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
How comfortable with silence are people in different countries.
In the immortal words of Uma Thurman:
That’s when you know you’ve found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.