“Pausing” as a Leadership Imperative
Guest Speaker Dr. Chris JohnsonIn this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts master somatic leadership coach, trauma psychologist, and mindfulness instructor, Chris Johnson. Chris is the founder of Q4 Consulting Inc., a Chicago-based consulting firm that helps leaders transform themselves, their teams, and their organizations to meet future challenges, grow and thrive.
Chris is a passionate advocate for the power of business to create prosperity, beauty, and happiness in the world. She’s been involved with Conscious Capitalism Chicago for over a decade currently serving as Chair, and on the leadership team of Ellevate Chicago, an organization committed to developing professional women. This past summer she published a book, The Leadership Pause: Sharpen Your Attention, Deepen Your Presence, and Navigate the Future, an eye-opening, accessible guide to developing one’s leadership via the deliberate, body-based practices that tap the wisdom and intelligence of the body.
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INTERVIEW SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS
Chris describes the practice of pausing as a way to interrupt our automatic processing and reactions and give space for reflection and mindfulness. She emphasizes the importance of utilizing this tool as a way to reset our nervous systems and check in with ourselves so that we can show up as our best selves. This mindfulness technique is specifically designed for the workplace in that it is intended to be simple and quick, a way to center ourselves and get back to work.
- Chris identifies some of the core leadership qualities that are so essential in modern times. These include presence, curiosity, a learning mindset, interpersonal connection, care, and compassion. She notes that mindfulness principles are now key to effective leadership. (3:25)
- Many high achieving people struggle with the concept of pausing and will see it as unproductive, but science shows that taking time to be present, to pause, actually gives our nervous system a chance to reset and prevents stress and burnout. (10:12)
- In this talk we touch on how to introduce mindfulness practices to people who may not be interested in it and Chris recommends a hands-on approach. Leaders can invite and encourage pausing within their teams by asking them to follow their breath or introducing it from a neurobiology perspective. (21:18)
- Apart from her pausing practice, Chris also recommends for leaders to keep meetings short and concise and encourage teams to get up and move or walk every once in a while. These small practices can have a huge effect on energy levels and productivity. (32:34)
Our bodies and minds are not built to sit at a desk and be constantly focused and productive. Taking moments to check in with ourselves, to recalibrate our nervous systems, and recenter our intentions can have profound and positive impacts in our workday. When we give ourselves space to decompress or change our habitual reactions, we become more present in everything we do. Pausing has shown to improve resilience, capacity, and confidence when applied in the workplace, and can also be used in our everyday lives.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“Pause is an interruption of an automatic reaction, an automatic habit or way of doing something. But pause gets a bad rap, because many people, especially high achieving folks, drivers, who are working their businesses often feel like they’re wasting time if they pause…. When we don’t pause, our physical system, our psychobiology gets amped up, we experience it as stress. And when it goes on for long periods of time with no remittance, then people can tend toward burnout.” (10:12)
“So having taught mindfulness for a long time, many people are like, I’m going to go away from work, so that I can practice this thing called mindfulness, or do some reflection. And actually, the call to action in this book is bring it to work, and you can practice it here in tiny doses.” (12:59)
“So pause is kind of, you know, expansive, and it can contract. But it’s a super useful, you can carry it anywhere you want, kind of practice to become fully present in the moment.” (14:37)
“Be willing to practice, be really curious. Mistakes are your friend, so if you feel like you made a mistake… It happens. Just be willing to be human, practice the pause. It will be your friend, however you choose to take it.” (42:19)
RESOURCES
Chris Johnson:
Website | LinkedIn
Book: The Leadership Pause: Sharpen Your Attention, Deepen Your Presence, and Navigate the Future
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Sue Bethanis 0:00
Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposa’s monthly podcast providing perspectives on leadership. Today we’re excited to welcome Dr. Chris Johnson. Welcome.
Chris Johnson 0:09
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Sue Bethanis 0:11
Yeah, Chris has devoted her life to the deep listing that underpins what matters most in people’s lives. She is the founder of Q4 Consulting, a Chicago based consulting firm that helps leaders transform themselves, their teams and organizations to meet future challenges, grow, and thrive. She’s a passionate advocate for the power of business to create prosperity, beauty and happiness in the world. By integrating evidence based tech teachings on the neurobiology of attention and the wisdom of the body, Chris provides professionals practical approaches to lean in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. In other words, VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous that’s a mouthful, man. Chris has been involved with Conscious Capitalism Chicago for over a decade currently serving as chair and on the leadership team of Elevate Chicago an organization committed to developing professional women. This past summer, she published a book The Leadership Pause: Sharpen Your Attention, Deepen Your Presence and Navigate the Future, which is an eye opening accessible guide to developing one’s leadership via the deliberate body based practices that tap to wisdom intelligence of the body. So that’s your bio that I read, which is a very nice bio. But I’m mostly interested in your journey, how you would describe how you got here, why you decided to write the book.
