Episode 19: The Importance of Quiet and Stillness

In a world obsessed with hustle, noise, and nonstop stimulation, what happens when we choose silence?

In this episode, I'll explore the transformative power of quiet and stillness, particularly in politics, diplomacy, and the corporate world.

Whether you’re an introvert who craves calm or a busy creative who struggles to slow down, this conversation invites you to reimagine stillness not as absence, but as presence.

And yes, my attempts at quiet while recording this episode were foiled by Mother Nature. Oh, the irony!

#DagHammarskjöld #StillnessMatters #QuietTime #CreativeMind #SoulCare #IntrovertLife #MindfulMoments #SacredSilence #SlowLiving

Sara's book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld is available now! Click here to buy it on Amazon. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Quiet and solitude, Dag Hammarskjold, diplomatic negotiations, American culture, loud extroverts, corporate America, introverts and HSPs, leadership styles, disarmament, world peace, Shark Tank, AI revolution, corporate bias, stillness and quietness.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey,

Hello, Hello and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 19 of decoding the unicorn the podcast. I appreciate you joining me. Today. I will be talking about quiet and solitude. It's a little bit funny, kind of ironic, because I have a duckling in the house. Two of my ducks had a duckling, and they more or less abandoned it, and I found it wandering around confused. And I'm like, Well, it's my turn to step up and be a mama duck. I guess he may be audible in the background with his chirps, because I don't know if you know this, but ducklings are quite loud, especially when they're little and they're not totally sure what's going on. So it is what it is. Nature has her own ideas. And I'm like, Yay, I want to sit down and record an episode about quiet and solitude and stillness and nature's like, hey, that's great. So I'm going to give you a baby duckling, and he's going to be super loud and confused. Okay, awesome. Nevertheless, onward, we press

Just a reminder. You can find Sara's book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld on amazon.com the link is available in the summary for this episode. And now back to the show. 

Dag absolutely understood the value of being still and being quiet when he was leading diplomatic negotiations or trying to mediate a disagreement, he didn't charge in. He wasn't like a drill sergeant yelling and screaming. This is how it's going to be. This is how we're doing everything. It's my way or the highway. Doug wasn't like that at all. Another reason why this has been on my mind is because I feel like American culture in particular glorifies people that are loud, tough, people that are full of bravado and machismo, that seems to be very in style. And I don't really get it. It's not something that resonates strongly with me, and it's not something that I particularly want to be around. And I think whenever you have communed with dag spirit, if you've read, you know, shameless plug a book like decoding the unicorn, and you've seen the difference in the way that dag approached leadership, people, management, negotiations, etc. It's like we could have it so much better. It doesn't have to be all about bravado and loudness and screaming. There's a big difference between using brute force versus using intentionality and finesse. If you've ever watched a kid that gets frustrated putting a jigsaw puzzle together, you know they're getting toward the end, and they're like, I just want the pieces to fit. So sometimes they're trying to shove the pieces into place because they just want to hurry up and get to the end result. It's like, well, wait a minute, finesse the pieces. Don't shove them into place, like the cliche about shoving a square peg into a round hole. We know that it doesn't make sense to do that, and yet, sometimes in life we do. There are also plenty of Christian scriptures about be still. Listen for the still small voice. It doesn't say the voice inside you will be yelling and stomping and shouting and throwing a fit. Maybe that's more the human voice, and not so much that of the Divine. But dag was a realist, an idealist in some respects, yes, absolutely, but a realist as well. He had a very good sense of what was possible in a negotiation, what was probable and what was possible. And he was careful not to try to shove that square peg into a round hole, not to come in threatening people coming in, hot coming in, loud. That was not his style at all. We've probably all heard the saying that You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And I wonder where that ethos has gone in modernity. We see it not only in the American political landscape. Surely I don't think I need to even toss out any examples there, but we also see it in corporate America. So many introverts and HSPs have their own horror stories. I know I certainly do, of being in meetings, sitting in a conference room, and the loudest extrovert is the one who wins the day. It doesn't matter if that person's ideas are actually the best, it often matters. Did this person sing the company song? Did they use. Jazz hands? Did they have loud volume? Because corporate America has the tendency to confuse loud volume and jazz hands with actual engagement. They think John Doe actually really wants to be here because he's loud. He's forcefully expressing an opinion. He's using a lot of wild gesticulations. So that must mean that he's bought into the mission and he really wants to be here.

