If you are into personal development you are likely to be familiar with ‘The Power Pose’. This is a confidence enhancing technique suggested by Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist. In a nutshell, the theory is that if you feel powerful or confident you will assume certain postures reflecting how you feel inside. So, in circumstances where you do not feel confident you can do it the other way around; assume these postures to feel confident. The onlookers can’t usually tell the difference between which came first, the pose or the feeling.
It is very unlikely that you would find a LinkedIn profile pic where one is not assuming their fav power pose including yours truly. However my article is not about this popular and effective technique which I am a fan of but a play on the words to talk about something equally important. The Power Pause. This particular practice can help you be in control of your experiences to your benefit, especially improve your mental health. It’s a technique I created based on my introspections and the work I do with my mindset coaching clients.
I will be discussing this technique and as usual give you tips on how to go about practising it.
Key Points
- What is the Power Pause
- Why is it important
- How to Practise the Power Pause
What is the Power Pause
It is the ability to pause in the middle of any train of thoughts, feelings or a hard wired behaviour so that you can take control of your mindset and change the outcome.
A few years ago I was having a conversation with a friend about personal development and spirituality. I’m not talking about incense burning, crystal charging spirituality but about consciousness expanding, intuition focused spirituality. I was telling them that compared to my highly emotional and hot mess express days, I can feel myself getting good at learning to catch myself. It’s not that I was able to have a perfect spiritually wholesome, compassionate win-win situation all the time.
But, at least I am becoming more aware of my hard-wired reactions and getting a handle on them. I was noticing the types of thoughts that I was thinking, the emotions I was feeling and the actions I was urging to do on auto-pilot while in the middle of a challenging experience. This was becoming especially useful back in my corporate days having to interact with many different personalities of clients and colleagues. We all have those difficult clients and colleagues where just seeing their name on an email is enough to activate our fight or flight response.
Think of one of the most difficult people you interact with, where most of your interactions with this person have been very defensive and reactive. And then when the interaction is over you feel like shoving your fist in your mouth and let out a very loud scream. You keep asking why it is that you give into the usual arguing, defending and justifying with this person all the time! You wish you could have listened more, articulated yourself better and not let them drag you into their vortex of negativity.
So I started noticing that I can catch myself from replying to that annoying email or not feel compelled to respond to requests or remarks at meetings and conversations straight away. The more I started becoming aware of my thoughts and feelings I could pause and stop myself from reacting in a way that I would regret later. This regret is not about living up to an ideal so I will be adored by my clients and colleagues, not out of fear of doing something stupid that will cost my job or getting on the wrong side of someone which could make my work life a nightmare.
My reason was not very Mother Teresa like and was more about my own mental health at the time. I was getting very tired of the constant thinking, feeling, reacting that went on inside and out. The agony, frustration, pit in the stomach feeling, the mistakes I made as a result of reacting, the time wasted on rectifying them, the misunderstanding that followed, talking about it with friends, the constant mental regurgitating that went on in my head even during my alone time and anticipating the awkward post-challenge small talk.
So, as I was noticing my own thoughts, feelings and reactive behaviours, I started to pause. I told myself “Wait a minute, let me just stop for a minute. I can see that the momentum is picking up on this negative train and I can feel a reaction brewing inside me. Then an unusual idea popped in “How about I just pause. Count to ten… 1,2,3…4….5….6….7…8…….9…….10……. Let me just stay here for a bit without responding”. And I felt this sense of relief while on this standstill. It felt really good.
When I paused I could slow down the momentum of the usual hardwired reactions which are activated by my rational mind. The pausing had a chain reaction like effect, similar to when you turn the gas knob down to reduce the fire from high heat to a low to stop the pasta from boiling over and water spilling everywhere. As I was noticing the brewing inside of me wanting to say that sassy comeback defending myself, instead I paused. I was able to simmer it down so I won’t boil and spill all over.
I could create some space in my mind and transition into a state of being in that pause, a standstill. I could be in a pause and take control of myself, my thoughts and emotions which lead me to my reactive behaviours! Wait, what an amazing discovery. I can be in control of my monkey mind?! Eventually I could change the direction of the usual reaction, shelf it and even come up with a different response! Not reacting as per usual but being in control, being able to command my mindset to not proceed with its usual strategy. This ability to be in charge of our mindset, my friends, is the real power and a power that can be gained from a simple pause.
