Slow Down to Speed Up: The Power of the Pause to Accelerate Continuous Learning

How often do you find yourself racing from meeting to meeting, jumping between tasks or rushing to fill the gaps in conversation with your own answer? Rarely giving yourself or your team a moment to breathe, reflect or think. Today, I wanna introduce you to the power of the pause. It might be the most powerful practice you can learn.

Master the pause and you can transform your leadership. Welcome to Chain of Learning, where the links of leadership and learning unite. This is your connection for actionable strategies and practices to empower you. To build a people-centered learning culture, get results, and expand your impact so that you and your team can leave a lasting legacy.

I’m your host and fellow learning enthusiast, Katie Anderson. In today’s episode, we’re gonna explore the power of the pause. So let me ask you what happens inside you when there’s silence, when the talking stops, [00:01:00] even just for a few seconds.

I literally just counted to 10. How did that feel for you? Was the silence uncomfortable? Did you want me to just get on with it? Or maybe even hit fast forward? The pause was uncomfortable for me too. I literally had to count in my head and count on my fingers to resist filling in the silence. This is a daily practice I’ve had to build to counteract my natural jerk.

This is a daily practice I’ve had to build to counteract my natural urge to jump in, to talk fast, to fill the space, to rush on. And later in this episode, I’m gonna share more about why this intentional practice matters so much. Mastering the pause can change everything from your relationships at home, your impact as a leader and your own wellbeing.

The [00:02:00] pause helps you create space for reflection. For learning and for connecting with your intentions. What might happen if instead of fearing the pause, you embraced it. So why are we so uncomfortable with silence? With the pause, whether you’re an experienced leader or just starting your career, most of us struggle with slowing down.

With pausing. We fill our calendars with meetings and to-do lists instead of time to think. We rush to fill the void in conversation that actually gives others and us space to reflect and to respond. Two forces in particular, make this difficult First. The addiction to action. We live in a do, do, do, do, do world where speed is rewarded and action is often mistaken for progress productivity looks like checking off tasks on a list.

But in this rush, we fall into what I call the doer trap, which I explored back in episode 40. Being the hero who saves the day or a [00:03:00] pair of hands that just gets it done even though it wasn’t yours to do. Solving problems for others when they don’t have an immediate answer and mistaking motion for impact.

Think about your own calendar. How much time is blocked for thinking or reflection for you? Or for your team, and even if you set it aside, how often does it get overrun by meetings and other urgent tasks? When you’re moving fast, it’s easy to get reactive. You fall back on habits, giving quick responses, or jumping to solutions without first understanding what problem your team actually needs to solve.

Not because you don’t care, but because it feels faster to just get it done. Second, the instinct to fill the space. How often have you heard a facilitator or a leader ask? So does anyone have any questions? Only to just rush on before anyone can even process the question or even answer. Silence to us feels uncomfortable, so we jump in, we keep things moving, [00:04:00] and then we take over the thinking opportunity for others without even realizing it.

When we fill the space too quickly, we jump in, we tell our ideas. We keep moving, we crowd out the ownership, the clarity, and the insight that might otherwise emerge from others. Both instincts, action and filling space come from good intentions, but left unchecked, they crowd out learning and limit development.

This is where the pause comes in. And I’ll be the first to admit that I have struggled with both doing and telling with embracing the pause. You’ve heard me talk about this in the podcast in the past as a high energy, high achieving extrovert, one of the biggest and most transformational changes I’ve made personally as a leader, as a coach and as a human being, was learning how to break what I call the telling habit and embrace the pause in conversations to slow down and allow others the space to think.

And contribute [00:05:00] their ideas. I shared back in episode 13 about my aha, about my telling habit when nearly 15 years ago when I was a senior director of a lean transformation across a large organization. I invited my coach Margie, to shadow me during meetings with leaders and other team members. And as much as I knew the importance of asking questions and giving space for reflection, and it was even what I was coaching senior leaders in our organization to do because this is the habits and the leadership culture we wanted to create.

When it came to my own day-to-day, I didn’t realize how ingrained my habits of speed and filling the space and sharing my own ideas really were. Later that day after she had shadowed me, Margie gave me some very blunt feedback. She said, Katie, I know you care about your team, but you were like a lion pouncing into conversations, shutting people down with your enthusiasm to contribute your ideas, [00:06:00] and she was right.