Chris Johnson 1:32
You know, you want the long or the short version Sue? The middle? Yeah, okay. The middle version is that I grew up with two entrepreneurial parents. And my father had a really severe stutter really severe. So that folks often discredited him in his capacity, because of his disfluency. So early on in my life, I would credit my dad with not only being a hero of mine, but really somebody who taught me how to pause just because it was the right kind of courtesy thing to do. Like you shut up, you didn’t interrupt you let him finish, right. There’s a lot more to that whole story. But fast forward, then about probably a dozen or so years ago, I was working with a business coach. And I was talking about some of the people I was working with. And I’ve got a history of teaching mindfulness for many years, probably about 25 years. And so I was, you know, how you do in these sorts of group things in a group coaching situations, you’re fussing around trying to sort stuff out? And I came upon, I’m like, leaders just need to freaking pause. And oh, Chris, you mean the leadership pause? And like, Yeah, cuz I need to do it, everybody needs to do it. And so that was the birth of the book name. And then it took a while to actually write it. So COVID helped out with the writing of that. Yeah. So that’s kind of the middle version. How’s that?
Sue Bethanis 3:08
Well, I love that you talk about talked about your dad. That’s really, that makes a lot of sense. And I love the way you came to the name, too. So talk to us about the leadership qualities that are the cornerstone of the book.
Chris Johnson 3:25
The leadership qualities, I actually tabbed in my book. So I would be able to speak exactly to that. I know you’ve had somebody on recently on your program, who talked about executive presence. So in terms of qualities, yeah, that was great interview, presence, for sure. Curiosity and a learning mindset, connection with oneself so that we can be connected with others, the more disconnected we are from ourselves, the less connected we are with other people that’s increasingly important. And then really care and compassion. And we saw a rise in that even before COVID and COVID put a fine point on that. So those are kind of the qualities that I see as being especially important for leaders, there are many others. But skills are really involving attention, because what we put our attention on is where all of our energy goes. And then how to work with energy, like how do we actually shift our mood shift our energetic state, in terms of being more performance ready. And I think that has a lot to do with deliberate practice with listening and engaging in conversations really listening, not just feigning that we’re listening, and then developing people. So those are kind of the skills that I think right now set us apart as leaders and that we really need to zero in on. So I’d be curious what you think about that, given your work in the space as well?
Sue Bethanis 4:49
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that discernment I would probably have in there I mean, that you didn’t say that word exactly but I think a few things that you said certainly hit upon that. Because the things you mentioned allow people to have good judgment and allow them to make good decisions. Yeah, I think that what’s happening, you know, I think even more so during COVID Is that we’ve had to make decisions without having that much information. Totally. So I was just going to ask you like, did you come up with those qualities and skills before COVID and were writing about them before? Or did you come up with them during COVID? And what’s COVID at all instrumental in have you come up with that in terms of what you’ve seen with your clients?
Chris Johnson 5:38
Yeah, that’s a really great question. Nobody’s asked me that one yet. So in terms of before, after COVID, but I think probably from COVID, and working with clients during COVID, I would say the care and compassion one as a quality, really, the fine point was put on how much we need to care for the people, all of our stakeholders, but especially those that are working for us, that are contributing to us, so we can contribute to others. That seems to the fine point there. I would say I thought about it before, but I think I’ve thought about it a whole lot more since COVID.
Sue Bethanis 6:14
Yeah, I would totally agree with you on that care. No pinpoint that. Yeah. I wrote an article in 2021. And it’s finally, about hybrid, and it’s finally, like, apropos now. But the cornerstone of that was about care and compassion and how we’re just, it’s allowing us to pause in a different way. And not an in a moment pause, but more of a general pause in terms of how we need to relook at how we look at work, just know how relationships are. I was talking with somebody. I was at a conference the last couple days and talking with a lot – it was a women’s tech conference, essentially, and talking about people wanting to come in the office and how important that was to them. But that the commute, you know, is hard. And I said, Yeah, that’s what we’re finding is that people want to connect, but they don’t want to commute. It’s just not worth it. It’s too much. It’s too hard. We’re just so used to you know, once that changed, you know, people don’t want to they still don’t want to go in every day. Now. Like go in two or three days. That’s probably the max. Yeah. So what are you noticing about that?
