 2: 21:13

Yeah. So sometimes I've been asked to join the leadership like a leadership meeting. Sometimes it's top management, sometimes it's just a department, and then I can do a presentation to walk them through the why, the what, the how, just in broad terms, and then I facilitate by using silence also as a tool. I facilitate what it could look like for them. So it's going to be my ideas, my experiences, but coupled with their culture.

Speaker 1: 21:56

So I want to stay a little bit longer with the silence and then I would love for you to speak more about the meeting, the book about meetings you wrote. But the silence part that you started, introducing kind of a little bit of a concept even though I know you said there's not a one size fits all but a concept for that which includes breaking the noise during the meeting. So it's not only as we did in the beginning of our session today, it's also in between, yeah, when our moments what moments are good to break the sign, the noise with?

Speaker 2: 22:37

yeah so. So again, I've tried to do some kind of I tried to do some frameworks to make it a little easier and I've developed nine places where you can do it. I won't go through all of them, but I can give you a few examples. But I have nine places that I teach where to do it, that I teach where to do it and what is important, I think, for the listener to remember is that it's not just starting in the beginning, it's seeing silence as a part, as a collective part, of the way we communicate with each other, and see silence as not just, it's not a lack of something, but it's actually enhancing something, and it's in many ways. It both strengthens your decision making, it strengthens your ability to listen, it strengthens your ability to communicate clearly and it strengthens bonding and team building and connection and mutual respect. It just gives so many, it has so many benefits right. At one point I got this mental picture, this analogy, that a meeting without silence is like a typewriter without a space bar.

Speaker 1: 23:55

Ah, that's a very good analogy.

Speaker 2: 23:59

Yeah, thank you, Because I did this. This is also I'm traveling around with this, when I go in and introduce this, to make people understand the why, and that's where I can help, because I come as this outside authority to talk about it, so it's not this HR person who's going to be weird to try to explain it. But there's one thing I always talk about, and that is that I'm going to just have a dramatic pause here. According to linguists, we speak in the Western world. We speak with approximately 150 words per minute. That means that when we speak for an hour, we meet for an hour. We speak with 9,000 words per hour. That equals 22.5, like written pages of information that we throw in the heads of each other. And if we do that and we follow the norm the norm that I'm trying to rebel against then we will speak all the time. There will be constant talking from. We enter the meeting room. Also, if it's a virtual online meeting, we speak from start to end.

Speaker 2: 25:19

Silence is not allowed. Silence is efficient. We think Silence is awkward and think Silence is awkward and we're here to talk, so we just fill in with 9,000 words with no space. That has so many bad consequences when you know about the brain, neuroscience, linguistics, and one of them is that if we talk all the time, we actually force each other to multitask, Because if there's constant talking, we either have to think while we listen or we think while we speak. Right, there's no time to just think. And that means that those 22.5 pages of information that is being produced in a meeting, in one hour meeting, that is draft material. Yes, so think about that. That if all the authors that you have read, if they didn't go through an editing process they didn't have an editor to say are you sure this is necessary? Oh no, we will delete that. That's the meetings we can actually create if we start using silence.

Speaker 2: 26:29

And I use the word silence because it's the space, it's the space bar. I'm not talking about meditation, I'm not talking about sitting and doing mantras or breathing exercises or singing or doing yoga or all these other kind of things that people associate with when they hear silence. It's the space bar, it's a collective, facilitated space bar. And when people again ask me so where do you use it? How do you use it? It's the same thing. When do you use the space bar? When you write a book? Between the words, right.

Speaker 1: 27:02

Yeah, and chapters.

Speaker 2: 27:03

And chapters, but what is in the chapter? So it's an art, it's an art form and sometimes, when I'm doing my courses or my workshops, often people say that, wow, it's kind of like you're creating music, because it's using silence so actively, so dynamic, creates actually a rhythm and music instead of just words, words, words, words, words, words, words. It becomes music yeah and it's constant.

Speaker 2: 27:36

Now we're silent for x amount of seconds. Now we speak and we also force ourselves and our colleagues to actually say what is the most important. That's what silence can do. An analogy for that also is that we have some speed bumps out on the street. Sometimes, when people are driving with 50 miles an hour or something, there's a speed bump and that forces us to slow down and stop and stop.

Speaker 1: 28:11

But is it difficult to learn when to introduce those small segments of silence, For instance in a meeting? Because you're trained in this, you've done it for years and now you partner up with the HR department or leaders or managers of meetings or employees and then you tell them or you show them how this is done, and it's kind of like art, but can anybody do it?

