For the first time in his life, Jason turned off the self-help. He didn’t need the next chapter. He was already writing it.
She laughed. She ordered the old-fashioned.
He smiled slightly. “I know a lot of things. But right now, I know you’re about to order an old-fashioned.”
The real test came two weeks later. His friend Mark—the natural alpha of the group—tried to cut him off mid-sentence at a happy hour. The old Jason would have shrunk. But the audiobook’s voice echoed in his memory: “Silence is a weapon. When interrupted, stop. Look at them. Wait.”
Desperate, he hit play.
Jason started small. He stopped using filler words in meetings. Instead of saying, “I just think maybe we could try…” he began saying, “We’re doing this.” The first time he did it, his manager blinked. No one objected.