Imagine following the spirit of a silence vow into daily life. Challenge yourself to spend an entire day saying only what you absolutely must say. It’s been widely observed by behavioral psychology experts — and anyone who’s ever been on a first date — that we too often tend to treat “conversation” as a game of waiting for our own turn to speak. We miss what’s being said because we’re mentally rehearsing our next utterance. What if you could eliminate the idea that the next available mini-silence is your next opening to express whatever is in your head? What if you were limited to, say, fifty spoken words tomorrow? I think you’d listen quite differently. You’d attend quite carefully to every word you heard. You’d be attuned to what you must respond to. You might discover that the less you say, the more you hear.