Silence in a conversation isn’t failure. Let it breathe; the good stuff often comes after.

A pause feels much longer to the person worrying about it than to anyone else. Rushing to fill it usually replaces something real with something safe, because the other person was still deciding whether to say the true thing. Silence is where people find the harder sentence. Two or three seconds is not an emergency.

Next time a conversation goes quiet, count to three before you rescue it. Watch what arrives in the gap when you leave it open.