Sitting through an awkward silence instead of filling it teaches you more about a conversation than talking ever will.

Rushing in to fill a gap is almost always about your own discomfort rather than the conversation’s need. The cost is whatever the other person was two seconds from saying, which is often the part they had been working up to. Silences do work: they let somebody decide to be honest, and they show who in a room is at ease.

Practise counting to five before you speak into a pause. It will feel much longer than five. Watch what the other person does with the space, because that is information you have been talking over for years.