If your politically correct opinions meet silence, stop talking.

If you are an opinionated person and you talk a lot, you may notice that your audience is often silent. If your opinion locks step with the commonly held beliefs and ideas, your audience often chooses silence rather than defending their position or feelings, even if they’re alone with you. This is not a good sign. When people agree with you, they are mostly quite eager to let you know that they think you are smart, and in the know, they want to reaffirm your opinion and encourage it. When people are quiet with you when your opinion is “societally correct”, they disagree, and often SO STRONGLY that they don’t want to create a heated argument over it. If they only disagreed slightly, they’d offer their opinion and view so you can compare approaches, but if they’re quiet and don’t look you directly in the eye, they basically disagree with everything you just said 100%. They just want to get away from the situation and avoid having another one with you.

Silence is only a good sign in a one-on-one conversation if your listener is looking at you intently with a neutral face or with a genuine smile. If they’re not looking you in the eye and remain silent, they’re basically telling you to go fuck yourself. Don’t interpret this gesture as “shyness,” and think twice before you take it as a sign of guilt. It’s a strong disagreement with a good load of disrespect. If you’d now ask them to look you in the eye, their expression would change to anger, unless, they are, indeed feeling guilty. And yes, this applies to your children as well. You might want to ask them why they disagree with you, you might learn something.

If you meet a person who doesn’t hurry to agree with you but rather stays silent, you better stop talking, too. They don’t like you, and you don’t want to give them more reasons not to. Or, if you’re brave, you can invite their opinion, by noting: “You don’t agree with me?” If they simply didn’t have an opinion, now they can say “No, no, I do, I just don’t know enough to offer anything more…” which is a possibility, but not a given.

Exceptions also include situations when someone is so star-struck by you that they can’t get a word out of their mouth, but even then, they’d more than likely try to express agreement or admiration of you, even if they struggled to.

Depending on the country, if you’re speaking on stage to a crowd, you may get a silent crowd only because they have respect for you and your speech. Some audiences may not have enough knowledge of your topic to have a previously held opinion, or if there’s another expert in the audience, they may feel this is your stage, and even if they disagreed with you 100%, they remain politely silent. However, you should see nodding, smiling, thumbs up… Again, depending on your country, or shaking of heads, rolling their eyes, obviously checking their phones, or staring at the clock if they just want to get away from you and your drivel.

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