Are you afraid of silence? If you are, you’re not alone. Many people are uncomfortable with silence and want to fill it with noise. But silence can be a powerful device in your toolbox.

For instance, when a pro interviewer feels a subject is holding something back on a particular topic, they’ll often use the power of silence at the end of the answer to draw out more information.

If you resist the temptation to respond too quickly to the answer, you’ll discover something almost magical. The other person will either expand on what he’s already said or he’ll go in a different direction. Either way, he’s expanding his response, and you get a clear view into his head and heart.

Try counting to three – or five if you can stand it – after your subject answers a tough or thoughtful question. This method can seem agonizing at first, but – used with empathy – it works wonders to develop a deeper rapport between two people.

As a society, we just don’t seem to like silence! We’ll do just about anything to avoid it. We’ll spend countless hours preparing for conversations, just to make sure there won’t be any uncomfortable silences. We’ll talk when we have nothing to say. We’ll even throw in filler words like “um” or “uh” to make sure there isn’t a moment of silence in between our words. Here’s the irony: Those pauses in communication can be one of the most powerful communication tools we have.

Summing-up: You can hold someone with silence and make them go on. You tend to feel you need to fill all dead air. There are times when if you just say no more than ‘uh-huh,’ and pause, they’ll add something out of a kind of desperation that turns out to be pretty good. Let them sweat a little and then they’ll come up with something that they were perhaps not going to say.