Nearly ten years ago, I signed up for a ten-day silent meditation retreat.
At the time, I had never meditated for more than fifteen minutes on a Headspace app.
I had no idea what I was walking into.
My brother, who had spent years traveling through India and Costa Rica, told me I needed to go. I trusted him. So, I did.
It sounded interesting in theory.
In practice, it was brutal.
Ten full days of no talking.
And that wasn’t even the hardest part.
No eye contact, we couldn’t read or journal…
Zero distractions. Only presence.
It was me, sitting alone with my thoughts, for hours on end. It turns out that when you strip away every distraction, you are left with yourself in the rawest possible form.
People often assume that the silence is the hardest part, but it wasn’t. I’m not really an extrovert at heart. Give me a book, a journal, a quiet corner, and I’m content. What made it so difficult was being completely unable to escape my own mind. There was nowhere to hide.
Every day, I cried.
It was physically uncomfortable too. Sitting for hours in meditation, my back grew so sore that I couldn’t lift my hands above my head to tie my hair in a bun. I remember laughing at myself later, realizing that if I had known how hard it would be, I never would have signed up.
But that’s the thing about growth - you can’t think your way into it. You have to walk in blind and stay long enough for the discomfort to teach you something.
When I finally came out the other side, what stayed with me wasn’t the difficulty. It was the quiet power of being fully present.
We fill so much of our lives with noise; through conversations, screens, plans and words.
We talk to fill space, to ease discomfort, to prove we belong.
What I learned in that retreat is that we talk too much.
Silence reveals what words can’t.
When you allow space to exist between thoughts, between people, between moments, you start to hear what’s real. You begin to notice how often our speaking gets in the way of true connection.
That experience changed everything about the way I show up - as a mother, a leader, and especially as a coach.
I learned to listen differently.
To hold space without rushing to fill it.
To extend grace to myself first, so I could offer it to others.
To trust that silence doesn’t mean absence - it’s often where the truth finally has room to speak.
If there’s one lesson I carried out of that silence, it’s that growth rarely happens in the noise.
It happens in the pause, when you stop trying to manage what comes next and simply sit with what is.
So, before you fill the next silence, pause.
Listen.
What might you hear if you stopped filling the space?
3 Coaching Questions to Consider This Week….
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When was the last time you sat in quiet long enough to feel uncomfortable?
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Where in your life could more silence bring more clarity?
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How might silence help you connect more deeply with yourself or someone you know?
Let me know what stands out from this week’s newsletter.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
Erica
Executive & Leadership Coach
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