CAL106 On STOP – the purposeful pause (solo)

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. What if there was a really simple, yet incredibly powerful way to handle stresses to handle those. Difficult moments when we feel pressured into making decisions or struggling with back to back meetings and so on. Well today, I just want to share with you a very simple technique that we'll call stop. That will highlight the power of just taking a purposeful pause. Before I get to describe that. Just want to recognize that we missed the last episode, Mainly, because of my travels and because some of the arrangements for doing another interview, didn't quite work out. So this will be a short solo episode today. And I want to talk about stop. Because it is a technique that no matter who I talk to about it, whether it's in the PhD class, on, from surviving to thriving or whether it's talking to a group of leaders, Stop is a technique that people report again and again, and again, as something that's made a huge difference to them. And something that is so simple to do. So what is stop? Stop is an acronym that stands for S for stop. T take a breath. O, observe. P proceed. And let me walk through each of those in a little bit more detail. So stop. It's about just interrupting your thoughts or feelings at the moment. And just taking a purposeful pause. In whatever you're doing in whatever you thinking. And in that pause, you really can find your power and your presence. The T take a breath is. Just noticing your breathing for a second. And then you might just deliberately take a breath in gently and slowly through your nose. And. Expanding your belly as you do that. And, and an even slower breath out, if you can. And in that pause. Doing the O, the observe. Now what you observe. will, make sense relative to the situation you're in. It could be that you're just taking a moment to observe your thoughts and feelings, your emotions. It might be observing your physical sensations. How your body's feeling. It might be observing the situation and surroundings. Who else is around, what else is going on? What's the story going on in your mind? What reactive inclination do you have in this moment? So it's actually stepping out of reactivity. And just taking a step back and taking a little bit more of an objective stance. And then the P for proceed. And again, what this actually means will be dependent upon the situation. But it's about having stopped, taken that breath observed what's going on. It's about making some more purposeful choice. In how you then want to move forward. Like it could be how you want to respond. What's one thing you want to focus on. Uh, what could be a next step that you want to take? And again, it's just that shift from being reactive. To taking more control of being responsive. And we can talk about using stop in a myriad of situations in our everyday lives, where people have found it useful. And it could just be. Remembering to stop when you actually feeling really stressed at the moment. And you just need to step back for that minute. And this whole stop routine can literally take seconds. Or you might want to extend it for a minute or so. If you want to just sort of breathe a little bit more or just do the observing and thinking about how to proceed for a little bit longer. But we're only talking about seconds to minutes. So when you're feeling stressed, you may just want to. Take that breath. Just become more centered and more focused. Before you move on. It could be stopping before you react and blow up at something. You know how sometimes we're in situations where we feel that this reactive response coming up that we know is not going to be very helpful. One student a couple of years ago reported that they applied this technique when they were writing a paper with a co-author. Who wasn't delivering in a very timely way. And it was coming right up to the deadline. And they were just about to send off a really snarky email to this person. And somehow they had the presence of mind to remember stop. So they actually literally stopped, took their hands off the keyboard, stood up, just walk to the window, looked out while they did that take a breath and just observe, have a think about what's going on. And then they could come back and handle the situation and I'm much calmer and more rational way. That was more likely to result in the relationship being preserved and in getting the input that they needed from the person. So we recognize those situations where we can tend to react. Using stop to help us shift to a response mode can be really useful because it helps, it helps us shift from some sort of instant judgment or. Instant sort of, uh, you know, like maybe aggressive action to becoming more curious or, or stopping us from saying the thing that we'll regret. We can also use stop before making a decision. One of the big pressures in academia is often the pressure to feel like we ought to be saying yes. And how difficult it is for people to say no. Especially if it's a power relationship and someone has asked us to do something and we felt pressured to, to just jump in and say, yes, and our gut is telling us, this is not what you want to be doing. Stop here can be really useful as well, because it can allow us to actually connect with what our gut is saying. You know that observing what your body's telling you. And instead of doing the reactive yes. To something that you really don't want to do. You may be able to say. Thank you for asking me, can I get back to you on this and actually take some time to really seriously step back and think about it. So the stop just creates that pause that enables you to. To stop making it a reactive, yes. To a more considered response later on that may or may not end up being yes, but at least it will be something that you will feel like you've had more of a choice about. Another situation where stopped can be really useful. Is. Doing it between tasks or between back to back meetings or appointments or whenever you're changing contexts. And this is somewhere where I, I personally find stop incredibly helpful. Often in my role, I have had relatively back to back meetings are often with not with a lot of space in between. And just very deliberately taking time between each meeting to do this sort of stop. Helps me let go of the last meeting. Become more centered and focused. And be ready to focus on the next meeting or the next interaction. I also use it when I'm switching context, say coming home between work and home. And before I put the key into the door, when I get home, I'll do a stop just at the front door. Just to become more present and more focused to make that deliberate decision to step back from all the things that are running around in my head that I've carried with me from work. And I know that that's something that many people have reported as being really useful. Stop can be also really useful. When we're talking to people that we're trying to develop and grow, and we know that we often have a temptation to jump into advice mode often inappropriately. And it's not saying that advice isn't useful. Um, and there's a previous episode that you can listen to about this, but sometimes we're too quick to give advice. And I also find stop incredibly useful and incredibly powerful for just recognizing, I can almost feel that advice coming up in my throat and the stock just gives me the moment just to say you go down, just hang on for a tick. And it lets me access then a curious question to go back to the person and ask for a little bit more information or ask for what they've been thinking about it. What solutions might they come up with? And again, the number of times I've been so grateful that I've actually been able to access that stop that purposeful pause, ask that curious question. And we've actually often come to a situation that's far better and far more impactful for the person because they have felt much more empowered to find their own solutions with support with scaffolding. So there are many, many situations that I'm sure you'll be able to come up with as well. About when it may be really useful to make use of stop. And accessing stop though, as a technique, take some work because it is about developing a new habit. So one of the things that I often recommend to people is you may want to think about. Just in terms of starting to get familiar with it and for it to become a little bit more of a first reaction for you. You may want to look at setting a random timer. Just to have an alarm or an alert or a notification at different times during the day or at some regular intervals during the day. And whenever you get the notification, you use that to take your 15 seconds, your 10 seconds, whatever it is. Just to do that purposeful pause to do that. Stop. You might have a little stop sign hanging on you on your laptop screen. That reminds you between your meetings. Just to stop. Take that breath. Observe what's going on. Decide purposefully how you want to proceed. It's such a simple technique and yet it's so incredibly powerful. For managing stress for enabling us to be more present to ourselves and to the others that we're interacting with to give our full attention. To make more reasoned and reasonable decisions. And just to have a better day. So I look forward to hearing how you go, trying out, just stopping. Just taking a stop, taking that purposeful pause. And finding your power in that pause. You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www. changingacademiclife. com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts. And you can follow ChangeAcadLife on Twitter. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues. Together, we can make change happen.