In this episode, host Beth Cougler Blom explores the role of silence in facilitation and how it can be a powerful and intentional tool. Beth shares personal reflections, practical tips, and cultural considerations around silence, encouraging facilitators to embrace it as part of creating thoughtful and inclusive learning spaces.
Beth also talks about:
How to normalize silence as part of participatory experiences
Why facilitators should plan silence into their agendas
Strategies to help facilitators become more comfortable with quiet moments
What to do when silence is interrupted
How everyday life can teach us about using silence
Links From the Episode
- EP 63 Neurodivergent-Affirming Practices in Facilitation with Marie Dubost
- Tricia Hersey (Rest is Resistance Book, Rest Deck cards)
- Learn about Beth’s upcoming book, Everyday Acts of Facilitation
Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast
- Follow Facilitating on Purpose on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube
- Show website: http://facilitatingonpurpose.ca
Connect with Beth Cougler Blom
- Give feedback or suggest upcoming show topics or guests at hello@bcblearning.com
- Visit bcblearning.com to explore Beth’s services as a facilitator and learning designer
- Purchase a copy of Beth’s book, Design to Engage
- Follow Beth on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions.
Show Transcript
[Upbeat music playing]
Beth Cougler Blom
00:01
Welcome to Facilitating on Purpose. I’m your host Beth Cougler Blom. Thanks for choosing to spend some time with me today. In this episode, I am going to go over a whole bunch of considerations around silence, how we can use silence in our sessions and why we would use silence in our sessions as well.
00:24
To contextualize the conversation at the start here, I want to just make sure that we all recognize that we’re not talking about silencing people, making sure people can’t say things. Of course, that’s harmful.
00:39
We’re talking about inviting silence as part of a healthy dynamic, as part of a participatory environment where both speech and verbalization and sitting in silence and doing other types of things or just using it for time to think are valid options within any kind of meeting or workshop.
01:02
So this is around normalizing silence and just remembering that we can use it as a tool in our facilitation toolbox. I have the Rest Deck from Tricia Hersey and I’ve also read her book called Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, and I loved a quote about silence that she has in the book.
01:26
Well, it’s herself. I’m quoting her. [laughs] She said that “silence is a sound. Sound can be healing, but it doesn’t have to be from music tracks. Find and cultivate silence.” I love that concept that silence is a sound.
01:42
And perhaps if we think about silence as a sound, then it can help us remember to incorporate silence intentionally into our sessions and perhaps go along the road of being more comfortable with silence because I think so many of us, especially in I can only speak for my own culture, a Western culture here in Canada, that silence often can be uncomfortable.
02:09
Silence is something that we think we need to fill right away. We often here don’t have perhaps a comfortable relationship with silence that we ought to when we try to bring it intentionally into our facilitated session.
02:25
So if we think about silence as a sound, that might be helpful to us all that just like music is a sound, silence is also a sound and we can use both of those things in facilitated sessions. We can use the sound of voices and we can use the sound of silence intentionally.
02:42
Some people need silence, don’t they? And I guess when I say some people, I probably should say all people because my brain was going to, well, I just came off an episode with Marie Dubost about neurodivergence.
02:56
And we absolutely know that some folks really will need silence and they need that mental rest time because of a neurodivergence in their self that they have. But then I can’t just say that some of us need it.
03:13
I think all of us need it. All of us need to have rest times for our brain. And particularly maybe in this busy world that we’re in right now where we tend to fill it up so much, we tend to go on our devices so much. And even our participants, we have to work to help them not be on their devices [smiles] as soon as breaks happen, as soon as lunch happens, and maybe even during the session. They so often fill every moment with something,
03:42
don’t they? And we do this in our life too. We often don’t allow silence to come as much into our life. So silence is a sound, silence can be healing. Thank you, Tricia Hersey for that quote from your book.