It is not only that you are able to stop a negative outcome, but when you pause what happens is that you could shut down the rational mind and get into what is popularly known as flow mode. Most spiritual teachers, high achievers and creatives often talk about this unusual downloading or receiving of information that they experience in a state of quietness. According to metaphysical teachings there are two aspects of our mind, one is the lower mind and the other is the higher mind.
The lower mind is our personality aspect which is very analytical and rational, working with the information immediately available via our five senses and our past experiences. The other is the higher mind or what some call the higher self which is intuitive. Intuition is more a metaphysical insight that comes without conscious reasoning. The intuition sees the bigger picture without analysis and guess work. So when you pause, you can shut down the regular hardwired programmes that run in you and can access your own intuition for guidance.
Benefits Of The Power Pause
Learning to pause is not only beneficial for our professional performance but in our personal and spiritual aspects of life too. It’s not always about getting into flow mode and finding a perfect answer and mitigating damage. Most of the time we are taught that the mind is like a wild beast and we must try to somehow wrestle it to the ground with all our might and keep it under strict guard and restraints to avoid horrible consequences. True, sometimes it feels like that. But there are simple ways of taking control of our mind.
Even telling someone that they can be in control of their mindset brings about an immediate sense of relief. We don’t always have to memorise the best phrases to respond to adversity, feel like we have no control over unexpected events and accept reactions as an unavoidable part of life and keep worrying about our seemingly negative personality traits. We can be in charge of our mindset. We do not have to live in the fear of not having control or always trying to control our mindset. Also not all techniques have to be so complicated.
Learning that I can be in charge of my thoughts, feelings and reactive behaviours have been very liberating. It took me a while to fully realise that acquiring this power is possible because like most people I have spent some time trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. Well there was nothing exceptionally wrong with me, I just didn’t realise that I can be in control of my mindset. It is powerful because we do not have to live in the fear of our own thoughts and fall victim to them. It is possible to reclaim our personal power.
An important point I would like to make is that techniques, just like tools and theories, are just an aid for us to enhance our awareness, broaden our perception and improve the quality of our lives. Our aim should be to eventually not be dependent on any of these aids and have organic control of our minds. The Buddhist parable of the raft explains this dependency. Once you get to the other side of the river, you would need to let go of the raft without holding on to it.
Here are some of the in real life benefits I have experienced personally and in my clients:
- Helps with navigating through challenging conversations both in personal and professional life. Learning to pause helps you to engage in the conversation to understand the situation from different angles, not just to win the argument with clever rhetoric.
- Helps in curbing cravings and stress eating which could lead to adverse health effects. When you learn to pause, you get to understand if you are craving food because you are really hungry or as a stress response to divert your attention.
- Significantly beneficial in managing stressful situations. Usually there is a snowball effect that takes place when you are stressed where you recall all the negative experiences you’ve had up to date and it makes the problem bigger than what it really is. Learning to pause can stop this snowball effect.
- This technique is also effective with managing anxiety and may even help overcome an anxiety attack or a panic attack. When you can eventually get to a place where you can pause, you can either challenge your negative thoughts or practise your anxiety reducing exercises.
- Helps people who are recovering from burn-out. Most who are burnt-out are chronic multitaskers. Learning to pause can help you to recognise your compulsive urge to juggle multiple acts and instead attend to your tasks on a priority basis.
- Power pausing can help you slow down your escapist behaviours such as endless social media scrolling, online shopping and unplanned and excessive texting and chatting.
- Learning to pause after completing a task is very handy and one of my favourite times to pause. Most of the time we are on auto-pilot mode trying to get through our task list one after the other. Learning to pause after a task gives you a moment to catch your breath, centre yourself and prepare for the next task before jumping right into it.
- Reminding yourself to pause during a meeting helps to stay on track of the meeting objective. It is quite easy for participants of a meeting to get side tracked with small talk and other issues which are not on the agenda. It helps to be aware of the discussion and be cognisant of the conversations which take place between the different participants so that you can direct the meeting in a time efficient manner.
- Pausing significantly helps me with reading and studying. You may be familiar with how you sometimes read the words but not fully grasp the meaning of the text. Pausing after reading a paragraph helps to break down that mindless reading and absorb the message.
- Usually when we wake up we have a replay of yesterday’s events and the upcoming to-do lists that our brain relays to us without even actively commanding them. Remembering to pause and tune out the endless transmission of the brain, helps you to be in control of your day than the day taking control of you.
