Latest / Courage into Clarity / The Power of the Pause
Transcript
- Jackie: Hello everybody and welcome to the next episode of the Courage into Clarity podcast. This is one that I've been reflecting on for some time and I'm going to start by giving some reflections around an area that often comes up when I'm working with teams and individuals. So being busy seems to be a badge in most organisations but teams who struggle aren't the ones who don't have talent, they're the ones that are often short of space. And in this episode, excuse me, I make the case for the pause as a leadership discipline, not a luxury. So I'd like to walk you through the four stages of my courage into clarity framework, courage, clarity, alignment and action and why stopping sometimes takes courage and nerve and how courage produces that clarity. What a team pause does for psychological safety and wellbeing and why paused action is better action. Before we start, I want to ask you something. When did you last stop? Not to check your phone, not to grab a coffee on the way to the next meeting but actually stop. I know when I started to do this episode I had to really think about that question. When did I actually just stop and do nothing? And that's probably quite a difficult thing to remember. I think it's probably been intentional around pausing perhaps on my yoga mat before a yoga class or maybe first thing in the morning before I reach for my phone or my cup of tea. But certainly I can't think of times often in the day when I literally have just stopped. So if you had to think about this, then this episode is for you. So welcome to the Courage into Clarity podcast. I'm Jackie Greier, and today we're talking about something that sounds small, often feels impossible, but changes almost everything that we do. The power of the pause. Why this? Why does it matter? For more than 20 years I've worked with executive teams in boardrooms, in hospitals, in many engineering firms, etc. And there's a pattern I see again and again. The teams who struggle most aren't short of talent, they aren't short of ambition, they're short of space. They're often running from meeting to meeting, decision to decision, email to email. And I know how that feels myself. And somewhere in all that motion, two things quietly take the hit. People's wellbeing. and the quality of their thinking. So today I want to make a case. Pausing isn't a luxury, isn't something we say for Wellbeing Week, it's a leadership discipline and I think it sits right at the heart of the Courage into Clarity framework. I'm going to walk you through each of those four stages and look at what the pause does at every step for you and your team and see how we use this when we're working with teams and individuals to help them use the framework to build new habits, to build new behaviours that really help them be more effective, but also improve their wellbeing and their happiness. So we'll try one together right now in real time and I'll leave you with three simple ways to start pausing this week. Why don't we pause? That's a question I guess that we could ask ourselves many times. So let's be honest about why we don't do it. In most organisations we're just busy. Busy is a bit of a badge. If you're not busy you feel like you're not contributing, you're not doing anything. There might be a fear that, you know, if my diary's not full I'm not important. A fast reply says you're committed or stopping even for a moment can feel like I might be falling behind with something. But our bodies keep a very very different score. In 2021, Microsoft's Human Factors Lab ran a small but striking study that put EEG caps on people and tracked their brain activity through a series of video meetings. When the meetings ran back to back, stress-related activity in the brain kept building. Meeting after meeting, the moment of switching from one call to the next created its own spike. They then gave people 10 minutes between meetings to rest. and the buildup didn't happen. The brain reset. Ten minutes. That's all it took. And yet how many of us have a diary with ten minutes of white space in it? I've actually heard that even 90 seconds can make a huge difference to how our brains read set. So I've learned the value of stopping long before I coached anyone. In my early career as a nurse and a health visitor, think the most important skill wasn't speed. It was the moment you stopped and looked properly. It was observation and listening because that's when you noticed what really mattered. So if I think about times when I've worked with mums and babies, when I've been listening to reports of how and what's been happening during the week, when I've gone for visits. If I really stop and listen and watch the mother and watch how she's talking, how she's moving, how the baby's reacting to her, what the interaction is between, I think I've noticed more of the information which often sits beneath the surface. And I think we can do that in the workplace as well. So, you know, listening to people, really stopping, pausing before we react and taking that time to think. and notice and be curious about what's going on for the other person can be really valuable to help us gain a bit more information so we can connect and answer and give the person what we wanted rather than just feeling like we wanted to react in some way. So I think observation and listening from that pause is really key because when we don't pause three things happen. Our stress response stays switched on and a stress brain narrows so we become much more reactive responding to whatever is loudest or most prominent rather than whatever matters so it might be that email notification coming in, that phone call, the ping on the phone, the ping on the the Teams meeting, the messages in the chat, whatever it might be. And we stop ourselves noticing ourselves and each other and the early signals that often something isn't right. So that's a real issue if we think about wellbeing, if we think about performance. And actually in my experience, it's the same issue because in order to have effective wellbeing, we need to look at our performance and make sure that we're not extending our performance from a stress response, rather from an intentional response to get more things done and to perform more effectively. So let's think about the courage into clarity framework. So courage, stage one. Brings us to the first stage, yes, courage. So now you might be thinking courage to pause, surely that's the easy bit. Well, it isn't. In a culture that rewards speed, know, stopping actually takes a lot of nerve sometimes. It takes courage in a meeting to say, can we pause here? I don't think I've understood this yet. We might worry about what other people think. We might worry about how we're going to come across. It takes courage to protect a gap in your diet. when someone wants to fill