Chris Johnson 7:30
I’m finding the same thing. People who used to commute every day, and it seemed kind of like the thing to do, you didn’t really think you had an option. As much as now we know we have many more options. And the whole commute thing is big. I think it’s not just commuting to work. But it’s also after work events, networking events, like, do we want to drive into the city in Chicago, because it takes an hour to get there to hang around for with bad cheese? And, you know, wine or something? Yeah. So I think there’s a lot of that. And I don’t know that leaders have figured it out yet, in terms of what the hybrid mix will look like. I don’t pretend to know, do you have a beat on that?
Sue Bethanis 8:16
Well, I don’t think that no, I don’t think that there’s a beat on it. I think that there’s all basically people are doing what they want. And even if the company says three days a week, they they still don’t do that. There’s, tons of reasons why and some of which is that they’re not around anymore. So they can’t go in the office three days a week, they’ve already moved. So there has to be a lot of exceptions. And so I think that’s still back pretty much backup to the manager. Now. There’s, there’s some CEOs that are really staunch about it, and pretty much are keeping track of it. But most aren’t. And most tech companies are not going in three days a week. So then that mean, what that means is, is that it means that we have to get very creative and intentional about how we connect. So maybe people come in once a quarter or, you know, for an off site or something. And also when you’re in the office, how do you meet with people and not be on Zoom?
Chris Johnson 9:19
Right? Like why am I sitting here in an office when I could? Yeah, exactly. Right.
Sue Bethanis 9:23
So what are you noticing about that?
Chris Johnson 9:25
I’m noticing that people are describing that it’s hard to do and a resistance to going in. And in my experience. Now, I don’t think that the leaders who are asking folks to come into the office have figured out exactly the magic potion to say, hey, how do we creatively use this time together to really be together? I think that we’re all in the process of being able to create that. So then the question is how does a leader create the context to support figuring that out in any given space?
Sue Bethanis 10:00
Exactly. So let’s talk more about your book. I mean, this is certainly related. You talked about mindful pausing, and that it’s both mental and physical, of course. So why does it matter and tell us a little bit more about it?
Chris Johnson 10:12
Well, certainly one has to make a choice to pause. So pause is an interruption of an automatic reaction, an automatic habit or way of doing something. But pause gets a bad rap. Because many people, especially high achieving folks, drivers, who are, you know, working their businesses often feel like they’re wasting time if they pause. And so mentally, we have to decide to make choice pause. So, but physically what we need to be able to do, and it’s interesting, the Harvard Business Review just published their latest edition, it’s all about busyness. And, yeah, and the downsides of that. And it can lead to burnout and all kinds of stuff. Because when we don’t pause, our physical system, our psychobiology gets amped up, we experience it as stress. And when it goes on for long periods of time with no remittance, then people can tend toward burnout, you know that. So being able to start to break, that frenetic movement, the VUCA, that gets there without an actual concerted pause of some sort just allows us our biology to reset. And so being able to practice a centering pause to allow us to align our mind, our hearts, and our body, so that we’re all kind of in congruence, there’s tons of research about coherence and congruence, you know, in presence, I mean, people know when we’re not fully present, because there’s something out of alignment, we’re not really attending to what’s in front of us or people. And so being able to zero in on the physical aspects of a pause and sense myself feel myself allows me to be more present with you, you and the team, however that goes. So there’s, it’s definitely you can’t separate it one from another. And I think that if we really want to have a catalytic way of working with people, we need to zero into the body right away, because that’s the quickest way to be in the moment is to zero in on the physical sensations.
Sue Bethanis 12:21
So I mean, typically in meditation, we think about focusing on the breath, that’s the way I know to get to focusing on the body, so that we can get present. And I also, in that, I believe that in order to be able to do that you have had to have meditated. It doesn’t mean have to meditate every day. But you have had to have meditated to know what it feels like to get attentive. How is mindful pausing? Is it is it meditation? Is it breathing? Like, how is that different or similar to what Thich Nhat Hanh talks about is in terms of insight meditation?