Speaker 2: 28:39

I think, yes, in a way, it's really simple. It's not rocket science when you look at it, and I see a lot of people who are not able to do it, because, first of all, you need courage. You need courage to be the one who stops all the talking, because human beings, they love to talk, some more than others, and we don't like to be stopped. So, first of all, being the person stopping in the middle of them. But we're just talking about something important, yeah, you think.

Speaker 2: 29:15

But maybe if we stop and we just take a step back, we found out that we were actually going out of a tangent that seemed important for you right now, but in the big picture it wasn't, and if we had continued there, we would end up with another meeting where we didn't take the right decisions, where only one third of the participants actually had something to say because time was up. Yes, right, even though you found it very interesting and you didn't like that, I interrupted. So I mean, doing that is difficult, but, but that's why I also encourage people to do this as a collective thing, as do it as a, as a, like a pilot project say okay, for the next one, three or six or twelve months, we try this this.

Speaker 2: 30:01

So let's experiment, Experiment and we learn this and we follow up on it and we ask each other after some weeks so how did it go? What was awkward? What worked? How can we adjust it? Oh, the 40 seconds was too long for me. Okay, let's try with 20 seconds.

Speaker 1: 30:18

So that's what we do. Then there needs to be someone with a mandate to break the noise, and also someone who is courageous enough to actually do it, even though it seems like people are having a good time talking. And, in your experience, is that necessarily the leader of the meeting, or is it HR, or is it employees or someone in the group of employees who seems talented for it? Or how do you pick that person to get the mandate to break the noise?

Speaker 2: 30:49

Yeah, it's a very good question and first of all, you need some of the managers, the leaders. You need them to have some kind of commitment for this and be a role model for this. It's very important. But one thing I do more and more when I'm doing projects, programs with organizations, is that we do, for example, I can do a keynote with all the employees in the department and then after that the management asks okay, who liked these ideas, who see the potential of this and who would be ambassadors of this? And then those ambassadors who are voluntarily, they sign in on it. Those ambassadors who are voluntarily, they sign in on it. Then I do this facilitation of these ambassador groups so they learn it and then they get the mandate, because then we know that it's someone who can see the idea. They're not completely frightened by the thought of actually having to ask people to shut up in a meeting right.

Speaker 2: 32:03

And then they can be the motor. But you have to support that, of course, with the management, with some communication of why we do it, how we do it, where and when and when we will stop doing it if it's just a pilot project, right. So I think that's how we create the mandate, but everyone can get a mandate for it. If, for example, 10 employees, 10 colleagues are sitting in a meeting, it doesn't have to be the person in charge of the meeting.

Speaker 1: 32:35

You can also give the mandate to someone else to say OK, in charge of of of the silence yeah yeah so so you started out writing and and also, uh, telling people about site and the importance of silence in meetings and in general at the workplace. And then you just recently came out with a new book about meetings, called midlakt in danish. We mentioned it before. It's hard to translate, but something like meeting overloaded.

Speaker 2: 33:06

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 33:06

Yeah, and why did you turn your attention to meetings? Because there are many parts of it could be a project where you could introduce it, but you chose meetings as something that was meaningful for you to take a deeper look at and maybe come up with some good advice. For how kind of was meetings?

Speaker 2: 33:30

so again it. It goes back to, to the, the introduction, the story of how I ended up doing this silence thing. Um, when I got those eureka moments, then I could have have. I could have gone other ways because I wanted everyone to learn about this, and I also did like in in 2012. I was doing silent sightseeing, silent walks, I did silent networking events, I did these public workshops, but but what I found is that then people would go home and they would try to ask their husband or their wife or or their kids, so like, and and the silence I'm talking about is this collective silence. It's using it as a facilitated collective energy field, with people who meet, who are meeting, and that's actually also the reason why I focus so much on meeting cultures. To begin with, because we have a work where our calendar is filled up with meetings.

Speaker 1: 34:33

Yeah, what's happening there?

Speaker 2: 34:35

Yeah right, but we have that and then I thought, okay, so that's where we can introduce silence. So in a way my workplace became the meeting cultures in that way. So the reason why I then wrote the new book, where I don't mention silence A lot I mentioned a little bit it is actually based on 10 years of experience of seeing how how should I say this in a diplomatic way diplomatic way?

Speaker 2: 35:11

yes, but I I really found out how frightening silence can be to a lot of people and how much resistance just the word silence or the concept of being silent in a meeting can feel. So. So I I thought about I had to find new ways of coming in and introducing it in a way that didn't reject it before I entered the room. And the book I don't think you mentioned it but it has a subtitle and it is the seven meeting rules that will give you more time, focus and work happiness. But then one of the meeting rules is called the stop rule. That is silence, that is the silent concept in disguise.

