Why are we so afraid of silence?

We live in a world of noise. Even in lockdown when we’ve been at home and there have been less cars on the road and planes in the sky and so the world has been a little quieter we’ve been able to fill that void with news, music, tv, podcasts, radio, video calls, audio books and on my estate an almost constant noise of power washers and lawn mowers during daylight hours.

I’ve been going out for daily walks. Most days with my headphones in listening to a podcast or audio book. On Easter Sunday I was out at lunchtime and took out my earbuds and for the first time in all my daily walks I couldn’t hear anything at all but the buzzing of insects and singing of birds. Not a single engine – no distant car or train. No lawn mowers. No human voices. No dogs barking. Nothing but the insects and the birds. I live in a large housing estate on the edge of a very big town. It was profound. It was an experience probably never to be repeated without being in the depths of the countryside.

I’ve been telling myself that walking the same streets every single day for nearly two months now I need a book or a podcast to stop me getting bored. But is that really true? Am I just trying to hide from my own thoughts?

I’m passionate about helping women to lead the life that lights them up now, not at some undefined point in the future. To do that we have to be able to listen to and trust our own inner wisdom and that means listening to our own thoughts.

I think of inner wisdom as the most precious part of you. It's more than your intellect or common sense.
 
It's where head and heart meet.
 
Some people may call this listening to your gut or intuition, but to me it’s more than that.
 
It’s that still quiet voice inside you. The calm one. The one that speaks from a deep place.
 
The one that is saying, this is the right thing, this is the right path, listen to me.
 
And we can’t hear that voice if we have a constant background of noise. We need silence to listen to ourselves, but so many of us are afraid of that silence. So many of us are afraid of being alone with our thoughts.

I think this is because we let our worries escalate and spiral. We listen to the critical voice that tells us that we’re not good enough, not clever enough, lazy, too old, too young, that people like us don’t…. The list goes on.

I realised last week while I was talking to my own coach that my critical voice had been telling me that I’m a failure and I’d been listening. There is no evidence of this at all. It doesn’t stand up to logical thinking but I’d been listening to the critical voice.

This is my primitive mind at work. The part of my mind whose job it is to keep me safe. I call my critical voice Sandra and when she tells me I’m not good enough or starts making me worry about what other people will think I thank her for trying to keep me safe but tell her she can leave me alone as I’ve got this under control. It’s not the voice of my inner wisdom.

The trouble is, if we don’t learn to question that critical voice, if we don’t learn to reassure ourselves that we have got this, that we’re safe, that we are enough and we can do this then we never give ourselves the space and silence to listen to the voice that does know what is good for us. We don’t give our inner wisdom a chance to speak and that’s the voice we do need to listen to. That’s the one that knows when we’re on the right path. That’s the one that makes sure we’re connected to our values and doing the things that will light us up, that are connected to our real purpose.

I’ve launched a quiz to help us understand how good we are at listening to our inner wisdom. I’m passionate about helping women to live lives that light them up. How do we know what it is that we really need from life if we don’t listen to ourselves? How do we do that if we don’t give ourselves the space and silence to listen?

When you answer the quiz you then get a guide to help you tune into your inner wisdom better and tips for quietening the critical voice and dealing with a worrying mind so that you can stop and tune into that deeper wisdom.

Take the quiz here and get your guide so that you can tune into what the wise part of you knows to be your path.