Chris Johnson 12:59
Yeah, I think it’s not different and it’s very different, and here’s the distinction. So the not different part is that it’s bringing attention to the moment. The different part is that today, and the reason that I wrote the book, there are many reasons I wrote it, but one is because I needed to read the darn thing. So to share it with people is really that I’m going to be intentional about bringing my attention to the moment at work, and not just in the rest of my life. So having taught mindfulness for a long time, many people are like, I’m going to go away from work, so that I can practice this thing called mindfulness, or do some reflection. And actually, the call to action in this book is bring it to work, and you can practice it here in tiny doses. So I describe in the book, different kinds of pauses, different lengths, to get us started, it is very much about interrupting the automaticity of our mental mind to be totally present. So it’s the same and it’s not, it’s really zeroing in on work and how to do it at work.
Sue Bethanis 14:08
What is the automaticity? That’s a good word.
Chris Johnson 14:12
Yeah. That’s a mouthful, right? Yeah, exactly. You know, those habits of mind about how
Sue Bethanis 14:20
No, no, I know what you mean that just never put those all that all that together? Yeah.
Chris Johnson 14:24
Yeah. I had to learn a new word to write about it. Right. Exactly.
Sue Bethanis 14:30
Take us through, like you just mentioned there, like there’s different lengths and different types of pauses. Give us some examples, and maybe we could practice.
Chris Johnson 14:38
Oh, yeah, I’d love to practice. So one of the guys and actually I see Lin on the call. I know she knows Rand Sagan and I do some work with Rand. I talked about Rand in the book. He was a little bit of a case study, he talks about a micro pause like just catching himself, which is a phrase I write a lot about in the book, How to catch ourselves, being ourselves in the moment and having the micro pause. So before you pick up the phone, when it rings, before you open the door to leave just a momentary micro pause on purpose, then there might be a longer pause, I’m going to take a 10 minute break at work and I’m going to go into a quiet space, and I’m going to just sit and start to notice my breath. Or I’m going to sit and notice what’s all around me. Maybe I’m sitting outside like I was right before I came up for this call, and was listening to the birds kind of feeling the breeze, noticing the sensations and just like noticing just for the sake of noticing, right. I’m on a vacation now with my mom, which is a planned longer pause. And it’s like, I’m not going to do much of anything on this break. But I really want to be with my mom and I wanted to look at gardens and I want to be all about the gardening. So that’s a certain kind of pause. We can talk about sabbaticals those can be longer. So pause is kind of, you know, expansive, and it can contract. But it’s a super useful, you can carry it anywhere you want, kind of practice to become fully present in the moment. Does that help?
Sue Bethanis 16:11
Yeah, yeah, that’s great, great examples, in my experience with mindfulness, I studied at Spirit Rock quite a bit. Nice. Yeah, I haven’t done it a long time. I haven’t been there on time. Because I think once I had my kid, which was 17 years ago, going there and having to put my phone away just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work for me, you know, it’s like I need to be able to be on call. So I just choose not to do that. But I’m sure somebody could convince me otherwise. But maybe now I could as I’m getting older. I want to go back to what I said before, I don’t believe that, I don’t want to make it a negative, I believe that, in order for us to be able to do the micro pauses, you have to have had some sort of metitations so you even know what it feels like to feel present in that way so that you can actually access it. Because without knowing how it feels, it’s hard to access those micro. So tell me your opinion about that.
