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It might seem strange that the first of ten Right Risk principles deals with silence. Come on, you might be thinking, let’s fast-forward to where the action is! Risk-taking is all about action, right? Risk-taking is James Bond throttling a motorcycle off a cliff and parachuting into a waiting speedboat; it’s Indiana Jones creeping into a cobwebbed chamber clutching his bullwhip; it’s John Rambo demolishing a foreign army all by himself; and it’s Lara Croft karate-chopping a baldheaded villain. Risk-taking is, archetypically, the hero putting his life on the line to save the damsel in distress from the racing locomotive. Heck, even risk-taking of a less action-packed nature involves doing something. Risk-taking is the protester marching, the rebel resisting, the entrepreneur innovating, the explorer discovering, and the writer opinionating. Surely risk-taking, that glorious act of courageous audacity, hasn’t got anything to do with silence.

True, risk-taking involves action. But before you can act you need to know what to act on. The reason silence is so important to risk-taking—and in particular Right Risk-taking—is that it helps make your risks more deliberate, intentional, and directed. Silence, extended to the point of mental stillness, has a leveling effect on your perspective, sharpening your powers of discernment. Through silence you become more attuned to your most deeply held beliefs and values, helping you perceive what risks are most compatible with your inner constitution and thus which are truly worth taking. Through silence you can more accurately answer your Right Risk question, Is this the Right Risk for me? Hence, the first principle of Right Risk is find your golden silence.

There’s Gold Inside of You!

Right Risk-taking is about purposeful action: matching the best of your intentions with the best of your behaviors. For your risk to be full of purpose, it has to be anchored to an ideal or a cause that you believe to be worthwhile. But to manifest your convictions through risk, you must first know what you stand for and what you stand against. Silence is the mechanism we use to access our deeper level awareness—our inner gold. When your Right Risk answers emanate from the center of yourself, versus being imposed from the world outside, your conviction is higher and so is your commitment to taking the risk. Let’s face it, taking a risk because someone else tells you to is much less fulfilling than taking it of your own initiative. Silence is how we listen to ourselves. For this reason, when readying for your risk it is helpful to follow this dictum: Careful reflection should precede purposeful action.

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Receptive Silence

Henry David Thoreau, who after spending a year and a half in quiet solitude at Walden Pond certainly earned the right to expound on silence, talks about the necessity to “shake off the village” as a means of connecting to your inner wisdom. Thoreau also underscored the importance of having a sacred place, or what he referred to as a sanctum sanctorum. The sanctity of silence is essential in helping the Right Risk-taker to stand apart from the world in order to make sense of it. Ultimately the choice of whether to take a risk resides solely with you and no one else. While the opinions of others should be taken into consideration, you are the one who has to be most comfortable with your risk decision. Having a “sacred place” will help you shut out the world long enough to compare, contrast, and perhaps integrate your own opinions about the risk with the opinions of others. Though the actual location of your sacred space should be picked by you, I find such places as an empty church, peaceful garden, and local library, luxuriously silent

In his wonderfully insightful book The Courage to Create, Rollo May writes about the “constructive use of solitude.”¹ Like Thoreau, May advises that we periodically disengage from the world and let solitude work for us and in us. Silence helps us relax so that insights and intuitions can break through. The constructive use of solitude is not passive silence but receptive silence. We see this receptivity in the artist waiting for inspiration, the writer staring out the window, and the athlete focusing before the contest. It is the attentive silence of listening, not just for words, but also for indications from our intuition about the actions we should take.

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Silence takes discipline because it requires being alone, something that seems increasingly difficult for people to do. Yet the rewards for doing so are clear. In silence we strengthen the connection to our inner wisdom, heighten our awareness, and become more exacting in our decision-making. Silence helps us become more clearheaded about what we need to do and why we need to do it. When we sit with silence long enough, we begin to hear and decipher the whispers of our soul. Right Risk-takers use silence to access the wealth—the “gold”—that resides inside them.

