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Confort with silence in different countries
(piefed.jeena.net)
So I'm from Germany but I live in Korea. And especially in the beginning when I arrived here as a agile coach for a big automotive supplier company where I was supposed to teach them the new processes and so on it was terrifying.
I would do a presentation of something and then my expectation was that we would talk about parts of it and there would be follow up questions about details, etc. but more often than not there was just silence. And that would eat me up inside to a degree where some times I would complain about it and just cut the meetings short.
Over time I realized that they are comfortable sitting and thinking about what I showed them.
But it's still difficult for me :D
UK should be in there twice. Londoners on the tube during evening rush hour are extremely comfortable with silence.
This made me wonder... What "silence" are we talking about here? "Not talking" or "no noise"?
Not talking
I was going to say, depends how far north/south you are.
Down here on the south coast you'll be looked at with extreme scorn if you try to fire up a conversation with a stranger. As god intended. People who can willingly talk to strangers are utterly alien to me.
I grew up in the southeastern US, so I'm used to casual chitchat with strangers just being the polite thing to do. I've had to learn not to do so, at least in most cases, now that I live up north.
It's especially odd because I'm an introvert by nature, but present as an extrovert because of my cultural upbringing.