it. can't count actually the number of times that I've had coaches or people in team sessions say I can't put a gap in my diary someone will just fill it. There's no way I can keep that space but is that really true? It takes courage to sit in silence when every instinct in us says I need to say something, I need to be noticed, I need to be contributing and it takes courage for teams where it becomes, needs to become a collective practice where one person pausing on their own can look like hesitation. A team that agrees to pause together to make that commitment to take their time over decisions to make a statement can value that thinking over noise and just getting things done and rushing from one task to the next. I guess the permission really matters when you're looking at teams as well. You people won't pause if they fear it'll be read as weakness or as not coping. So if you lead a team, your pause is a signal. When you stop, you give everyone else permission to stop too. Here's a question to hold. What would it cost you to pause and what is it already costing you not to? So the next stage of our framework is one of clarity. This is the idea that the heart of all my work, you know, courage produces clarity. So we tend to believe that it works the other way around, that we need to be clear before we can be brave. So we wait, we wait for the full picture. We wait for certainty for the perfect moment. But clarity rarely arrives while we're waiting. It's actually the brave act of, in this case, the act of stopping that creates the space for clarity to arrive. I see this all the time in coaching. A leader arrives with a knot of a problem, a restructure, a difficult relationship, a decision they've been circling for weeks. And very often the breakthrough doesn't come from me offering an answer, it comes from them slowing down enough to hear their own. That's what coaching really offers. The courage is in the stopping and then the clarity follows. So when we give ourselves time and space to have coaching, to have those conversations, we create the clarity. that really allows us to often come up with the answer that's been sitting there all along. So think about when your best ideas turn up. In the shower, on a walk, driving home, perhaps on a train, almost never in the middle of your fourth meeting of the morning. I mean, that's not a coincidence. So when we step back from constant input, the mind has room to join the dots to notice what we're actually thinking. The pause gives us clarity about ourselves too. And emotion intelligence starts with self awareness and self awareness needs a gap. A moment to notice. I'm frustrated, I'm anxious, I'm feeling something in my body, I'm running on empty, I've got some tension in my shoulders, I'm noticing I'm clenching my jaw or maybe I'm talking really, really fast because I want to get things done. And before that feeling quietly makes a decision for us, we maybe don't just talk about it, we just do something instead, rather than using that feeling as data to help us guide what could be going on. So let's do a little bit of slowing the pace right down now. So we're going to do a short activity, about 90 seconds. So if you're driving, keep your eyes open and simply follow along with your breath. We don't want any accidents, but if you're not, you maybe want to sit comfortably in your seat, feet flat on the floor, get your back against the chair, put everything down, turn any distractions off and just take a few deep breaths. There's a technique called sight siteclit sighing. So researchers at Stanford compared it with other breathing practices and with mindfulness and meditation and five minutes a day of siteclit sighing gave people the biggest lift in mood and the biggest drop in anxiety. And it's simple, two breaths in through the nose, one full breath, then a small top up and a long slow breath out through the mouth. So two breaths in through the nose. One full breath, then a small top up, then a long, slow breath through the mouth. Let's do this together. Breathe in through your nose. again. One more. Can you notice what's different? Even slightly. I notice almost a little bit of fizzing in my head or my chest as I'm getting the oxygen into my brain. I'm recording this episode trying to create some space and a pause before I go on holiday. So maybe you notice something different as you do that breathing. Did your shoulders drop a little bit? Did your jaw ease? Did the speed of your thoughts change? You didn't add anything, you didn't learn anything new, you just stopped. And that's what clarity feels like when it starts to arrive. So we give ourselves space by slowing things down to start to notice things. Let's think about the third area of our framework. So the third stage is alignment and this is where the pause becomes a practice and maybe a team practice. So most alignment in teams or between people or for individuals isn't disagreement or conflict, it's assumption. We assume we all mean the same thing or that people are understanding us or I've done the right thing. We assume the silence in the room means we agree and we assume that everyone heard what we heard and we move so fast that nobody really checks apart from a quick all okay. So a team pause in the moment is you checking. It's the leader maybe who says before we decide let's hear from everyone or somebody that's actually running the meeting. It's asking a question and then leaving a few seconds of silence. It's long enough for the quieter voices to come in long enough for someone to say, I'm not sure about this. actually, can I just check that? Can we just go back to that point because I think that's really important and I'd like a bit more clarity on there. So it can be really simple. So it can be opening a meeting with a two minute round. So one word perhaps for how you're arriving today, what you're bringing into the room. That could be an emotion, that could be a thought in your mind, it could be a feeling, it could be a sense of energy and everybody just listening. So it sounds almost too small to matter but so many teams and so many people I see going straight to task as soon as they get in the room and I think we're all really guilty of that particularly in online meetings but if we take this time to just check what everybody's bringing to the room it also tells everyone in the room that people come before the agenda and it gives you information that otherwise you might have missed. So, Nite C. Klein, in her work on thinking environments, talks about how the quality of our attention shapes the quality of other people's thinking, and the pause is the attention made visible. It connects directly to psychological safety in Amy Edmondson's work. So, people speak up when they believe it's safe to, but they're far more likely to believe that when there's actually room to speak. So, Rush team shut people out