A client says yes, then goes quiet. You follow up. Nothing. You follow up again. Still nothing. Most salespeople read this as disengagement and push harder — but the silence may be telling you something the words never did. The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, writing in the 1780s, argued that human communication rests on two distinct foundations: the 'principle of veracity' (people generally say what they mean) and the 'principle of credulity' (people generally believe what they're told). What Reid noticed — and what modern communication researchers call 'leakage' — is that these principles break down in opposite directions under pressure: people stop saying what they mean long before they stop appearing to agree. In finance and insurance especially, where clients often defer to perceived expertise, the visible 'yes' and the actual decision can quietly diverge for weeks. The practice worth building: treat a client's silence after agreement not as friction to overcome, but as data to decode. What are they not saying — and why might saying it feel costly to them?

Think of a deal or conversation that stalled after an apparent agreement — what signals did you explain away rather than examine?

Drawing from Scottish Common Sense Philosophy combined with Communication Theory — Thomas Reid (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 1786, on veracity and credulity as social foundations)