Speaker 2: 36:08

So that is my different forms of silence. That is reflective silence, restorative silence and relational silence. That is all the dynamic facil forms of silence. That is reflective silence, restorative silence and relational silence. That is all the dynamic facilitation of silence where you can use it in many ways and many times during a meeting. But I just call it the stop rule and I also in the book I have a chapter called hit meetings how to make it a hit, and it's with H-I-I-T, which refers to the training form, high-intensity interval training. Do you know that?

Speaker 1: 36:38

Yes.

Speaker 2: 36:38

You know it right. So interval training, because basically that's what it is. If you really want to look at it fundamentally, instead of having a block of words right, we speak with 9,000 words for one hour, right From start to finish then that would be like training to say, okay, now you have to run a marathon and you, you can stop after an hour, but you just run. That's what we do when we go in a meeting. But then it's interval training, which was developed by finnish uh running trainers. Like a hundred years ago. That was to do these very short sprints and then interchanging between high intensity and low intensity. And some years ago I discovered that that's basically what I do when I facilitate that rhythmic change between talking and silence.

Speaker 2: 37:34

And, as you said, it's an old thing there's so much old wisdom in silence, but I mean it's not old that you can use it so extreme that you can have 10, 20% of a meeting in silence in a corporate meeting room and you will find out that the meeting will become shorter, everyone can be heard and you will take better decisions and you will leave the meeting with more mental energy than before the meeting.

Speaker 2: 38:04

So, for example, by using the stop rule, you can say okay, we have a meeting, we have one hour, we know that half of the people are not prepared, then why not set aside some time where everyone can read the agenda? Everyone gets time to think what should I contribute with in this meeting? What is this meeting about? Just to zoom in on it, right, even if you had prepared a week ago, or you prepared in an open office space where you just couldn't concentrate, but you thought you prepared, or you prepared in the back of a cab or whatever, then you can still use some time to focus and just think about how much more focused the meeting would be if we all, in mutual silence, sad and prepared when we're in a meeting. We are not dictated to just talk all the time just because it's a meeting room.

Speaker 1: 39:00

Why do you think it's so frightening to many people do something out of the ordinary, like introducing silence at meetings. Why would it be so or why is it so difficult? Hmm.

Speaker 2: 39:17

Fear of death and I did that on purpose, Just to say something that for some people seems very random, but I think it is because it is the fear of social rejection, it is the fear of standing out, of failing, which basically comes down to the fear of death, because our old brains we knew that if we weren't part of the group we would die right.

Speaker 2: 39:55

And there's a lot of research showing that. So all these kind of social experiments can go in and trigger that anxiety, that basic fear, and so I see some kind of similarities with those managers, those HR people that have the courage to do this and create these amazing results by doing it with actually very few skills.

Speaker 1: 40:29

So they don't fear death.

Speaker 2: 40:30

They don't fear. No, or maybe they've been through something, maybe they've been through some reflection. I mean, it's quite obvious that when I go out and I speak with so many people, there are some people that seem more conscious and self-aware than others. And I mean, if you are not self-aware, if the mind and the body are two different things and you cannot feel your body and you're completely stressed and you're just um, in that mode, that status quo, then this is so frightening and and I see that also in my work that we have to deal with people who actually try to sabotage this Really, yeah, yeah, and that's another again just to go back and reinforce my answer why I wrote the new book is that using the word silence is so easy to sabotage.

Speaker 2: 41:30

How, like, when I use the word silence and you have an employee and that can be a manager, that can be a project leader, that can be an employee that just really hates the idea of someone going in and challenging the norm or what we usually do. Or maybe it's a person who usually takes 70% of the talking time and he sees that, oh, this will actually create more democratic knowledge sharing.

Speaker 1: 41:59

Yes, I'm not in favor of that, and then it does resemble death.

Speaker 2: 42:02

Yeah, that's a death for him, right or her, and then, surely enough, when we come to the final round. So what do you think about this? You know what I feel? That this is going to be. No, it's not going to work. It's not our culture.

Speaker 2: 42:18

It's not our culture, it's not efficient and I really don't support that. This is going to be pushed down our throats, because we should be free to do what we want. Yeah, because you have free talking time, because no one stops you, right? And you're pushing your words down everyone else's not throat, but ears, or what have I heard? I've heard so many things when I'm in a flow it destroys my flow when I'm asked to stop and it does.

Speaker 2: 42:52

It does because they've just been building up, they've been talking themselves warm and going into a long monologue that they enjoy. Because you get this dopamine hit. When you talk and you share what you think about the world and you have people listening, it gets a huge dopamine hit. But it's just a few examples's. So many ways but you have to navigate in that and understand where it's coming from. Where it's coming from yeah, because you also need to meet these people with these people.

