The Critical Pause We’re Skipping in Business and Life
I’m currently sitting in my home office, which is really just a room I put an old desk in and call my office. This is the place where I write. It’s the place where I brainstorm and plan and make calls for the company my husband and I are building.
It’s also the place where anxiety tries to rule. It’s where I’m often rushing from one thing to the next without taking deep breaths. It’s where I’m tough on myself when I’m reading and researching and still don’t know how to do something new. It’s where I question if I should just pack up and move back to the life we had before we tried this entrepreneurial crap. It’s where I’m trying to write this specific piece, and I’m second guessing, “Is this a load of junk? Does this even make sense? Will anyone care or resonate with this at all? Am I just nuts?”
I’m going to go ahead and trust that this does make sense and that it will resonate with many of you.
Like I was saying…
When I find myself in this mental cycle, I have two primary options:
1. Recognize I’m here, and choose to stay.
2. Recognize I’m here. Pause. Recenter. Then choose to go another way.
STAYING:
Staying means I’m ok being overrun with anxious energy. It means I’m ok not being present, not being still, not enjoying what I’m doing. Staying means I’m alright letting me be excessively hard on myself. What’s at risk if I choose this? My joy, my creativity, and also my productivity. Why? Because we cannot be both creative and critical at the same time. It’s literally impossible. Creativity requires freedom. Critique requires judgment. Now, there’s a place for critique and judgment of our own work; that’s important too. BUT! If I spend all of my energy critiquing everything I do, write, create, externalize before it’s even fully exhaled, I cheapen my product, and I certainly cheapen my experience of making my product.
PAUSING:
If I go the other way though, if I choose to notice my internal chaos, pause, breathe and choose to refuse to let it keep controlling me, I choose freedom. I choose creativity. I choose joy and fun and art and all the amazing, cool things stored up in my head that I would otherwise miss. I choose invention and originality. I choose to give myself a space to freely and genuinely express what’s inside. That brings newness and excitement and enthusiasm and energy. Creating is when I feel most alive! Creating requires me to reach into the depth of who I am and draw out what is inside. It’s so rich, and it’s so beautiful. I lose all of this if I choose to just keep going and going without that crucial pause. The pause is where I find my grounding. It’s where I can re-center and beg the question, “Ok, what’s going on in me? Is this what I want to be about?”
Without this pause, I just keep on forcing, striving, perfecting. And what does all of that matter if I’ve lost my joy and creative design in the process? It’s worthless.
Juliet Funt is a speaker about what she calls “white space” and “the strategic pause”.
In short, she says that we no longer “value the idea of retreating into thought to find an idea that will turbo charge a business, or a company, or a project. That work is hard, and it’s very advanced, and it requires quietness, and we’re afraid of the quiet. Instead, we go to a new fuel source, the source of exertion, and we work hard, and we drive harder, and we log more hours, and we stay connected, and we feel as if exertion will replace the gems of thoughtfulness.”
DID YOU HEAR THAT?
We exchange exertion for thoughtful creation. We rob ourselves and the world of our thoughtful creation and offer them a whole bunch of “stuff we got done” instead. What a rip off for us and everyone else!
You know the saying, “Work smart, not hard.” Most of us totally live doing the opposite. We work, work, work, do, do, do. We let our emails and texts dictate our day rather than being in charge of our own time. We back-burner self-care because we don’t “have time”. We hustle with tasks but miss the bigger, better ideas because we don’t slow down long enough to notice what else is there.
So we must ask ourselves: what do we want more? Do we want to be “accomplished” even if the work is mediocre? Or do we want to produce less but it be more meaningful? Do we want to work smart or work hard? We can’t do both.
If we want meaningful work that isn’t exhausting us, work in which we feel energized, have clarity and purpose, we must create quiet, still space for ourselves. Quit the overload, turn off the radio, put your phone in the other room and give yourself some quiet solitude. Take 90 seconds or 10 minutes or 2 hours or whatever amount of time you need to create space. I once was in a yoga class and spent 40 of the 45 minutes just trying to still my brain. I could not find mental quietness. But I told myself in that moment that I would not cave to letting racing thoughts be my boss. I’m my OWN boss, and I get to choose how I spend my energy, even if it takes 40 minutes to try and regain that authority.
So what will it take for you? What’s one way you can create space in your life? Can you shut your office door for five minutes after your meeting to reflect on what ideas you loved most from your discussion and which ones you don’t? Will you drive home with no music or audiobook or podcast playing so that you can assess how your day really went? Can you take a short 10 minute walk around the block by yourself to hear the birds chirp and notice what thoughts rise and beg for attention?
We all possess such greatness, and the world is longing for it. But we will never discover our true greatness if we just stay busy. We need the pause. We deserve the pause.
For continued study:
Juliet’s work focuses on four passions that originate from a good place within us but can move us to an unhealthy place quite quickly. She calls them the Thieves of Productivity. Here they are:
When drive goes to overdrive
When excellence becomes perfectionism
When information becomes information overload
When activity becomes frenzy
Keep an eye out for these shifts in your days, and when you notice you’ve moved from the left to the right, PAUSE. Create space. Recenter. Change paths.
To hear more about Juliet’s important work, here are a few resources:
http://www.whitespaceatwork.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Ga_-ZO_uc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXpeGspTq64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TVcgqF08GY
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