Chris Johnson 17:06
I would say I respectfully probably disagree. And here’s the thing. Yeah, so for those of us who have chosen to follow a mindfulness practice, we have a fair bit of experience about like, what is this thing called a pause. But you know, anybody and I’m convinced of this, especially with a lot of the folks I’ve worked with over the years, one of them I write about in the book, Paul, he was a happened to be a Vietnam veteran. And at the time I met him, meditation was the furthest thing from his mind, he had seen active duty combat, lost some people, did some things there that, you know, he didn’t want to talk about, like a lot of them. But by the time I met him, he’s an entrepreneur, building a business and very much one of those driven characters. And when I first met him, he couldn’t sleep a full night. In fact, he hadn’t slept since Vietnam through a whole night. And so he wanted me to promise that I could help him and I’m like, you know, I don’t think so. I know, I can promise that if you practice what I’m talking about, you will have something happen. And so we started very rudimentary, like noticing when you breathe in through your nose, and you breathe out through your mouth, and then starting to just follow the breath. He got it. And he taught me, right, I’m supposed to be teaching him but he’s teaching me he taught me like, Yeah, you don’t have to start off right away full on committed, you can use your own natural expression, and I believe, Thich Nhat Hanh talked about that, too, just following the breath, you know, following your feet in a walking meditation. So I think people have more capacity than we think. But we’ve also made mindfulness kind of a out there like a subspecialty thing. And it’s kind of about being alive. I’ll just say it’s kind of about being alive and
Sue Bethanis 17:21
Breathing , you know, just being very simple about just noticing your nostrils. And that to me is how you get present is you notice something about your body. So the easiest to me, the easiest way to notice something about your body is your breathing. And it’s just rather than like feeling a tingling or whatever feeling, it’s just you have to breathe. So yeah, you know, so notice it, and that can get you. I kind of think of it as like a you know, I don’t even know how you spell it. Like you’re just over it. You’re over here and you’re – Yes. So I’m going to open up the line. Anyone have a question so far? About the mindful pausing?
Chris Johnson 19:50
Well, and can I just say hello to some of these folks I know like Lynn and Romi and Steve, thanks so much for coming today and joining in this I’d love to see your mugs. Send. Hi, Romi. Hi, Steve, nice to see you guys, I’m so glad you have a question. This is a great time to ask guys.
Steve 20:13
A struggle that I have is seeing, you know, members of our team struggling with stress, particularly during the pandemic. And not being able to coach them to think about mindfulness as a tool to help them adjust. It’s, for whatever reason, it’s not in there, something that’s on their mind. And I find it very difficult to encourage folks to try and pick up this habit to deal with stress, even as I see it real literally destroying their lives.
Chris Johnson 20:49
So your question is,
Steve 20:51
How do you open their minds to have this conversation as as a boss, frankly, it’s somebody sort of accused me of it to say brainwashing is taking it too far. But right, well, you know, I don’t need this stuff yet. I literally see you putting on pounds every week, and yelling at people and recognizing that you’re having a tough time right now. I struggled with that.
Chris Johnson 21:18
Yeah. No, I don’t think you’re alone. You know, what I would say to that is, I’m a pretty hands on kind of gal. So if you were to come in my office, and you were crabby, and etc, I might say, Steve, Hey, would you? What’s up? You know, do you have a minute, you sound like you’re agitated? Yeah, I’m agitated. I think when you want to try something, I’m all about the experiment. And I would probably say, let’s just do a little experiment. And I’ve asked people to engage in a practice, kind of like Sue said, maybe we could practice together. Because when people are really stressed out, what we tend to do is more of the same stuff. So if I overeat, I’ll probably overeat. If I scream, I might scream more. Sometimes people shut down instead, those are similar, not similar to each other, but their frequent reactions to stress. So part of the pause is like, let’s just take a moment and see if there’s another alternative to the habit way that we react. And I might actually say, hey, let’s do this. So I’ll do it right now. Let’s do it. So I would say to all of you, let’s just sit up nice and tall. So you want to feel your tailbone in your chair, if you’re sitting in a chair, if you’re standing at one of those cool standing desks, just find your find your tailbone. And let’s just take a moment. And we’ll go with what Sue said first, because I think that’s right breath is something that’s both conscious and unconscious. It’s available to us all the time. So let’s tune into the breath here with just our attention. And you might want to close your eyes. Let’s see if you can notice where breath is most vibrant for you. Is it at your nostril? Is it at your chest? Do you notice it in your ears. And just allow yourself to take a moment or two to really just follow the circular nature of an in breath. And a little bit longer out breath. Let’s do that for just a little bit longer. And as you exhale out this next time, let the breath kind of fall to the background. And then bring your attention to what it feels like to sit on your chair. So feeling your seat or your feet if you’re standing and tune into gravity holding you in your place and then with your next outbreath allowing that too to fall to the back. And then just simply sitting here for a moment. Probably noticing some thoughts come in. Let them come in and then let them go. There’s no need to follow them right now. And you might have to do that 100 times and that’s just perfect. And then take one last breath on purpose and on your outbreath come back here with your attention. I’d love to hear specially Sue or Romi. But anybody else? What did you notice just in that very short sitting, what did you notice in yourself in your physical experience?
Romi 25:23
Stillness. And to be just at peace, relaxing, and getting my attention to where the breath is helps me to stop a little bit my thoughts and when I became aware of thoughts again, just to let them again, go to again focus like an exercise to come back to the breathing again. This is this is like the beat what I felt or what happens to me.