Never Stand Still: Perverse Thinking

In the mid 1990s, a regional communications company launched a billboard advertising campaign that implored people to “Never Stand Still!” The underlying message was that to be successful, you must be perpetually on the go. God forbid you be still! Stillness is for weaklings and has-beens; the new breed of winners are those who are furiously busy and fully accessible. The ad was essentially saying, If you want to avoid missing out on emerging opportunities, you’ve got to be continually refreshed with up-to-date information, you need “all the news all the time,” you’ve got to be electronically connected! You’ll be eminently productive to the extent that you are permanently interruptible.

“Never Stand Still” is asinine advice. And it is dangerous too. If you are never still, you’ll never access your golden silence, and your risks will be taken in a haze of distraction. Instead, standing still is exactly what we need to do before taking a major risk. Standing still teaches us composure and poise. Stillness helps focus the risk-taker, enabling her to regulate her emotions and discern the right course of action.

The importance of stillness was well described by Oprah Winfrey in an editorial in O Magazine. In running her production company, Harpo, Oprah is pulled in many different directions by many different people. To get centered, she walks into her closet, sits on the floor, and—in her words— ”goes still as a stone.” She writes, “When I walk out, I am centered on what’s most important and can make decisions based on what’s right for me—not on what everyone else wants or needs. I’ve learned that the more stressful and chaotic things are on the outside, the calmer you need to be on the inside.”²

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The French mathematician Blaise Pascal famously said that all of man’s problems stem from being unable to sit alone quietly in a room. Those words are more relevant today than they were in his time. We seem to have lost the ability to saunter, to carry on a lingering conversation, to kick back and relax. Instead, anxiety and worry are talked about with pride. With a good deal of self-importance, business people often refer to “what keeps them awake at night,” as if stress-induced insomnia were an essential factor in professional success. Busyness has become the defining preoccupation of our age. The only quiet moment we seem to get is that brief interlude in the morning while we are waiting for our computer to boot up. We seem hell-bent on keeping ourselves distracted. We crank up the radio volume in our car, unwind with “comfort TV” at home, cut deals on our cell phone at the playground, and spoon-feed our minds with Internet junk food everywhere we can. We work harder and harder to buy more and more laborsaving devices. And the more we acquire, the unhappier we seem to get (in the U.S., depression is now the leading cause of disability³). For as much as our cell phones, pagers, emails, and PDAs have put us in touch with others, they have put us way out of touch with ourselves.

The problem with the boundaryless world is just that— we have no boundaries. We allow the world in with no filter to help us decide the relative importance of each new bit of information. When everything is urgent, all things get trivialized. Again, Thoreau’s writing is instructive. He noted that when we fritter back and forth at the whim of the external world, we dull our ability to prioritize what is truly important. In his last book, Walking, he writes that this kind of undisciplined thinking results in more than just mental laziness, it can permanently profane how we think so that “all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.”⁴

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The Risk of Silence

Finding your golden silence requires the discipline of setting boundaries. It means unhooking yourself from all the electronic tethers to which you have become accustomed and obliged. It means guarding your private time jealously. It means that an appointment with your silence comes before an appointment with your stockbroker, hairstylist, personal trainer, or plastic surgeon. Finding your golden silence means making your sanity a priority.

In addition to boundary-setting, silence requires courage. Spending time alone carries a tremendous risk: We might not like our own company. When we are left alone, we are also left with all our irksome flaws, all our disappointments and regrets, and all our self-condemnation. This is what makes distraction so appealing: it keeps us away from ourselves. When you are flitting back and forth between the TV and Internet, and when you are furiously churning on the productivity treadmill, you don’t have to stop and face your own loneliness. As the late spiritual writer and Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello once wrote, “There is an emptiness inside you, isn’t there? And when the emptiness surfaces, what do you do? You run away, turn on the television, turn on the radio, read a book, search for human company, seek entertainment, seek distraction. Everybody does that. It is a big business nowadays, an organized industry to distract and entertain us.”⁵

While the risks of spending time alone are formidable, the reward is self-assurance. When you persist in silence and allow the discomfort to dissipate—which it eventually will— you wind down the commotion of your inner world and gain peace and clarity. From this posture, with your worries disarmed, your decision-making is more precise and your attitude more confident. Certainly this is a better starting point for taking a risk than a nail-biting anxiety or a spontaneous whimsy.