03:58
And maybe it’s something that we can all think about just as we get going here, thinking about what silence means in facilitation. I once went to a session with a connection of mine here in my facilitators group, her name is Lisa Gordon.
04:14
And Lisa had a quote in her workshop that I was in and she said, “let the silence do the heavy lifting”. So I want to just consider that for a second because I wrote that down in my learning journal at the time.
04:28
I thought it was an interesting phrase that I wanted to remember. “Let the silence do the heavy lifting.” And so let’s unpack that a little bit. What do we think Lisa meant? If I draw on my own experiences intentionally using silence, one of the first things that comes to mind is after we ask a group a question, the frustration that a lot of people have is that no one will have an answer.
04:57
No one raises their hand. No one says anything. People are kind of ‘deer in the headlights’, kind of look, we might say, ah, you know, someone’s, the facilitator has asked a question. We don’t know what the answer is and they’re expecting us to answer it right away.
05:14
But if we think about what Lisa said, let silence do the heavy lifting, if we just allow silence after asking a question, for example, 10 seconds of silence could be useful. Or even in things like Liberating Structures, we have lots of structures—or activities, if you’re not familiar with them, they’re just activities—they intentionally incorporate one minute before people start to do something. So I give you an invitation question, something to think about, I give you one minute of silence to think about that thing, and then you turn to a partner, or then you turn to the small group that you’re working with and you’re able to have a discussion about the thing.
06:00
So let silence do the heavy lifting really is a great concept for us all to think about. If we give participants that one minute of silence or even more in certain situations could be helpful, then it gives them time for their brain to work, to kick into gear, to really draw on their own experience, their own backgrounds, what they think, what they know about, and then they can perhaps participate a little more comfortably,
06:28
a little more easily after that. To be able to let silence do the heavy lifting then, we need to plan for silence. When we’re in our design stage for our agenda planning or our lesson planning for our session, that’s when we need to plan for silence.
06:47
We need to write it into our plan that we’re going to wait that minute, we’re gonna wait two minutes, whatever it is. And we tell the group then, don’t we? We say, “I’m gonna give you one minute to think about this and I’ll ask for silence during that time”, so that everyone knows what is happening, that silence is intentional in that moment.
07:06
So plan for silence in whatever it is that you’re planning in, your lesson plan, and your agenda, and make sure you follow your plan [smiles] when you come to that point. Now, of course, if you’re going just wait 10 seconds, you’re not gonna probably put that in your lesson plan.
07:21
You just have to train yourself to look around the room, whether it’s virtual or in person, and tell yourself that you’re gonna wait. You’re gonna wait comfortably, [laughs] waiting for someone to say something before immediately jumping in and answering your own question or asking another question or so on.
07:42
I mean, if you’ve asked the wrong question and they really are confused, of course you have a problem. And that’s why you’re going to plan your questions intentionally. But if you’ve asked a juicy, meaty question and you know they’re going to have something to say in response to it, then I think you can just wait those eight seconds, 10 seconds, whatever it is.
08:01
You don’t have to write that in your plan. You’re just going to know that when you ask a group to do something, it takes a while for them to realize what they’ve been asked, what you’re looking for, and then what they think and then what they might want to say in front of the group.
08:16
So plan for silence, but also just in those informal times, just know you might have to wait. And I kind of laugh, I’ve said this so many times, I don’t know if I’ve said it on the podcast, but one thing that I do is just, I just take a drink of water. [laughs]
08:31
And I usually have some sort of water nearby, whether it’s in person or virtual, and I’ll lay out a question for the group and I will just turn to my drink and take a sip. And that just kind of is a natural thing to do to help myself wait that silent time out and give people a chance to say something.
08:54
And it usually works. Usually somebody feels the need [chuckles] to say something during that time when I’m just taking my sip or two of water. You might have another strategy that works for you. And if you do, let me know.