without ever meaning to, moving on to the next. task, deadlines, pressures, quick action, let's just go to the next bit, not really checking in. So teams that pause really let people in. There's a wellbeing piece here too. So when a team pauses to ask, how are we actually doing or feeling, not how the project's doing, but how are we, people feel seen. They feel included and they feel connected. So often strain or stress gets noticed earlier, loads get shared, people feel much more able to share honestly what's going on rather than feeling like they've just got to tick a box and show that they're paying attention. So that's what know sustainable teams do as a practice. They don't wait for someone to burn out before they notice, they notice some of the signals and the strain and the reactiveness before someone burns out and they have these practices in that help them then prevent the burnout happening. So I had a client a while ago, team that had been working, know, large project team, having to work to strict deadlines, often working remotely, finding it difficult to connect. And all they did at the beginning of every major check-in meeting, which was a decision-making meeting, was literally to just pause and get everybody to just say how they were feeling at the beginning of that meeting. how what they were pleased with that week was another thing that I also saw them doing because so often teams because we're so busy in task Moving on to the next thing I see so often in data and in the room that we don't stop and celebrate successes and success is what motivates us So if we can do some of that as a deliberate intentional action and practice it can really help us Feel more effective feel more connected and included and motivated So stage four of our framework is action. So I know some of you thinking, well, this is all very well, Jackie, but I've got things to deliver. Absolutely. And here's the thing. The pause isn't the opposite of action. It's what makes action better. So paused action is intentional, chosen action. Instead of reacting to whatever lands in front of you, you respond to what matters. Fewer decisions often get reversed because we've got more clarity. We've got less time goes on fixing the fallout of rush calls or decisions. or poor communication and people have the energy to follow through because they haven't been running on empty because we've had some of those deliberate practices in to manage that pace to help us attend to each other's needs and pay attention to what else is going on in the team apart from what's in front of us in the team meeting. So think about the last decision your team had to unpick. Perhaps that email that was sent in haste or the project that was launched before everyone on board or the reorganisation announced before anyone asked how it would land. How often, looking back, would a pause a day, an hour or even 10 minutes have changed the outcome? Most of the rework I see in organisations isn't caused by bad people or bad ideas, it's caused by speed without space. So think about music, I think this is really nice analogy. The rests in a piece of music aren't gaps in the performance, they're part of it. They give the notes their shape, take them out and you don't get more music, you just get noise. You don't get that connection. And rest isn't a reward you earn once the work is done because the work is never done. You know, every organisation will always ask more of you. This is always my push back to teams when they say they don't have space and we've got too much to do. No matter how much you do, there will always be more. So how do you make a decision to manage what you can do in a way that means you look after yourself, you look after each other, you deliver but you don't burn out? Because we wait till everything is finished before we pause, we never will. So building pauses into our working day is how we protect people's energy. how we make performance last beyond the next quarter and for teams this is about pace not slow but sustainable. The highest performing teams I've worked with aren't the ones who never stop they're the ones who know when to stop and who build it into the way they work rather than waiting until they're exhausted and that goes for leaders too. So let's think about three pauses that you can try this week. Let's make it practical. one for you and two for your team. So one, the 90 second pause. So before you walk into a meeting, open a difficult email or make a decision that matters. Stop for 90 seconds. Take three of those cyclic size, then ask yourself one question. What do I actually want from this? That's it. 90 seconds between reacting and responding. How might that feel? Point number two. the pause point for your team. So agree as a team that anyone at any point can call a pause point. So when they do, conversation stops and you ask two questions. What are we missing? And who haven't we heard from? It means slowing down. It's just, it isn't just the most senior person's job or the leader's job. Everyone owns it. And that's courage as a collective practice, which means people are going to be more attached and committed to it and holding each other accountable. that in a compassionate way. And then three, how about some white space in your diary? So I know this is something I try to do and the lots of coaches that I talk to try to do this. So look at next week, find some back to back blocks and put 10 minutes between them. Better still, agree as a team in team meetings to finish at five to the hour or 25 past not on the dot. Now this seems really simple, but remember what that research found. 10 minutes is enough for the brain to reset. more simple and if you do them together quietly transformative. So let's bring it all together. Courage, the nerve to stop in a culture that rewards speed. Clarity, what arrives when we do. Alignment, the space for everyone to be heard and to check we're truly on the same page. And action, chosen, sustainable and far more effective than the rushed version. So the pause isn't where the work stops, it's where the better work begins. And our wellbeing as individuals and teams depends on it. So I'll leave you with one question for the week ahead as we end this podcast and I go off to pack my suitcase to go off on my holiday where I'm definitely going to be doing some pauses and I've got some books lined up to help me do that. So where is one place you could pause and what might you discover if you did? So if this episode resonated, please share it with someone on your team. Maybe that's your first collective pause. And if you'd like to explore what this could look like for your team, you'll find information about the team diagnostic and our team coaching journeys at courageintoclarity.com. So I'm Jackie Carrar. Thank you for pausing with me today. And until next time, take a breath and let's lead with courage. Thank you.