She did not talk her way in…

I have been doing a lot of work in the last couple of months with an executive coach. One of the things I have learnt is that how we as women ‘over explain things’ and talk too much. And in my reading on some of the forgotten codes of strong women of history, I want to use Catherine the Great as the inspiration for this letter to you. Before Catherine ruled an empire, she learned a harsher art: how to remain inwardly active while outwardly constrained.

Catherine's particular value lies in the union of thought and administration. She is remembered as a ruler who wrote, read, annotated, corresponded, and reasoned at scale. This makes her especially relevant to the modern woman, whose battles are not fought with armies but are constantly fought with attention, language, timing, and the ability to remain intellectually sovereign.

Catherine the Great arrived at the Russian court at fourteen. Foreign. No allies, no fluent Russian, no claim to anything. Every visible weakness was material for someone else's strategy. Catherine's rise begins with an essential disadvantage. She was not born Russian. She entered the Romanov world as a German princess whose position depended on adaptation, observation, and survival.

She did not talk her way in. She read, she observed, and she learned what the historians later called the education of silence — the discipline of remaining inwardly active while outwardly contained. By the time she ruled, she had turned it into method: gather what the room reveals, decide on paper before speaking, and never mistake the desire to answer for the duty to answer.

She held power for thirty-four years. Not by volume. By timing. The court she entered was not a gentle school of belonging. It was a place of rank, suspicion, vanity, surveillance, and quickly shifting favor. In such an environment, every visible weakness could become material for someone else's strategy.

Two of her disciplines belong in our rooms today.

Most of us treat our silence in meetings as failure. We drive home replaying it: I should have said something.

Catherine treated silence as intelligence-gathering. While others performed, she collected: who aligns with whom, what the real objection is, what the room wants, but will not say. The person who speaks last, with what the room has revealed, holds the advantage over the person who spoke first to fill the air.

You are not being quiet. You are collecting.

Every justification you add signals that you believe your position needs defending. The room hears the signal before it hears the argument.

Catherine's court taught her that the person who over-explains, hands the audience the material to dismiss her. Her rule was the opposite: state the conclusion. Hold the reasoning until someone earns it by asking. When they ask, you answer from strength — they came to you.

Catherine learned early that silence is not emptiness. It is data collection. In volatile courts and organizations alike, people regularly reveal themselves. They speak too much, flatter too eagerly, boast too early, complain too openly, or betray the shape of their ambition in conversational excess. A woman who cannot remain silent misses this information because she keeps interrupting reality with herself.

Your reasoning is an asset. Stop giving it away unprovoked.

The three-sentence rule. Make your point in three sentences: the position, the strongest piece of evidence, the ask. Then stop. The silence that follows will feel unbearable. Hold it anyway & the first person to speak after a proposal usually concedes something, and it does not have to be you.

Write the meeting before you enter it. Catherine drafted her positions on paper before any minister entered the study. Fifteen minutes with a notebook before your negotiation does the same work. Three lines: my position in one sentence, the two things I will not concede, the one question I will ask instead of explaining. You arrive with verdicts, not feelings — and verdicts do not ramble.

Think of the next room where you will be tempted to prove you belong. You already belong. The work proved it before you walked in.

Say less. Collect more. Let them come to you.

What Modern Women Can Still Learn from Catherine

The modern woman cannot reproduce an imperial court, but we can learn from the mental habits such a world demanded.

What Catherine ultimately teaches is that mental power is built before public power appears. The woman who seems composed in a meeting, in the boardroom, calm in conflict, precise in writing, and difficult to provoke did not improvise those qualities in the moment. She trained them beforehand. It is procedural.

With love,

Christina

Has over-explaining cost you a room or have you found your own way to hold silence? Write to me. Letters to HERloom exists for exactly this, and your account may be the one that names it for someone else. Anonymity always respected.

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