Hey, I’m Caleb. Welcome to my new column, Breaking Trail.
Each month, this is where I’ll share an essay on lessons learned from using agency in both work and life. While Derek and I certainly enjoy a good thought-provoking deep-dive, we also want to inject some levity every now and then… so I’ll be opening this column each month with a dad joke. Here, like this—
What do you call the quiet after a bad dad joke?
Sigh-lence.
See? This is going to be so much fun. In all seriousness, though, I’m very thrilled to be launching this column. We’ve been working hard to expand the Unobstructed publication, and we hope you enjoy reading as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together.
Let us know what you think!
I’m a talker, and I always have been. My sister used to complain that, when we were kids, I ate too slow and everyone had to wait on me to finish. However, the fact was I ate fast, but I just didn’t prioritize eating. I had a captive audience there at the table and I’d tell them every little thing that was on my mind.
With self-reflection I’ve noticed that a lot of my “talking” over the years has fallen into two very distinct categories.
Avoiding discomfort with silence.
Puzzling through trains of thought.
This progressive realization came over many years of self reflection and a lot of walking/hiking/biking in the woods, where silence typically prevails (even with company). Realizing how these two extremely different needs to verbalize came to be and what they are has helped me immensely in how I am able to leverage them in my life at this point.
I cannot count on any number of hands the amount of times I’ve sat in a car, music turned loud, because something needed to fill the silence—the tension.
I grew up in a loving and supportive family, without a doubt. Yet, there was near constant tension. My dad grew up in a poor rural family in southern Virginia. He and his five brothers shared the attic of their one bedroom house and worked on their grandparents tobacco farm. As an adult, he’s had a remarkably successful career that makes one truly believe in the “American Dream” and all of its promises. What lies under the surface of that story, though, is sacrifice. My family moved…. a LOT, to the level that I know to follow up the list of places I’ve lived with a quick “no, we weren’t a military family.” Meanwhile my mom stayed at home and raised my siblings and I, while my dad travelled in near perpetuity to meet the demands of his career. So, we grew up seeing my dad MAYBE a week’s worth of time a month.
Now, for a young Caleb who had aspirations of being an actor, lawyer, or pastor (a story for another time), I always found that tense silences needed to be broken. I could achieve a laugh or a smile from one of my family members if I started telling stories or cracking jokes... anything that could get them to start thinking about literally anything other than whatever created the tension. Quiet meant something was wrong, just percolating under the surface and likely to boil over later. Discussion and chatting meant things were okay—that we were open to talking and exploring ideas or having a repertoire.
It wasn’t until I got into outdoor sports, spending as much of my time as I could outside, either alone or with friends, that I started to really embrace silence without discomfort. I started to embrace the silence of nature as my gateway; the way you have to truly listen to hear everything in your surroundings, the rustling that may indicate a potential wildlife sighting, the babble of a distant river and its glorious promise of a water refill. Things that would be all too easy to miss if you were busy chatting. I truly cannot find a way to articulate it but there is something about the comfortable quiet that is found watching a campfire with friends or family that is unparalleled.
According to the powers that be in the education industry, we commonly look at “learning” across four different methods: visual, auditory, read/write, and kinaesthetic. Most of us learn through all four of these but learn “best” through one or two of them. For me, it’s resoundingly auditory. Like, I specifically recall my friend and rugby teammate, Clay, getting frustrated with me after “borrowing” my notes for a lecture that he missed. The reason? My notes were ¼ of a page of extremely truncated bullet points… topic reminders that bring back a memory of the lesson or lecture. I learn by simply paying attention and listening, notes just are quick reminders of the topics that were addressed.
Unfortunately, for my friends and loved ones, this also led to me developing a practice of talking through entire trains of thought out loud. Because, talking through a problem to myself, in real-time, as a method of working through it, pulled me out of my own head. Again, unfortunately, this meant others around me had to hear this process. I’ve said the two words, “ignore me” more times than I will ever care to count.
In hindsight this practice probably reached its peak in high school when I was getting deep into a love affair with Improv and Speech-&-Debate. I joined our school’s improv club as a freshman and felt an immediate kinship with the entire group. I even went on to become one of the leaders by the end of my time in high school. One of the key principles of improv is to “keep the ball rolling.” If dialogue and action pause, the scene is dead. You keep talking to keep building the world and establish the scene. Coupled with Speech-&-Debate, which focused on storytelling, the principal need was to know your subject material so well that you could speak to it without really having to think about it. That one-two-punch, again, unfortunately for friends and family, led to a comfort with speaking without thinking.
I had trained myself to be “good” at it.
I recall vividly sitting in a coffee shop with my former supervisor, now dear friend, Erica Nelson. While chatting, she offered one of the single most important pieces of feedback I’ve ever received…
Talk less. Or, at least, don’t talk first.
In a professional context, this was a part of a larger journey I was on as a young, white, cis-gendered male who is also 6’6”. I take up space in professional environments and, in the vast majority of them, my voice and others like it, are often the loudest. Meanwhile, I worked in a marketing and creative department that was 90% female. Erica opened my eyes. I started to notice that if I reigned in my energy and didn’t jump at the bit and start volleying ideas, others would speak up after the silence lingered. This didn’t mean I shouldn’t share my ideas, but rather that I needed to ensure space for others to share theirs, too. We all had ideas, just not everyone felt an equal urge to step forward and share them immediately.
Silence, for me, is now a skill and a tool. I can use silence to center myself. I can use silence to indicate comfort while sitting in the car on a drive with my wife, neither feeling we need to fill the space. I can use silence to let my daughter think through things herself rather than giving her the answers.
But on the flip-side, I’m still a talker. Now, though, I speak up to create space for others to contribute their thoughts in a crowded room.
The skill, I’ve discovered, is knowing when to shut-up, rather than talking for the sake of talking.
Cheers,
Caleb