To Get What You Want, Try Shutting Up
Silence makes us feel awkward. Deploying it can be a superpower.
4 min
To get what you want, try closing your mouth.
A well-deployed silence can radiate confidence and connection. The trouble is, so many of us are awful at it.
We struggle to sit in silence with others, and rush to fill the void during a pause in conversation. We want to prove we’re smart or get people to like us, solve the problem or just stop that deafening, awkward sound of nothing.
The noise of social media and constant opinions have us convinced we must be louder to be heard. But do we?
“I should just shut up,” Joan Moreno , an administrative assistant in Spring, Texas, often thinks while hearing herself talk.
Still, she barrels on, giving job candidates at the hospital where she works a full history of the building and parking logistics. She slips into a monologue during arguments with her husband, even when there’s nothing good left to say. She tries to determine, via a torrent of texts, if her son is giving her the silent treatment. (Turns out he just had a cold.)
“I should have just held it in,” she thinks afterward.
We often talk ourselves out of a win. Our need to have the last word can make the business deal implode or the friend retreat, pushing us further from people we love and things we want.
“Let your breath be the first word,” advises Jefferson Fisher , a Texas trial lawyer who shares communication tips on social media.
The beauty of silence, he says, is that it can never be misquoted. Instead, it can act as a wet blanket, tamping down the heat of a dispute. Or it can be a mirror, forcing the other person to reflect on what they just said.
In court, he’ll pause for 10 seconds to let a witness’s insistence that she’s never texted while driving hang in the air. Sure enough, he says, she’ll fill the void, giving roundabout explanations and excuses before finally admitting, yes, she was on her phone.
For a mediation session, he trained a client to respond in a subdued manner if the other party said something to rile him up. When an insult was lobbed, the client sat quietly, then slowly asked his adversary to repeat the comment. No emotional reaction, just implicit power.
“You’re the one who’s in control,” Fisher says.
Acing negotiations
To be the boss, “you gotta be quiet,” says Daniel Hamburger , who spent years as the chief executive of education and healthcare technology firms.
He once sat across the negotiating table from an executive who was convinced his company was worth far more than Hamburger wanted to pay to acquire it. What Hamburger desperately wanted to do was explain all the reasons behind his math. What he actually did was throw out a number and then shut his mouth.
Soon they were shaking on a deal.
Hamburger, who retired last year and now sits on three corporate boards, also deployed strategic silence when running meetings or leading teams. If the boss chimes in first, he says, some people won’t speak up with valuable insights.
Days into one CEO job, Hamburger was confronted with two options for rewriting a piece of the company’s software. He didn’t answer, and instead turned the question back on the tech team.
“People were like, ‘Really? Are you really asking?’” he says. By morning, he had a 50-page deck from the team outlining the plan they’d long thought was best. He left them to it, and the project was done in record time, he says.
A day without speaking
Staying mum can feel like going against biology. Humans are social animals, says Robert N. Kraft , a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at Otterbein University, in Ohio.
“Our method of connecting—and we crave it—is talking,” he says, adding that it excites us, raising our blood pressure, adrenaline and cortisol.
For years, Kraft assigned his students a day without words. No talking, no texting. Some of the students’ friends reported later that they’d been unnerved. After all, silence can be a weapon.
Many students also found that when forced to listen, they bonded better with their peers.
When we spend conversations plotting what to say next, we’re focused on ourselves. Those on the receiving end often don’t want to hear our advice or semi related anecdotes anyway. They just want someone to listen as they work through things on their own.
The question mark trick
Without pauses, we’re generally worse speakers, swerving into tangents or stumbling over sounds.
Michael Chad Hoeppner , a former actor who now runs a communications training firm, recommends an exercise to get used to taking a beat. Ask one question out loud, then draw a big question mark in the air with your finger—silently.
“That question mark is there to help you live through that fraught moment of, ‘I really should keep talking,’” Hoeppner says.
At a cocktail party or in the boardroom, you can subtly trace a question mark by your side or in your pocket to force a pause.
Sell with silence
Fresh out of college, Kyler Spencer struggled through meetings with potential clients. Some sessions stretched to two hours and still didn’t end in a yes.
The financial adviser, based in Nashville, Ill., realized he was rambling for 15-minute stretches, spouting off random economic facts in an attempt to sound savvy and experienced.
“I basically just bulldozed the meeting,” says Spencer, now 27.
He started meditating and doing breathing exercises to calm his nerves before meetings. He now makes sure to stop talking after a minute or two. The other person will jump in, sharing about their life, fears and goals. It’s information Spencer can use to build trust and pitch the right products.
His client list soon started filling up, and happy customers now send referrals his way.
“It’s amazing,” he says, “what you learn when you’re not the one talking.”
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The voices reshaping how Australians think about money — and why credibility matters more than reach.
6 min
The best financial advice many Australians are receiving right now is not coming from licensed advisers charging by the hour. It is coming through a phone screen, in the ten minutes between work and dinner, from creators who have built credibility the hard way: by being right, being transparent, and being specific in a space where vagueness has always been the easy default.
This is not a ranking by follower count. Follower count is a measure of distribution, not of quality. What follows is a ranking by substance — credentials, accuracy, community depth, and the quality of what an audience actually learns from following these accounts. The distinction matters, because the Australians acting on this content are making real financial decisions with real money.