09:04
I’d love to hear about it. Reach out. But that’s the one I’ve used for years. And I mean, I need to drink water anyway because we talk a lot as facilitators. So it’s a good thing to remember to stop and take a drink now and then.
09:17
And if we can do it in those times to promote silence and to use it intentionally, all the better. So silence really does help people think. This is what we want them to do in our sessions. If we’re creating and facilitating participatory sessions, we want people to engage, don’t we?
09:35
That is the biggest challenge people have. And so things like this, to allow people to participate, but more importantly, have that thinking time that they need before they jump in to participate, whether it’s to say something to the whole group or a partner or a small group, they need to have that.
09:54
So we need to create opportunities to get them that thinking time that they need. And we know different brains have different processing speeds, too. Some process very fast and some need a little bit more time to process.
10:07
So we need to equalize the experience for people and allow that thinking and processing time to happen. Another thing around planning for silence is just the structure that we do use. So something like 1-2-4-All in Liberating Structures is the thing I mentioned before where we can start with one minute of silence.
10:28
But what if we haven’t got a structure where we’ve intentionally put in the one minute of silence? I’m thinking of something like circle practice. So in circle practice, we send a talking object around a circle and one person goes after the other to respond to some sort of prompt or question that they’ve been asked to respond to. If you were newer to facilitation, you’d think, okay, well, everyone’s just going to go when they get the talking object, aren’t they?
10:54
But no, we have to offer the group the ability to pass in that case. So as the facilitator, this is an intentional thing again, write it into your lesson plan that if you have a circle practice going on or something similar like that where people go one after another, up front you need to say that if people want to pass and then be returned to later, that is totally fine.
11:22
And that gives them the silence that they need and it gives them the permission from you that they need to be able to know that passing is okay. Because otherwise, a bold person might say, “you know, I’m not ready to say something right now, can you pass me?”
11:37
But another person might just be really feeling like they’re being put on the spot in that case and feel like they have to say something because they maybe aren’t as bold or don’t have as much confidence to say what they really need in that moment.
11:49
So as facilitators, we need to think about how we make that kind of experience comfortable for people and not put them on the spot and let them know that they have the ability to pass. And that is an equally fine measure.
12:03
Both options are fine. “When you get the talking object, you can say something or you can opt to pass and we will come back to you later after you’ve had a chance to think more or hear what other people have had to say” or whatever it happens to be.
12:17
So again, another way to plan for silence is just around the types of activities and types of processes that we choose to put into the plan and some of those instructions that we need to give the group so that they know what is possible in the environment.
12:34
You could even put this kind of thing in your group agreements at the start of your session if you want. If you feel that you want to be really overt about the ability that the group has to pass when the time comes to them, if they want to be returned to later, you can put some sort of statement into your group agreements to say that overtly.
12:56
So the group knows, hey, if I asked you to say something at this point because you’re in the circle and you’re coming next, you can say, “I’d like to pass now and be returned to later.” I hope that you aren’t actually calling on people, just surprising them with inviting them into the conversation because that is a very nerve wracking situation for a lot of us.
13:19
I think Marie also mentioned that in the last episode, that we don’t really want to call on people and say, “Oh, Rebecca, what do you think?” And she’s surprised and she doesn’t know that she’s going to be called on.
13:32
And then there’s sort of a panic situation sometimes that can happen for some people. We don’t want to put people in that position. So anything to do with the ability to pass or the ability to turn that kind of question around or back and say, “You know, I’m not ready to speak right now.
13:48
Is it possible that you can ask someone else?” You can think about how to seed these kinds of things in your group agreements. So either you can say, I will never call upon you without you having raised your hand first.
14:00
So just know that that’s not going to happen and you can [chuckles] feel comfort in that perhaps. Or if you wanted to say, I might call on people from time to time when you haven’t put up your hand, but just know if I do that, you do have the ability to say, you know, I really don’t know.