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Shut Up and Go Inside

How do you find your golden silence? By not thinking—literally NOT THINKING. You can’t “concentrate” your way into inner silence. Internal silence is about being patient, quelling your inner commotion, and quieting the mind. It is not doing non-auditory things like reading or journaling. Those require too much internal thinking. And inner silence is not prayer, at least not in the traditional sense of reciting words verbally or mentally.

In commenting on how to connect to our inner silence, Franz Kafka once said, “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”⁶ We find our golden silence not through a process of adding to our thoughts but through a process of subtracting from them, or letting them go. While a pure non-thought condition may be biologically impossible (short of unconsciousness), you can get pretty close by letting your thoughts evaporate like mist off a quelling sea until all that is left is stillness. This kind of silence can take literally days to reach, but it is a small investment compared to the dividends it pays in your confidence.

Each year I attend two silent retreats, one in the spring, the other in winter. Not a small feat for an extroverted guy like myself. Though spiritual in nature, these retreats aren’t some Kumbaya lovefest. They are rigorously introspective. Each retreat lasts three days and centers on achieving inner and outer silence. While the act of shutting one’s mouth is not exceedingly difficult, the act of shutting down one’s thoughts is. On the first day of my first retreat, I was struck by how noisy and agitated my mind was. I kept obsessing about all my work obligations—whom I had to call, what I left on my desk, the size of my inbox when I return, etc. But by the end of the second day, my mental treadmill started winding down. Sure, an occasional obsessive thought would float through like a wayward cloud, but the storm had lifted. By the third day I was completely filled with internal stillness and could then begin thinking again in a clear-headed way. The word that best describes this stormless place is “objective.” When you sit in silence long enough, your subjective self separates from your objective self. And the more profound the silence, the better able you are to witness your life in an objective way. This outside-looking-in state is a kind of third-person experience whereby you can look at yourself—with all your flaws—in a way that doesn’t incite defensiveness.

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Finding your golden silence helps you get ready for your risk by improving your connection to your inner wisdom so that you can “hear” the answers to your higher-order questions (Who am I trying to become? What is my purpose? What do I want? What risks do I need to take? Where am I playing it too safe? Etc.). After eight years attending these retreats, I am convinced of the value of silence. Eventually silence becomes so loud that it practically shouts at you with the risks you need to take to further your life. I’ve come away from each retreat having made a life-changing decision. On two occasions, six years apart, I changed careers. One year I ended up breaking off a relationship that until receiving silence’s counsel I didn’t have the courage to end. On another occasion, I came to the decision to ask my girlfriend to be my wife (which she did). Now, when readying for a big risk, I wouldn’t think of making the decision without consulting my golden silence.

The Wonders of Silence

Considering all the rewards that silence has to offer, it is surprising that more of us don’t plug into it. In his terrific book, Awareness, Anthony de Mello writes with feigned astonishment, “You mean you understood astronomy and black holes and quasars and you picked up computer science, and you don’t know who you are?”⁷ De Mello has a good point. We know so much about the outer world while paying very little attention to the inner one. But the inner realm is just as fascinating. Through silence you begin to “know thyself” and come to recognize, trust, and value the wisdom that resides inside you.

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Silence is the first principle of Right Risk-taking because it is a first-order risk. Before you can risk on the outside, you must take risks on the inside. You must take the risk of questioning your beliefs and assumptions. You must take the risk of spending time with yourself and face your loneliness. The more frenetic and complicated our world becomes, the more important is silence to help us get centered. Right Risk-taking requires self-assuredness and confidence, both of which gain strength when you have the courage to find your golden silence.

Putting Principle 1 Into Practice

• What questions are you grappling with that silence might help you resolve?
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• How do you handle silence? Is it comfortable or agitated? Do you avoid it? Why?
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• Do you have a “sacred space”? How often do you go there?
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• Here are a few things you can do to find your golden silence:
     Begin each day with 5 minutes of uninterrupted silence.
     Turn off your radio while driving to and
     from work and enjoy the silence.
     Select a “sacred space” and spend time there at least once a month.
     Commit to making an annual retreat. Many retreat centers offer
     retreats that are centered on silence.
     Read Thoreau’s Walking, and then take more sauntering walks.
     Stop thinking so much.