Pause

#Beingaleader means you need to learn to pause. Pause before you respond. Pause before you react. Pause to allow all the facts to emerge.

#Beingaleader means you need to learn to pause before you respond. We live in a culture that seems to require us to have an opinion. About everything. It’s not just that we are supposed to have the same opinion as others. But we are just supposed to have an opinion. Pause. Many times I just don’t care enough about the subject matter to warrant an opinion. Even if the subject matter is important, I just don’t want to expend the mental capacity or lose focus from other more important (to me) things to conjure up an opinion. Maybe it would require too much emotional energy and I just don’t have it to give. You don’t have to have an opinion about everything. Take a pause and see if something is important enough to you to respond to.

#Beingaleader means you need to learn to pause before you react. Are you an emotional reactor? Feel the need to ‘do something’? To ‘feel something’? Pause. Let the emotion subside before reacting. Oftentimes you will find that time itself is the best thing for the moment and your reaction will actually increase the amount of time you will need to spend on an issue. Reactions in the moment tend to be less helpful to solving a problem than almost anything. If you are interested in solving the problem and not immediately reacting, you are exercising the control of yourself needed by a leader.

#Beingaleader means you need to pause to allow the facts to emerge. Facts are pesky things. They sometimes are on their own timetable in terms of revealing themselves. Pause. Allow them to come to the forefront. Maybe then you won’t embarrass yourself so much or have to retract something you said or did in response to incomplete facts. This is a missing ingredient in many leaders today. They don’t like facts getting in the way of their agenda.

#Beingaleader means you sometimes need to pause. So take a breath.