Great leaders are great listeners, and therefore my message today is a simple one - talk less and listen more. The best leaders are proactive, strategic, and intuitive listeners. They recognize Put down the phone and just be. Take time every day to linger in your own thoughts. Sit silently in a dark room without background noise. When you learn to enjoy the silence that is your own thoughts, you'll be prone to less wordiness when you open your mouth. Your words will be worth more because they aren't as cluttered and your thoughts When you speak less, people will have the desire to know you more. It's better to speak if silence no longer works for you. How To Apply. Listen more than you speak. Let the fools expose themselves. Don't shoot off your mouth, or speak before you think. Don't be too quick to tell God what you think he wants to hear. God's in charge, not you—the less you speak, the better. ". Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. ". Communication is more than having the best vocabulary or enunciating your words perfectly. It's a two-way street; listening is just as important as speaking. A major insight into human behavior from pre-internet era studies of communication is the tendency of people not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared. This tendency is called the "spiral of silence." 1. Swedish Proverb. Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours. Better listen to a broken string than never having bent a bow. Shortcuts often turn into very time-consuming routes. Let the other party be heard too (before you judge). Research, my own and others', has also shown that men tend to talk far more than women in what might be called public speaking — formal business-focused contexts, like meetings. In a now SmTPb.