14:18
And and I’m not ready to say something. I would probably prefer the former. But if you’re in an environment where you really are trying to encourage people to speak for kind of the goals of the session, maybe you want to encourage people a little bit more to say something, but just give them that opportunity to pass.
14:35
And that might help them feel a little bit more comfortable in the session. One consideration around silence is when people don’t respect the silence that we’ve called for to happen. I’ve definitely had this happen in my facilitated situations. Not very often, but here and there I’ve called for silence and then silence has not been given to the group [chuckles] by one or two or more people because of course some folks like to verbalize out loud and they do their thinking out loud and that’s very valid but it also has to be something that needs to be tamped down to allow space for other people to have their preferences met in those kinds of situations.
15:21
So sometimes when I’ve said let’s have this silence and someone starts to talk or turn to their partner and say something I will have to interrupt and reinforce the invitation or the instruction that I’ve just given them and remind them that no we’re actually really looking for silence here and I’d appreciate that.
15:42
The group would appreciate that silence is happening for everyone at this time. So that’s hard. We do have to jump in sometimes and correct participants kindly and nicely but don’t let participants get away with that kind of thing because you’re the one that’s holding space for the group in that respect.
16:04
You’ve intentionally thought about inviting silence whether it’s for the minute or whatever it is and if someone transgresses that you need to say something. Can you say it kindly? Of course you can.
16:16
Even use humour if you want to but just reinforce that what you’ve just given them is a bit of a rule—without saying the word rule of course—but remind them that silence will happen and you would like to ask for that again from the whole group.
16:32
I don’t want to throw our fellow facilitators under the bus, but I often teach people who are learning facilitation or who are facilitators themselves and sometimes we laugh amongst ourselves, we facilitators.
16:43
I think that we are often the first ones to jump in to respond to any question because of course we have no problem talking with groups and we love to participate and so on. [smiling] So if you have a group of facilitators then sometimes you might feel my pain. [laughs]
17:00
No, it’s not pain but it’s just the chatty group of any kind, whether they’re facilitators or not. The chatty group has so many benefits and also we have to recognize that probably not everybody in that group is very chatty and wants to verbalize out loud right away and we just have to remember all of the different folks that we probably have in the room and at least one person out there is going to be very very thankful to have silence.
17:28
Sometimes I’ve even seen facilitators not follow this own rule themselves. I know once I attended a workshop and the facilitator was facilitating through an activity that I knew and I knew how it was supposed to run because it’s a common activity.
17:44
They talked throughout the entire time where silence was supposed to be happening and the group was supposed to be doing their individual independent work. And the facilitator even had a toddler on her lap at the time, [laughs] which is very inclusive.
17:59
I will say that’s amazing in terms of inclusivity, having our children sometimes in our facilitated sessions, it’s a beautiful thing. But of course, if we’re trying to intentionally foster silence in our session and we as the facilitator have a chattering toddler on our lap, but also we don’t respect ourselves, the silence that we’ve asked for, then maybe it’s a little bit of a problem [chuckles] and it could be perhaps a spot of reflection opportunity for us as the facilitator to reflect on that and see if it really did go as we had planned and perhaps plan to do something a little bit different next time,
18:38
holding ourselves accountable to the instruction that we gave the group and didn’t follow ourselves. So I sometimes kind of smile to myself. Of course, we facilitators are often terrible participants because we see sometimes what other people are doing that we would not do ourselves or we would hope we would not do ourselves.
18:58
But we have to give other folks grace always when they are in front of the group as we hope that they would give us grace when we are in front of the group. We all make mistakes. I’ve talked about this before and the only thing is we just need to reflect on it.
19:15
So if I did that, I would hope that I would spend some time at the end of that session thinking back over the different activities that I facilitated, how the session went, and thinking about those times of silence and all the other things we think about when we reflect on our practice.
19:35
And maybe I would recognize that I didn’t hold myself accountable to facilitating the structure in the way I should have to allow those silent times to happen for myself and for the group as well. We can use our everyday life to practice silence and this is so close to my heart right now because I’m writing a second book.