1- Queenie Tan – Corporate Authorised Representative; Co-Founder & Director, Invest With Queenie & Billroo
There are finance influencers who talk about building wealth, and there are those who document it in real time with receipts. Queenie Tan belongs firmly in the second category. Starting from a $400-per-week income, Tan built her net worth past $1 million while publishing the actual numbers — income, savings rate, investment decisions — for an audience of more than 400,000 across platforms.
She is a Corporate Authorised Representative, co-founder of the personal finance app Billroo, and the author of a book that has become a practical reference for young Australians navigating ETFs, superannuation and property. What separates her from the crowded field of money educators is precision: she does not talk in principles when she can talk in percentages.
2- Alan Kohler – Editor-in-Chief, Eureka Report; Editor-in-Chief, InvestSMART Group; ABC News finance presenter, host of Inside Business.
If Queenie Tan represents the new wave of personal finance creators, Alan Kohler represents something the new wave will spend decades trying to build: institutional credibility that has survived multiple economic cycles. As Editor-in-Chief of the Eureka Report and InvestSMART Group, and a decades-long presence on ABC News, Kohler has spent more than thirty years making financial analysis accessible without dumbing it down.
His coverage of RBA decisions, market movements and economic policy is cited by podcasters, journalists and fund managers alike. He is not chasing virality. He does not need to.
3- Aleks Nikolic – Corporate lawyer; host, Big Swinging Stocks podcast
Most finance creators address the mechanics of money. Aleks Nikolic addresses the psychology — and that distinction explains why her following is as loyal as it is. Operating as Broke Girl Wealth across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, Nikolic covers ETFs, crypto and investment strategy, but her real differentiator is a willingness to discuss the emotional architecture of financial decision-making.
Shame around debt. Fear around market volatility. The limiting beliefs that stop people acting on what they already know. In a space where confidence is routinely performed, her candour is a genuine competitive advantage.
4- Bryce Leske & Alec Renehan – Equity Mates Media
Equity Mates did not build a following. They built a media company. What began as a podcast by two friends learning to invest has grown into Australia’s most established investing media brand, covering ASX stocks, ETFs, global markets and fund manager interviews across podcast, social and YouTube.
The longevity is the credential. Equity Mates has operated through multiple market cycles, a global pandemic, and a generational shift in how Australians engage with investing — and its audience has grown through all of it. When the hosts speak, their listeners know they have been paying attention for years.
5- The Lazy CEO – CEO & Founder, Showpo; Shark Tank Australia investor
The metric that matters most on social media is not followers — it is engagement, because engagement signals trust. Jane Lu, known as The Lazy CEO, maintains an engagement rate of approximately 1.15 per cent on Instagram, which is exceptional for a finance account of his size. Her 242,000-plus followers are not passive consumers: they ask questions, share experiences and apply what they read.
Her content focuses on business finance and wealth building, and the active comment sections are the clearest possible evidence that her audience does not merely scroll past.
6- Tash Invests – Founder, Tash Lends; Forbes Australia 30 Under 30
Tash Invests built her following on a premise that sounds simple but is rarer in practice than it should be: she publishes the actual numbers. Not approximations or ranges or anonymised case studies — her salary, her savings rate, her portfolio value, her net worth, updated and on the record.
Having bought her first property at twenty-two and grown her documented net worth past $1 million, she has become the primary reference point for young Australians trying to understand what building wealth on a moderate income genuinely looks like. The specificity is the product.
7- David Scutt – APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group
The authority of most finance social media content rests on research and reading. David Scutt‘s authority rests on having done the job. A former Treasury Dealer at Arab Bank and the Commonwealth Bank, former ASX Business Supervisor, and former Global Markets Editor at Business Insider Australia and anchor at ausbiz TV, Scutt now brings that direct market experience to his role as APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group, rather than relying on secondary commentary.
When he discusses foreign exchange movements or ASX dynamics, it is not because he has read about them. It is because he has traded them.
8- Meddy Demars – Investing & crypto content creator
The gap Meddy Demars fills is specific and underserviced: connecting global macroeconomic events to the practical reality of Australian investors. When the US Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates, when inflation data moves, when commodity prices shift — most Australian finance content either ignores the local implications or translates them poorly.
Demars, operating across TikTok and Instagram from Sydney, does the translation well: explaining what global conditions mean for Australian stocks, savings rates and investment portfolios in terms that are accessible without being condescending.
9- Simran Kaur – Founder, Friends That Invest
Friends That Invest is arguably the most successful community-building exercise in Australian personal finance, and Simran Kaur is the reason why. The New Zealand-based creator — whose audience is predominantly Australian — built a podcast, a book and a social media presence around a single insight: that the personal finance world was not speaking to young women, and that the consequences of that gap were significant.
The measurable cultural shift that followed — women engaging with investing concepts in communities that had not previously existed — is the kind of impact that most financial literacy programmes aim for and rarely achieve.
10- Effie Zahos – Money Editor at 9News
Effie Zahos is one of Australia’s most recognised financial commentators, appearing regularly across 9News, A Current Affair, Today and Today Extra as 9News Money Editor. Her role puts everyday money questions, from mortgage rates to cost-of-living pressures, in front of a national broadcast audience.
Before television, she spent years as editor of Money magazine, building the editorial foundation for her current commentary. She is also Director and Money Commentator at InvestSMART, an ambassador for Canstar, and a published author, with her financial advice available in print as well as on screen.
That combination, decades of editorial experience, an active broadcast presence, and a body of published work, is what makes her commentary carry weight beyond any single platform or post.
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