Having the Courage to Pause
Thanks to Katie Moum via Substack
It is a great privilege to have a mission in life, as Rachel Carson, the author widely credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement, once observed.
Being mission-driven lends a sense of direction and purpose to our lives, which has become ever more important to so many of us in recent years. Committing to a mission greater than our personal success also leads to greater happiness and well-being.
But one of the challenges many mission-driven people face—in organizations, communities, and at home—is that we often feel we can never stop working.
There are at least three reasons for this:
Our mission is likely important.
Our 24-7 culture suggests that downtime is a quaint thing of the past.
And so many critical, even life-or-death, challenges demand our urgent attention today.
Yet some of the world’s greatest and most courageous mission-driven leaders have recognized a contrary critical truth: Pausing can be essential, especially when the stakes are high.
The Value of Pausing
In Nancy Koehn’s book, Forged in Crisis: The Making of Five Courageous Leaders, she recognizes that each of the five leaders profiled—Erneest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson—understood this.
“At times, doing nothing at all was the best action each of these leaders could take,” Koehn writes, adding that each leader learned “how to step back from a specific instant, assess the larger landscape, take the measure of their own emotions, and only then make a decision about what, if anything, they wanted to do.”
This kind of quality reflection only happens when we take a pause.
This is widely recognized in some industries, such as the medical profession, but not others. The authors of a 2021 study out of The Netherlands, for example, wrote:
“Research has shown that taking ‘timeouts’ in medical practice improves performance and patient safety. However, the benefits of taking timeouts, or pausing, are not sufficiently acknowledged in workplaces and training programmes [sic.].”
So, as we head into the holidays—a natural invitation to pause—may we all find ways of doing so that enable us to greet 2024 with new insights, determination, and courage.
Wishing you the happiest (and most restful of) holidays.