Chris Johnson 26:06
Got it. So thanks Romi when you said that peace was that? Uh huh. Psychological sensor? Did you feel a peace in your body? Or both?
Romi 26:21
Maybe this peace refers to a connection with me. Yes, maybe that is what I am trying to express. We’re using the word peace.
Chris Johnson 26:37
Thank you. How about you? Sue what do you got?
Sue Bethanis 26:40
What I got. Yeah, definitely relaxing, grounding. Got me here more. But you know, my I have a monkey mind for sure. Like I’m always thinking about stuff. So thinking about the palm trees that were on the side of the road that I’m sure people picked up. Yeah. So we’ve had a lot of wind. So there’s palm leaves everywhere. So that’s what I was going to, then I had to try to come back.
Chris Johnson 27:11
Got it. Thanks. How about you, Steve, I saw you come back. And my question was, what did you notice with that short little practice?
Steve 27:20
It just always helps me very slow the heart rate, relax the mind, slow them. For me, the biggest thing is slowing the mind down. And especially right now. And I’ve got two things going on at the same time, unfortunately. And but it’s a wonderful feeling. And something I wish I’d known about before the pandemic I had to learn during the pandemic made me a better executive for sure.
Chris Johnson 27:47
Well, you know, it’s interesting, your question, because I think the tendency for many is to try to think our way into responding differently. And we actually have to feel our way into it. So so your question about, gosh, if somebody doesn’t have a mindfulness practice, can they do this? I would say yes. And if you’re willing, if we’re willing to like, take somebody by the hand, and like, hey, let’s just sit for a second. Or sometimes I’ll go on a walk with people. And then we slow down the walk a little bit, and we bring our attention to the breath, and the walk, things like that give people a different felt experience. And then they’re a little bit more willing to try something else. And otherwise, they just think you’re nuts. And then it’s like, okay, you think I’m nuts anyway, so that’s fine. And I can live with that. But if people really want to, like, do something different, it’s a great way to help people shift. It doesn’t have to be super big. Yeah.
Sue Bethanis 28:47
Right, which is important, because they will, willy nilly and out there. Yeah,
Chris Johnson 28:51
exactly. Exactly.
Lynn 28:53
I’ll jump in just a little bit. As, as a biologist, scientist, someone was asking, how do you before how do you I’m gonna use my word. You didn’t You didn’t say this legitimize get get an opening for this, but I often talk about you changing your nervous system when you take a deep breath. That’s right, literally. And then I give a little tiny, tiny little explanation of the two kinds of nervous systems. That gets people’s attention. And, you know, I’ll say the phrase, take a deep breath, as has become trite. And there’s actually a biological reason.
Chris Johnson 29:38
That’s right. That’s a really great point, Lynne, thanks for bringing that up. Because when we marry that little bit of neurobiology and like, Hey, you can shift your nervous system. Oh, by the way, you can shift your mood and your energy too, here’s how, take a breath and all of those things together, people will respond. So thanks for putting that fine point on that. That’s important, for sure. And for that matter, Lynn, do you do this practice with your people too that you’re working with?
Lynn 30:06
Well, I do. As you know Chris, we, in our leadership work, this is a major part of our leadership work. And with a goal of instilling a practice after practicing with us for a year, we give them like, as you pointed out, varying opportunities, varying experiences with different leaders, I mean, instructors and coaches of the ways we lead them through and it’s usually done, I do it like, as you do in session often as a together. So it’s everything from the quick, deep breath to a longer, longer centering, and we have language for it, right? We have some language that fits into the executive suite. We call it recalibration, and I share that across different kinds of clients, and it’s a winner. You put it that way, and I heard you say game ready. Game readiness? Yeah. Take it back to the sports analogy, people Oh, okay. Be performance ready.
Chris Johnson 31:21
Right. And I want to learn how to deal with pressure more effectively, right, that language a lot, like I just can’t handle the pressure, I seem overwhelmed, I can’t admit that I’m overwhelmed. So then it’s like, Oh, if we give you some practices of different bite size qualities, then we can help you cultivate your resilience and deal with pressure a little bit more effectively. I think that part of the point is to not mystify what a simple pause can do just to state with clarity that it’s a very powerful practice on a short scale and a much more comprehensive scale, should one want to take it up as a practice.
