How to Hold a Quiet for Five Seconds

Imagine a personal stylist named Genevieve who has a video call with Mrs. Castellanos. Mrs. Castellanos has joined the board of a museum. She wants a wardrobe for the meetings and the dinners that come with it. At the start of the call, Genevieve asks whether she may record it for her notes, and Mrs. Castellanos says yes. Near the end, Mrs. Castellanos asks what the work would cost. “The edit of what you have and the buying for the first season is $6,500,” Genevieve says. “We’d start with a morning in your closet.”

Mrs. Castellanos looks down at the list she has been making. Genevieve hears herself say, “Or we could do the edit on its own first, and see how you feel.” Mrs. Castellanos says she will think about it.

That evening Genevieve watches the recording with the player’s clock showing. She finds the three places where Mrs. Castellanos went quiet after an answer. She writes down how long each quiet lasted before her own next word. The first is under a second. The second, after the price, is a little over one second. The longest is two seconds, when Mrs. Castellanos looked away to find a pen. Genevieve thinks of herself as someone who can sit in a quiet. The recording says she lasts about a second.

So she asks Oksana, who runs the studio with her, to help for 20 minutes on four evenings. Oksana plays a client and asks the price. Genevieve gives her answer and stops. Oksana says nothing and counts to two in her head before she speaks again. Genevieve lasts. The next evening Oksana counts to three, and Genevieve fills the quiet once with “or.” They do three again, then four. On the fourth evening Oksana counts to five, twice, and Genevieve looks at the list between them and waits both times.

In her next call, with Mrs. Castellanos’s sister, the price is followed by a quiet. Genevieve looks at her list and breathes. The sister speaks first, about four seconds later, to ask which morning Genevieve could come. The sister books her.

Nothing in Genevieve’s answer changed between the two calls. What changed is how long she can hold a quiet before her body makes her end it. That number was a second, and now it is five. The drill that moved it has three parts. Measure how long you last. Practice stopping at the end of an answer while someone holds the quiet. Then add a second at a time until five feels like nothing. Here is why the number starts so low, and why only practice moves it.

People answer within a fraction of a second, in every language studied

In 2009, Tanya Stivers and 10 colleagues published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was about how people take turns in conversation. They studied ordinary conversation in 10 languages, from the languages of small traditional communities to the major languages of the world. In every one of them, people avoided talking over each other. They also kept the gap between one person’s turn and the next as short as they could. The average gap did differ from language to language, but every language was within a quarter of a second of the average.

So the gap that feels natural after someone stops speaking is a fraction of a second, and it is that short everywhere. The study was about ordinary conversation, and the step to a client’s quiet after a price is the course’s own. Here is the step. A client who is deciding goes quiet for longer than a fraction of a second. You learned to talk with the shorter gap, and your body still expects it. So one second of quiet is already a long time to the part of you that talks.

Four seconds of quiet made people feel left out, even watching a video

Namkje Koudenburg, Tom Postmes, and Ernestine Gordijn are social psychologists at the University of Groningen. In 2011, they published two experiments on what a short silence does to the people in a conversation. In the first, 102 students read a scenario in which they made a slightly controversial remark. For half of them, a silence followed. Those students felt more anxious, more rejected, and less sure of themselves than the ones who read it without the silence. They also felt that they fitted in less well.

In the second experiment, people watched a six-minute video of three people talking. In one version, the conversation ran smoothly. In the other, it stopped for four seconds. The viewers did not notice the silence. Even so, the people who watched the version with the four seconds in it came away less sure of themselves. They also reported feeling rejected and left out.

Those were students, and the silence was someone else’s. The quiet after your price is your client’s, and you are the one sitting in it. So four seconds is about where the quiet stops feeling like a pause and starts feeling like a verdict. That is your body treating a judge whose decision you cannot control as a danger. The words you reach for are how it gets out.

Teachers waited less than a second, and three seconds changed the lesson

Mary Budd Rowe was a professor of science education at the University of Florida. In 1986, in the Journal of Teacher Education, she summed up nearly 20 years of research on what she called wait time. When teachers ask a question, she found, they wait one second or less for a student to start answering. After the student stops, they react or ask the next question in under a second. On most of her recordings, the pause after a student’s answer averaged 0.9 seconds. Many pauses were too brief to time with a stopwatch.

When teachers held the pause to three seconds or more, the classroom changed. Students’ answers grew by 300% to 700%, depending on the study. More students joined in, “I don’t know” became rarer, and the students who were rated as poor performers started to take part. A fifth grader told his mother about his teacher, who was trying the three seconds: “It’s the first time in all my years in school that anybody cared about what I really thought.”

Rowe also reported how hard the change was. It is difficult, she writes, “for many people to get average wait times up to 3 seconds or longer.” One-second wait times, she writes, “appear to be almost immutable.” Written instructions were “virtually useless.” What worked was recording a lesson, transcribing 10 minutes of it, and teaching again, over six to 12 hours. Then, in the third or fourth week, teachers slid back to the old pace. The ones who kept the pause had a chance to talk about what it felt like.

