Why Pausing Feels Impossible

You're likely feeling it in your own world: the buzz of new freedom. People are heading back to offices. Nine months of online school is over. A non-locked down summer looms. In late May, I started hearing another kind of buzz: folks wouldn't be attending my parenting webinar live. Zoom fatigue, bedtime, time difference and a looming holiday weekend...all add up to make a tough time for a live event. I decided to pause and re-evaluate.

The act of pausing, though, as I've talked about before, can be hard. It often FEELS right to do the opposite: double down and push harder. Pausing feels counter to what we believe we should do i.e. move fast and break things. Even if the factors have changed, it feels right to push on. Doubling down is all part of the process, isn't it?

In Think Again, Adam Grant tells me I'm not alone in this thinking. He says "when we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn't going as we'd hoped, our first instinct isn't to re-think...( it's to) double down and sink more resources into the plan,". The thinking is if we put forth more effort, we can make it happen.

Grant says that grit (that combination of passion and perseverance) is behind our tendency to double down. This feels true when I've double downed in my personal life. I eat less and exercise more if I want to lose weight. I gradually build up to longer distances when I train for a 5K. I study harder and longer if I need to pass an upcoming test. That's all grittiness. Work-related doubling down, however, feels more complicated than mere grit.

When it comes to professional doubling down, however, meritocracy's anthem "work hard and you will get ahead," is never far from my mind. The relentlessness of the message lingers despite the future shame and guilt when I fail. It persists despite me knowing that hard work is not a guarantor of success. The "work hard and...." promise of future success is way larger than personal grittiness.

But other people also influence our doubling-down. We don't want to disappoint someone. Or we don't want others to think we are less qualified or not as smart. We worry what will happen if we say "no". Will we be asked again? None of that fixation with what others think has anything to do with grittiness. It has everything to do with a culture that values a "yes" to everyone else over meeting our own basic needs.

What if, instead of doubling down, we were to pause?

In a pause we catch our breath. We have a chance to look up and out, instead of down and in. In a pause, we are afforded the space to listen for our intuition. There is a moment to notice how our body feels. We have an opportunity to act on our personal values. A pause also gives us time to consider something else: would doubling down serves us and the recipients of our work?

Here's another thing. Pausing and changing course is a thing that people do. It really is. Not everyone goes full speed ahead, moving fast and breaking things. But we often don't see the pause because it is invisible to everyone but the pauser. But it doesn’t have to be. What if we pause and share a bit of our thinking behind the pause? We can tell people that we are pausing and in doing so, show them that it happens and they can do it too.

If we don't take a pause, especially if things aren't going as planned, we rely on doubling down to somehow make up for things going off the rails. We rely on what is available to us when we are breathless and frustrated. I don't know about you but these are not the conditions under which I make my best most critical decisions.

Living in a culture that valorizes speed, binary thinking and "going big" can make you feel as if pausing feel wrong. But people pause. Even "smart" people. Even the most ambitious and productive people. Anyone can pause. Pausing is actually a good thing. It's a thing that anyone can do. For more on what happened in my pause and how I did it, head here for my video on Instagram talking about exactly that.