19:57
It’s going to be called Everyday Acts of Facilitation. My whole premise is that when we learn facilitation skills, we don’t just learn them in facilitation-related workshops or in meetings where we’re watching facilitators.
20:11
We do learn facilitation skills in those formal settings. Absolutely, we all do. I’ve done that. But I realized over time that the entire life I’ve had leading up until this point has taught me facilitation skills in so many ways and that’s what I go into in the book, where we can notice and practice and learn facilitation skills, all those micro skills of facilitation within our everyday life.
20:39
And actually silence is one of them. I didn’t put it in the book, to be honest, because I thought I would talk about it here because the book can’t hold everything. But if we think about how we use silence in everyday life, maybe it’s times where we’re driving with our teenager in the car and we’re both facing the same direction.
21:00
We’re looking at the road and we’re having a silent time before one of us thinks of something to say. And we could be uncomfortable with that silence, but we could also just sit in that silence and feel its comfort and feel that it’s just the space between before something else happens that’s verbal.
21:22
That silence is the sound, as Tricia Hersey said, and that sound of silence is okay in that moment. Maybe you’ve got times where you’re just sitting with your partner and having a cup of coffee in the morning and you both fall silent for a little while and it still feels comfortable and it still feels fine.
21:43
So just take a look around at your life and notice the times when silence is planned, perhaps, as in the car with the teenager, and you want to maybe have a little bit of planned silence before you hope that they open up to you.
21:59
And maybe sometimes it’s more unplanned where you’re just sitting having coffee and you run out of things to say for a second, but it’s totally fine to just sit in silence with each other and feel that it’s still comfortable.
22:13
I’m sure that others out there of you that are from other cultures, you might have more to say around what works in your culture around silence. You might be doing a better job around intentionally fostering silence in your location wherever you are.
22:31
Again, I would love you to reach out to me after this episode and let me know if you have any thoughts that have come bubbling up for you based on what works in your culture, what works in your situation, and some of the struggles or not that you have around silence where you are.
22:47
I only have my own experience. I’m sharing some of the things that I think about around this particular issue, but I’d love to hear from you as well. So as I start to close the episode here, I’ll just go back and think about where we’ve come.
23:03
We’ve talked about not silencing people. That’s harmful. We’ve talked about inviting silence as part of a planned participatory experience where silence and verbalization are both valid options and that we need to go back and forth between the two to be able to help people have the time to think that they need.
23:27
That people do think at different speeds and we need to equalize our spaces so that everyone has a chance to think and draw from their own experience and everyone has a chance to participate in ways that are comfortable for them, including enacting the right to pass.
23:46
We’ve talked about what to do when silence is challenged or interrupted, those times when we have to remind the group that we’ve asked for silence. And for ourselves, the times when we might have to reflect on our experience facilitating a session where we should have used silence or held silence more intentionally for ourselves and the group when we didn’t and chalk it up to a learning moment for something that we will be doing next time,
24:16
hopefully a little bit better. So next time you plan for your next session, think about the times when you can intentionally build in silence and see what that does for you, see if that makes any difference to participation, to engagement in the session.
24:33
I wish you luck thinking about and using silence intentionally. Thank you so much for being a part of this episode with me today. On the next episode of the podcast, I interview Tolulope Noah. Tolu has written a new book, it’s called Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality.
24:54
We are going to be talking about how to craft more engaging and enriching professional learning experiences based on the concepts coming out of Tolu’s book. Join us then for what’s sure to be a dynamic conversation.
25:08
Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes, including transcripts for all the episodes, at facilitatingonpurpose.ca. Feel free to reach out to me about any episode to share feedback and please do share it with a friend or a colleague who you think might enjoy it too.
25:25
Thanks so much to Mary Chan for her fantastic editing support on this episode. See you next time.
