Monday, September 7

Stop explaining yourself

You over-explain because you want the other guy to sign off on you.

Justified27 Speech11 Approval5

Key takeaways

Answer the next question with one sentence
Let the two-second pause sit without filling it
Count your extra sentences for one full day

TL;DR

You over-explain because you want the other guy to sign off on you. Stop adding the paragraph after the sentence.

Answer, then stop talking

It shows up in nothing places. You buy the cheaper tool and tell the clerk why. You leave a gathering early and give three reasons. You order water and say you are driving later, which is not even true.

Watch the extra sentence

Count them for one day and it gets embarrassing. Somebody asks what you did this weekend and you build a small legal defense. Nothing. Worked in the garage. And then out comes the whole brief about the project, the reason it took so long, the money it saved, all of it delivered to a man who was making conversation while the coffee brewed.

The extra sentence is not information. It is a bid for a verdict. You want him to nod so you can feel settled about a decision you already made three days ago. He nods because people nod. You feel nothing, because a nod from a coworker cannot carry that much weight, and so you go find another person to tell.

half-finished cup of coffee on a cluttered desk

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Let the silence sit

Here is the hard part. When you answer plainly, there is a pause. Two seconds where nobody has told you that you did fine. That pause feels like disapproval. It almost never is. It is just a pause.

You used to fill it every time. You told your brother why you turned down a job, then kept going until you could hear yourself selling it. He was not asking. He was eating a sandwich. Learn to sit in the two seconds. That is the whole skill.

Today

Answer the next question you get with one sentence and let the pause happen without filling it.

Go deeper

The reason you can drop the extra sentence is that the verdict is already in, and you were not the one who argued it. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1 Read it slow. No condemnation. Not pending, not under review, not contingent on the guy in the break room agreeing with how you spent Saturday. If that is settled, then every room you walk into today is a room where you have nothing left to prove. You still answer honestly. You still take correction when it is real. But you stop treating ordinary people as a jury, because the case is closed and the sentence was carried by someone else.