Sue Bethanis 32:04
You know, before the pandemic there were natural pauses in between meetings, because people had to walk from one meeting to another, and that’s taken away now. So it means that people have to context switch really quickly. Yes, sometimes they’re going to meeting that, you know, that flows into another one and similar, but many times, they’re not many times they have to like completely shift. So what are some ideas that people can use to do that to context switch to move from one thing to another? If they’re angry about something and somebody having to move into something else to be up?
Chris Johnson 32:34
There’s a whole lot in that question. In terms of shifting, though, one of the things is to shorten your meetings, make them really effective, have more much more effective, efficient meetings to get work done. And to declare the kind of meeting it is, is this a getting done meeting? Is this a brainstorming meeting? Are we working on innovation? You know, are we doing a plan? What kind of meeting is it? So that’s one thing. The other thing that I talk to people a lot about is you need to be up and moving. Somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes, you have to get up. And you just have to get up. There’s a lot of research talking about the biology of getting up and moving. Literally moving our bodies getting water, that alone can make such a difference in terms of context shifting. So those two things right away. And then I teach people often a centering pause. So this would be akin to the recalibration that Lynn’s talking about but it might just be, I just want to align literally what I’m thinking with what I’m feeling about the situation at hand. And then my capacity to take action in my body. And those three things could take like, I’m just going to center, lift up my vertical spine, take a couple of deep breaths and shift gears, that alone can help us context shift from one to another. But you have to do it intentionally. Right. It’s not just gonna happen on its own. Usually.
Sue Bethanis 34:08
Yeah, I can’t emphasize that more and more in terms of how important is to get up because we’re literally like sitting in our desks, like, eight hours. I mean, I don’t do it very often, because when I have clients, I’m probably doing it, you know, two to three hours a day at the most, and I go play pickleball in the middle of day, on purpose, but so when the days I do have to be like just last few days, I was in a conference all week, or I mean all day, and that was a different kind of intensity, like just being on I can’t believe I used to do that all the time. Totally out of practice to do that. So that’s one kind of intensity. The other one is to sit at your desk for eight hours and there’s people that are doing it for 10. Like they get up eight o’clock, they’re not done till six and they’re like that’s what they’re doing. They go to the bathroom. That’s it. Yeah, I just, I don’t know how they’re doing that. Well, that’s not the way that was before the pandemic, because at least they got to get up and go to the next meeting.
Chris Johnson 35:09
Quite frankly, no disrespect intended to anyone, they’re probably not doing it as well as they think they are. Because we can only concentrate for such a period of time and the brain requires a little refresh with the glucose, we use tons of glucose to concentrate. And if we don’t get up and move, eat something, hydrate, all of that, that really helps. Going back to the biology that Lynn was talking about where biological creature, so we need to just like, hey, I need to get up and go and move. One of the upsides I think, from the pandemic is a fair bit of permission that I see like people, like we’d prefer, you’re on camera, but if you can’t be, you know, go take care of what you need to and come back. And in some ways, treating people a lot more like they’re adults, like, I’ll take care of myself, if I need to have a little break, and then come back, which I find to be a positive upside. I don’t know what you think.
Sue Bethanis 36:07
I agree. And I think also, like people are taking some of my classes, hey, I want to take this with me on the phone, and go on a walk, great. Let’s do it. I can take notes you don’t have to take notes. So I think that I encourage that, and encourage them to do that with their teams. So it’s a little less casual. If they are meeting with the customer? Probably not. So like, take the meetings with their teams on, you know, in the forest. My case, it’ll be on the beach tomorrow. So, yeah, I can’t emphasize that more. I really can’t I just, we need to get up and out. I mean, I my whole emphasis on people is to be outside. Yeah, like I don’t care when, but you got to be outside once or twice a day, like at least. And I think that’s hard for people.