- I also suggest clients to pause when they are in the middle of a positive experience. A common complaint I get from people is over-promising when they are in a happy mood without even looking at their already overflowing list of obligations. How do you learn to be in control of that? Well try Power Pausing.
- Helps you to get through a bad day. One where you slept through the alarm, paid 2.5 surge pricing for an Uber to get to work, forgot your lunch at home and missed that morning meeting. Remembering to pause can help you to centre yourself and stop this negative mood spiralling from a bad day to the worst day of your life.
How To Practise The Power Pause
It will take some time for you to learn to pause while in the middle of a train of thoughts. First of all you need a compelling reason to start practising this. I started off by feeling so uncomfortable mostly with my interactions at the work and not wanting to go through the drama and trauma anymore. Sometimes feeling so sick and tired of a particular experience can be the catalyst or the only reason for you to work on your mental health and personal development.
You might not not have a compelling why, but what I am saying here might stimulate a certain part of your brain or tug at part of your heart. You could be someone who is always looking to take your personal development game to the next level. It doesn’t really matter what your why is but having some sort of a why can help you. Just like Cuddy’s power pose is reversible, you can pause when you notice a particular train of thought or when you notice a train of thought, just pause.
Here are some helpful tips to practise the Power Pause.
- Get into the habit of pausing in the morning. As soon as you wake-up and your brain starts syncing with your awake state, pause and tell yourself, let me just stay still for a minute. Don’t analyse what you woke up thinking and feeling. Just pause, count to ten silently and stay in silence for a moment following that. Don’t take any action or try to tap into your intuition. The objective is to learn to just pause.
- Try meditating for just 5 minutes in the morning. Meditation is a type of a power pause and can also be a precursor. Meditation helps to slow down the automatic thoughts, feelings and experiences that flood our psyche in the morning by focusing your attention on breathing, music, a guided exercise or just silence. Here’s an effective meditation to practise.
- Set a reminder to pause in the middle of the day. Especially during your afternoon slump time. Mine is around 2pm. Pause and observe how you are feeling and what you are thinking. Just pause and count to ten,then stay in that pause for a moment. Try not to manipulate the pausing into making yourself productive. If you get into flow mode and an idea comes to you then that’s great, write it down. But don’t try to force your intuitive downloading.
- Pick one uncomfortable experience you wish to work on. In my client’s case, she had a friend who constantly talks over her. Instead of anxiously trying to wait for her moment to squeeze in an answer to defend herself, I suggested that the client pauses whenever she has this urge. The more she paused the more she realised that she doesn’t always have to fight for equal airtime. She realised that her friend needs to be heard as she is going through a few challenges but she needs to cut down the long phone calls in half for the sake of her own mental health. So, try to pause and count to ten silently as you find yourself in a chosen difficult experience. Don’t try to achieve anything but just pause.
- Try to get into the habit of reviewing yourself in relation to practising to pause during this chosen experience. Review at the end of the day in your journal. Answer these questions in your journal ‘How did I go with pausing?’ ‘Did I pause when I felt the urge to react?’ ‘How do I really feel after the conversation with her?’
- Starting with an uncomfortable experience is again more impressionable than with one which is not. Humans have this innate tendency to to solve problems than review the processes that are going well for them, fortunately or unfortunately. Pro tip: keep this exercise to yourself and try not to share with others as it will only distract you and slow down the process.
- Incorporating the Power Pause in the morning, during the day and at the end of the day will help you to get into the habit of practising it regularly. Tracking your progress with a habit tracker for at least 3 weeks will help to establish this practice. It doesn’t matter if you do not do a consistent job at first, but the regular reminders will help your brain to eventually hardwire this habit. At one point your parents had to remind you to brush your teeth and then eventually got to a point where you brush your teeth daily without their reminders.
All of the above tips are about remembering to pause and just practising the pause and not forcing any desirable outcome through flow mode. Let getting into your flow mode come to you organically. It’s like brushing your teeth regularly so eventually a perfect set of pearly whites will be your prize. Your ability to pause will get better with practice. As your ability gets better, you will be able to get into flow mode easily.
As always friends, be kind to yourself. Practise all these techniques from a place of self-love. A soothing approach is always the sure and steady way. Let me know your thoughts and insights you gain from practising the Power Pause. May I suggest that you pause after reading this article?