Your client is not a fifth grader, and Rowe’s teachers were waiting for an answer rather than a decision. What carries over is the number and the method. A second is what people do without training, and no page of advice moves it. What moved it for her teachers was a recording, a count, and someone to talk to afterward.

A coach counted her silences the way a new driver counts at a stop sign

Ruthie Pérez Slingerland is a leadership coach who trains other coaches. In a post from July 2026 on the Catalyst Coach Academy site, she writes, “In my first year of coaching, I counted my silences the way a new driver counts seconds at a stop sign. Three beats felt brave. Five felt reckless.” Past that, she would “rescue the moment with a question nobody needed.”

Twenty years on, she still catches herself reaching for a question when a client goes quiet. The difference is that she notices sooner and puts the question down. “Silence is not a gift some coaches are born with; it is a habit, which means it responds to practice,” she writes.

Her first practice is to find your real number. Record a session, with permission, “and count how many seconds you actually wait before speaking.” Her own number was smaller than she would have guessed, and so was that of every coach she has watched do it. “You cannot stretch a pause you have not measured.” Then she chooses a target two or three seconds longer and works toward it over the next few sessions. Her second practice is one full breath after the client finishes, before she says anything. “It feels enormous from your side of the conversation,” she writes, “and completely natural from theirs.”

Her clients are quiet because they are thinking, and your client is quiet because they are deciding. The count works the same way for both. Genevieve’s recording gave her the number Slingerland asks for. The breath is what she took on the second call.

A sales trainer counts to three in his head before he speaks again

Jeb Blount runs Sales Gravy, a sales training firm, and writes on its site about the power of silence. His rule is a count. “After the other person finishes answering the question, mentally count ‘one … two … three’ before you talk again.” Then, “Silence can be awkward. Learn to live with that.”

His count comes after a prospect answers a question, and the course puts the same count after your own answer. The difference matters, and it is the reason the course goes to five rather than three. After a question, the quiet is yours to end. After your price, the quiet is the client deciding, and the client ends it. You do not know how long that will take. So the drill has to carry you past the point where the quiet feels like a danger. In the Groningen video, four seconds was enough to make people feel rejected. Five is one second past it.

Why reaching five while holding your breath goes wrong

Imagine a personal trainer named Caspar who runs the drill with a friend for two evenings and reaches a count of five. The next week he meets Mr. Ndiaye about training three mornings a week. He gives his price and stops. Then he fixes his eyes on Mr. Ndiaye, holds his breath, and counts. At five, he lets the breath out and says, “So, what do you think?” Mr. Ndiaye says he will let him know, and hires a trainer his wife uses.

Caspar held the quiet for five seconds, and Mr. Ndiaye watched him hold it. A man staring and not breathing is a man waiting for a verdict, and the question at the end asked for one. The number was there, and the danger was still there with it. That is the sign that the drill stopped too soon.

The drill is done when the recording of a round at five shows you breathing and looking at the plan between you. That is what you look like between answers. Rowe’s teachers slid back in the third or fourth week. So keep running a round a week for a month after you first reach five. Each time, tell your colleague what the quiet felt like.

Five seconds of quiet is not leaving the client stranded

Sitting through five seconds while a client looks at a price can feel like abandoning them in the middle of a conversation.

Slingerland’s answer is that the time passes differently on the two sides of the table. “The silence that feels endless to you usually feels spacious to your client,” she writes. “You are watching the clock. They are inside the question.” Mrs. Castellanos’s sister used her four seconds to decide which morning she wanted. Genevieve’s job in those seconds was to be there when the sister looked up. What the drill removes is the clock, not the client.

How to train the quiet up to five seconds

1. Open your recording with the player’s clock showing. Find three places where the client went quiet after an answer of yours. For each one, note the time of your last word and the time of your next word. Write the gap in seconds. If the gap is too short to tell, write “under one.” Then write the longest of the three at the top of the page, with the date.
2. Ask the colleague who plays your client for 20 minutes on four or five evenings. Tell them their job this time is to hold the quiet. They ask one of your three questions, you give your short answer, and you stop. They count to two in their head before they say anything. Then they ask the next question. Record the round. For example, a florist can say to her colleague, “Ask me the price, and when I stop, count to two before you say a word. Don’t help me.”
3. Each evening, your colleague adds a second to the count. If you speak before they do, that count is repeated the next evening, and the next, until you last through it. Count only your own words. A breath, a look at the plan, or a sip of water is not filling the quiet.
4. After each evening, watch the recording of the longest count. Look at what you did with your eyes, your hands, and your breath while you waited. Write it down next to the count. For example, a tutor might write, “Four. Looked at the father, held my breath, hands clasped.” The round is a pass only when the count was held and you look as you do between answers.
5. When your colleague has counted to five twice in one evening and you held it both times, keep going. Run one round a week for a month, at five, and tell your colleague afterward what the quiet felt like. If it still felt like waiting for a verdict, say so, and run the next round at five again.
6. In your next client meeting, when a quiet follows your answer, take one breath and look at the plan between you. Let the client speak first. Afterward, write the longest quiet you held and whether it felt like a danger. If it did, that is the count to give your colleague next week.

Next: You will see how to tell when a client’s quiet is thinking, and how to end an answer so it sounds finished.