Speaker 2: 43:25

It seems like it's a species, to meet them with respect. Right, and that's also why I try as much as possible to use humor and and to to create this let's, let's talk about it, right? Yes?

Speaker 1: 43:41

yeah, so we are nearing the end of this uh podcast episode and I um was wondering, looking back back at our time spent together today, if you were to introduce silence at some point during this podcast here, when would you have done it, and why at that particular moment?

Speaker 2: 44:16

So so I would like to experiment, even in a podcast form. I would have a countdown timer each 10 minutes to remind us that 10 minutes has passed and then we can times 10 minutes times 150 words, that's 1500 words unedited words. Then that would give me time to edit my words, to become even more focused in my answers. It would give you time to navigate in this conversation slash interview, because you are multitasking, you have to listen. You are very good at giving me facial expressions to show that you listen and I appreciate that a lot, but, but it will give you these pauses, right, but it but it is difficult and and like, first of all, I talk a lot and I know a lot of wonderful people who talk a lot. I'm not in a in a crusade against people who talk a lot. I'm just very pragmatic to say we need some rules, we need some guideline, we need some collective rules that we all know why works like we have in the traffic and I provide some frameworks for that.

Speaker 2: 45:50

I'm very good at facilitating it. If I'm just in a normal conversation, I can get carried away. Yeah. Right, I also do that here. I get out of a tangent and and I also enjoy the fact that this is a podcast and I am here to talk, I'm here to make the breaks and lead you through it.

Speaker 1: 46:09

I totally get it.

Speaker 2: 46:10

Yeah, so I have the same when I also have pre-meetings with HR or management for whether it's just a talk or a workshop or whatever. That I try not to in the first meetings. I try not to facilitate at all, and then afterwards I can introduce it in different ways, yes, and then they can see the difference.

Speaker 1: 46:30

Yeah, and people need to understand why Exactly and get to know you Exactly and that you're see the difference, yeah, and people need to understand why Exactly and get to know you Exactly. And that you're also a normal talker. Yeah, exactly who likes to talk? Yeah? This has been such a pleasure. We could talk for hours but, we are out of time In order to keep this short enough for people to keep their attention in this episode here. Is there any last things you would like to add that hasn't been said already?

Speaker 2: 46:59

So here I would say, if I was a facilitator right now, I would say, after asking that question, wouldn't it be nice to give my brain actually some time to think, instead of forcing my brain to come up with an answer immediately to fill out the space, to to to live by the norm of constant talking? That doesn't mean that I will come up with a clever answer, but just giving me the time actually gives my brain a chance to go into another modus than just having to completely be on on on all the time.

Speaker 1: 47:37

So is that?

Speaker 2: 47:37

okay, 20 seconds for me to think and maybe you can also think about something for the end of this podcast. Okay so the 20 seconds and what happened in my brain? My mind was I think I already talked a lot. I think there were some points I hope interesting. And I just have to say, before I forget it, that I hope that people listening to this will go out and be humble by this and not just think, oh, we just have to stop for 40 seconds or we just have to stop, but actually try it out. Maybe go home and do it in your family, with your spouse, with your children, with your friends at a dinner party.

Speaker 2: 48:52

Say what happens if we're silent for 30 seconds? What if we are silent for two minutes? Try to see that silence is not just silence, but it is so different from how you facilitate it, how you pre-frame it, but also how you are in the silence. How do you actually stand in the silence? Because I stand in silence with a firmness, a security that makes it a secure, a safe space.

Speaker 2: 49:23

But I've also seen managers who just jump into it and then, oh, we need a minute of silence or two minutes of silence, because we heard that in another podcast where we were silent for two minutes and then it's just awkward and everything just falls to the ground and they will never be silent again. So that's something I thought about and and I also want to invite everyone listening to this to connect with me on linkedin and and maybe we can communicate about this, if if they are, if you're more curious, and then I have a book in English. The Danish book we talked about Noise-Free Leadership is actually just called Noise-Free on Amazon and the subtitle is Rethinking how we Talk and it's just as a Kindle on Amazon for now.

Speaker 1: 50:11

Yeah, I also had time to think. Yeah, I also had time to think yeah, and what came up for me was that this was a first in terms of staying silent in parts of this podcast, and it was calming my nervous system down. It had an immediate effect. It's very simple, yet very profound, and I would just encourage everyone listening in here to connect with you, as you said, and learn more about this methodology. Thank you so much, bastian, for stopping by today.

Speaker 2: 50:45

Thank you so much, pernille, I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 1: 50:48

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