I realized that, well, I might ask some questions. I’d switch into telling mode. I was interrupting, finishing people’s thoughts, thinking I was being helpful by offering my ideas, perhaps worried about time and moving discussions forward. Or sometimes even being uncomfortable with people not having the right or an immediate answer.

So much so that I left little room for my team to think for themselves, and I was actually taking over some of the thinking for the leaders I was coaching. That moment was humbling and transformational. I realized there and then that I had a telling habit and I needed to figure out how to break it. I literally had to make myself sit on my hands in meetings and in conversations when I felt the energy in me rising and the urge to shear my ideas or just like interrupt and, and get in and interject something, I had to stop this.

This was [00:07:00] terrible. It was not having the impact I wanted on the people I was interacting with. I was crowding them out and it wasn’t a good experience for them, and it also wasn’t giving them the opportunity to think. And my coach challenged me to practice the counting to 10 after I asked a question, just like I did at the beginning of this episode, and I do every day.

It helped me stop jumping in to fill the space, especially after I asked a question. The impact of this pause that my pause in doing and my pause in telling created space to let others share their ideas. It was incredible. Team members were coming up with their own and often better solutions. My executive clients developed clearer insights into the strategic decisions that they owned.

And I was unburdened from the weight of feeling like I personally had to solve and do it all. This practice of counting to 10 is so powerful that I [00:08:00] explicitly model it in the workshops and leadership retreats that I lead with executives and internal change teams when helping them move from doers to enable.

In these sessions, after I ask a question, in that very first uncomfortable pause when I’ve counted to 10, I label it telling these leaders exactly what I’m doing and why, so that they can then model and learn that behavior too. And you know what? No matter how many times I do this, every time I pause and count towards 10, it amazes me that when I’m getting that uncomfortable feeling and wanna move on and rush forward around maybe 6, 7, 8, or nine counts.

Someone finally speaks up. They ask a question, they share a comment. If I had shortened that count, I’d have robbed them of that opportunity to contribute, to process my question, to think of what they had to say. When we [00:09:00] ask a question, it’s respectful to allow that time for the other person to process our question and to think of what they might want to say or what question they have.

We have to create space for other people to think. We have to pause in our telling, in our doing. So I challenge you the next time you ask a question today, pause after you ask the question and start counting to 10 before you say another word. See what happens. And if 10 feels too long, at first, start with counting to five and you’ll realize you’re starting to get uncomfortable probably around count one or two and wanna move on your instinct to move on and to fill the space with your idea.

Because someone’s not immediately saying something is strong, it is for me. So embrace the pause and be intentional. Create the space.

I really had a chance to appreciate the power of the pause [00:10:00] when my family and I moved to Japan over 10 years ago, and I came to see pausing in silence in a completely new light. And this had just been a year or so after my intentional practice of pausing, of counting to 10, of slowing down after Marcie had given me this feedback.

So in Japanese culture, silence isn’t awkward or InLight pauses. Even long ones are normal expected, especially in business conversations. I remember at one of my very first meetings in Japan with senior leaders at Mitsubishi, and even though I’ve been practicing pausing, this conversation was so eye-opening with my discomfort for silence in conversations.

I had been told before moving to Japan that pausing. A powerful, respected communication tool. And in Japan, instead of the leader being the loudest one, the expert with all the ideas, the most respected leaders are the ones that are silent that pause. This [00:11:00] silence represents wisdom and thoughtfulness, emotional self-control, rather than what we might perceive to be lack of engagement or agreement.

So I’d been prepared by others before moving to Japan about the different cadence of conversation and that it was respectful not to interrupt or fill these pauses, which I desperately wanted to do as Japanese leaders use silence to process information and consider how they wanna respond. So there I was sitting at this cafe with two Japanese business leaders, and the pauses felt like.