Chris Johnson 36:53
I think it is hard for people. It kind of goes back to the choicefulness, though, right? Like, do we want to be in react mode? So life is coming at us, work in our leadership roles coming at us? Or do we want to be a choice about how we respond to the situation? And, you know, one of the questions you asked, and I wrote about is this notion of triggers. So Steve was kind of talking about it. So somebody’s like, triggered, they’re angry, or they’re gaining weight, maybe they’re sitting too much. You know, Triggers are beautiful things. And most of us like, we get triggered, it’s like, I want to hit somebody or I want to scream, or I’m gonna go have that doughnut or something. But really a trigger is an opportunity to like, Oh, something I care about is getting affected. So it might be my identity, it might be my comfort level, it might be that we have different political views about something. But a trigger brings us into the moment super quickly, often negatively, although it doesn’t have to be negative, but often, and it’s an opportunity, like, Oh, what do I really care about? Oh, do I care about this team? And I’m really irritated with Steve on my team. And yet, you know, he might have something worthwhile to say if I can get past myself to listen to that. So like, could I just take a pause to like, Oh, I’m gonna listen to him. So triggers to me are the way in to a lot of the depth work that many of us on this call like to do that I like to say, I prefer to play in the deep end of the pool, where there’s a lot of transformational work and triggers will get us there every time if we can learn to pause and be with them and unpack them.
Sue Bethanis 38:46
Yeah, it’s so difficult. I have a 17 year old so you can imagine how much triggering that is. Yeah, I mean, like all the time. It’s amazing it’s like not all the time, but some of the time, I’ll say to myself, I know there’s something I supposed to learn from this. So that’s one way for me to deal with the trigger is to Okay, another learning, okay, so let’s just to be able to be on the outside of it. Otherwise, it’s so easy to be just so in it. But it’s hard to do that when you’re in it, to say to yourself, What am I supposed to learn from this? You’re not, you’re already triggered. You’re already like, so. So what I talked about is that you have to get to the other side of it very quickly, so that you can reflect on it, even though it might take five seconds, or it might take five minutes. But you’ve got to get out you got to get out of the amygdala so you can get to the reflection of it, or you prevent it, you can anticipate and prevent it. So, yeah, so I think but these are hard to do. God, they’re hard.
Chris Johnson 39:51
They’re really hard. And one of the stories I tell in the book is about this guy that was a trainer years ago. that I worked with his name is Todd. He’s an amazing kind of experiential outdoor trainer guy. And we’re with this large scale engagement we were on, we had 200 CEO and C suite leaders together in a merger situation. And he was doing some interesting kind of experiential work with a beach ball. And you can imagine all sorts of things with that. But one of the things that Todd said is he’s like, you know, you have to, there was a game that we’re playing, it’s like you have to catch yourself doing the thing you do in order to do it differently. And that phrase really stuck with me like, we have to catch ourselves being ourselves. Like we all have a tendency to react in a particular way. Yeah, maybe we have a small repertoire. But you know, we have our go to things. Irritation, and impatience is just one of mine. I’ll tell you straight away. And so if I can catch that, like, as it starts to go, then maybe I can divert traffic. And I have inevitably, a pause is involved, right. So I’m on vacation, I just mentioned that my mother made part of the arrangements. We were supposed to stay in a place for four days. And we realized yesterday that the reservation she made was for three. And it was 10 o’clock at night. And we had no place to stay tonight. And I could feel the ‘I can’t believe this mom.’ And it was like, hold on, just wait a second. Nobody’s gonna die if we make a reservation over at this other place. But I could feel it. And I could, there were little stories starting to happen. And it was like, Okay, how do you want to show up, Chris? Catch yourself. You’re being impatient. How do you want to show up? Those kinds of opportunities happen all day long. Oh, yeah. Right. Obviously with family. Yeah. Especially with family. So if you can catch yourself with your 17 year old like I caught myself with my mom, then. Then you it’s, it’s a part of a practice, right?
Sue Bethanis 39:51
Yeah. Yeah. That’s the families are always good. Well, this has been lovely. Any last advice you have for us? You know, strategies to integrate. For the folks on the call.
Chris Johnson 42:19
I would say be willing to practice, be really curious. Mistakes are your friend, so if you feel like you made a mistake, like my mom was beating herself up, I’m like you made a mistake. It happens. Be willing to have the human. Just be willing to be human, practice the pause. It will be your friend, however you choose to take it. That’s what I’d say. Thanks Sue, appreciate it.
Sue Bethanis 42:45
Sure. I want to just remind everybody about the book Leadership Pause: Sharpen your Attention, Deepen Your Presence and Navigate the Future. You can find Chris at Q4-consulting.com. You can also find her on LinkedIn at Dr. Chris Johnson. Well, Happy spring break everyone. Happy spring. And we need spring. We do need spring. So we’ll see you next time. And again, Chris, thank you so much for all your wisdom today. Appreciate it.
Chris Johnson 43:18
Take care. Ciao.