And they often overlook the introverts and the HSPs, who very well may have much better ideas. They might need time to formulate those ideas and to put them together, as opposed to just saying them on the spot. But it doesn't mean that the ideas themselves are any less valid. I want to be even more specific, even more raw about this. It's not only the loudest extrovert with jazz hands who usually wins the day. It's usually the loudest, extroverted male. And I'm going to go even deeper than that. I'm going to be even more real with you. It's typically the loudest, straight Wasp, extroverted male. Women and minorities need not apply. Go sit down. And if you are a female minority, introvert, even more so go to the back of the room. Sit down. We don't want to hear from you. John Doe is loud. He sings the company song. He comes in wearing a vest with the company logo on it, and so we need to listen to him. And it's like, oh, really, we don't, not all the time. Anyway, Dag had this quiet reserve about him, and sometimes the media would portray that as coldness or being aloof or being a snob, which simply is not the case. He knew that negotiations and diplomacy are very often not about shouting, not about loudness, not about bloviation and making wild gestures. Over on my nighttime podcast, the conserracy theories, I recorded an episode about Stanley Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove, as well as Sidney Lou May's film fail safe. They deal with the same basic topic, but the lenses are different, because Kubrick does dark comedy satire, and there are moments in Dr Strangelove that are laugh out loud funny, and it's about a horrifying topic, which is nuclear war. If the Cold War had resulted in nuclear bombs being dropped on, say, Washington, DC or New York and Moscow, what would it really have looked like fail safe? This is a lens that's more dramatic, more harrowing. And there's a character played, I believe, by Walter Matthau in fail safe that was based on Herman Kahn. And it's like how George C Scott's character in Dr Strangelove was based at least partially on Curtis LeMay. Curtis LeMay having nicknames like bombs away. LeMay and the demon, this archetypal Cold War warrior who felt like the answer to everything is bombs drop enough bombs do enough, scaring people, and you don't have to do much else. Another theme that we see in both films is that the idea is, if millions of people die, if there's nuclear fallout, if there's radiation, if the Earth is not really right for another 100 years, we don't care. It's an acceptable loss. Like there's a scene early on in fail safe where this Herman Cahn character is saying, well, we might lose eight or 10 million people, but that's okay. It's an acceptable loss. We can do without them anyway. And I sat there like Magneto in X Men apocalypse, when he's like, if it was your wife, if it was your daughter, if it was your sister, how would you feel about it? Then would you still feel that it was an acceptable loss, and some of the people probably would. I think some of these war hawks are so sociopathic that they don't even have the impulse to protect their own families, just diabolical. But the point I'm making is you have these warrior types, tough, bravado, machismo. Just drop bombs. If we lose millions, it's okay. And then you have somebody like DAG, who's saying, I am committed to disarmament, I am committed to world peace. What do we need to do? What kind of negotiations, what kind of discussions need to take place in order to defuse, to de escalate, not to ramp up, but to de escalate. Instead of throwing gasoline on a fire, what can we do to put the fire out, to smother it, so that it goes away and people can walk away with their lives intact, and the peace can be kept so often that. Happens from quiet, from solitude, from stillness, not from yelling, not from shouting, not from rushing around. And again, even in the business world, this is prevalent, not only in meetings where introverts and HSPs are ignored, the quieter voices get shoved to the back of the room in favor of some loud echo chamber. The other night, there was an episode of Shark Tank on and there was a lady who was saying, I can't go full time into this business yet because it's not generating enough revenue. I believe that it will. We're just not there yet. And Kevin, of course, Kevin kind of plays the villain figure, and always has from the very beginning, his his character or caricature on the show has always been the same, and he's like, Well, I'm not going to invest in that, because I want, as an investor, for an entrepreneur to be full time in the business. You may be a company owner, but you're not really an entrepreneur. And I don't want that. I want somebody who's hustling 24 hours a day to make my money back for me, and then make a profit. And if you're not going to do that, I'm not interested. So I'm out, and she was crying and she was upset, and I just thought, like, this is corporate America. This is what it really boils down to. And I think we will see more of that, actually, as the AI revolution continues. I read just the other day that Amazon now employs something like 1 million robots, and I sort of shrug my shoulders, like, what did you think was going to happen? Robots don't need to take bathroom breaks. They don't they don't unionize. They don't have vacation days. They might not have a sick day, you know, like, well, they won't have a sick day. I'm just thinking of scenarios that happen to humans. You know, humans in a body, in a flesh suit. This is the world in which we live. We're not supposed to have that quietness. If you're not running, then you're falling behind. It's like the phrase that let me get this right. It's something like hustle beats talent. When talent doesn't hustle. I see that now as an artist, and I'm like, Yeah, okay, I just No thanks. I'm opting out of that system. I'm opting out of it. I don't want it. No, thank you. There's so much more power in that stillness, in that quietness, and it makes me so very happy and so very proud that we have somebody like dag whose legacy that we can turn to and see that the loudest, most macho, arrogant, crass person doesn't have to be the person who everybody exemplifies. It doesn't have to be that that personality type is always put up on a pedestal. There is a different way. There is a better way, and I feel that the example that we have in Dag Hammarskjöld is a very powerful example.

Just some food for thought. Stay safe, stay sane, stay healthy. Have some solitude, if you can, and I will see you in the next episode.

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