Eternity. It was so awkward for me. I wanted to jump in, but I knew it would be disrespectful to do so. So I challenged myself to literally sit on my hands for a long time and to embrace the silence of not speaking until the others did. And truly, it felt like forever, but it probably was just a minute or a minute and a half.[00:12:00]

And it was a good practice to go to the extreme, to really force myself to embrace the silence and to practice that self-control of not just filling the space with my thinking and my conversation because I was uncomfortable, but instead to allow conversation to emerge and to respectfully allow time for thinking.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you or I need to go to this level of extreme pausing in every conversation. That would be way too long in our Western cultures where even a few seconds of space feels like forever. But those experiences when I was living in Japan and now in my continued conversations with Japanese business leaders, when I return for my Japan leadership experiences, remind me that.

The habit to rush in to fill the void robs us and others of thinking time, and [00:13:00] it perpetuates our do, do, do, do culture keeping us from first understanding what probably we need to solve or a thoughtful response rather than a reactive one. I learned to appreciate the space between that moment of stillness where clarity really can emerge.

And the Japanese actually have a word for this, ma. It means space or gap, but it’s really far deeper. The beauty of MA exists in the emptiness, the pause between notes and music, which give rhythm and beauty to the sound, the empty space in art or architecture that creates harmony in the silence and conversation that allows meaning to sink in.

In our doing oriented culture, we often overlook. This beauty and importance of space, we rush in to fill the silence, fill our calendars, fill every moment. But Ma reminds us the pause is not empty. It’s actually [00:14:00] alive and generative, and it’s the space that allows meaning. To take form in Japanese aesthetics and culture, ma teaches that the in between is not absence, it’s actually presence.

And if we think about that, it’s the pause in which learning, understanding, and transformation can unfold. So as leaders, when we embrace space, we embrace the pause. When we cultivate ma, we create conditions for others to think, to own their ideas, and to grow. So I want you to hold onto this concept of ma.

It’s not just a pause. It’s the space that allows everything else to have meaning. The pause is also part of Toyota’s secret power. It’s attitude towards the learning, slowing down, pausing to reflect, to make better decisions, not taking immediate action so they can learn. 40 year Toyota leader, Isao Yoshino, the subject of my book, “Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn,” told me that he believes Toyota’s success globally, particularly starting with its first overseas venture, NUMMI, which he and I talk about back in episode 50, was in large part due to this discipline of pausing.

Not rushing, but taking the time to learn. Toyota chose not to be the first Japanese auto manufacturer to start production in the US in the 1980s. Instead, it intentionally paused and waited so it could learn from its competitors’ successes and challenges. And it’s one of the factors that set new me up for greater success, becoming one of the most famous corporate culture turnarounds in history.

Reflection or Hansei is woven deeply into Toyota’s culture, and Mr. Yoshino emphasizes that reflection sessions are scheduled and actually done by leaders throughout the year to reflect and adjust and realign so they can meet strategic and operational goals. [00:16:00] Reflection, pausing, slowing down is the secret to success.

And discovering the power of the Pause. Creating intentional space for learning and reflection has been transformational. Not just me, not just for Mr. Yoshino at Toyota, but for thousands of the leaders I’ve worked with as well. One example is Augustine, a senior manufacturing operations manager in Europe who joined my Japan leadership experience along with another leader in his company and his coach.

Joseph Prohaska, who talked with me about the meaningful impact of the Japan experience back on episode 48 of this podcast. After witnessing firsthand how Japanese leaders created conditions for learning, and through the daily reflection sessions that I facilitated, Augustine returned to work with a commitment to create pauses in the busyness of the usual work routines to give space for reflection and conversation.

He instituted regular Hansei sessions with his team, not performance reviews filled with data and reports, but safe [00:17:00] spaces for reflection. To ask themselves, how are we leading? Where do we need to change and change ourselves as leaders? Hansei is about honest self-reflection, inviting feedback, and listening to other perspectives, not finger pointing or hiding behind numbers.

These intentional pauses to reflect, give people permission to voice concerns that would otherwise stay hidden, and just as importantly. They end in action. As Augustine said, Hansei action plans should make you a better leader. That shift from talking to listening, from reacting to reflecting has changed not only how he leads, but now how his team engages with transformation, the discipline of pausing.

Creates ripple effects across your organization. The benefit of the pause is threefold. One, it restores learning cycles. Plan, do study adjust cycles or PDSA or the foundation for scientific thinking and [00:18:00] improvement. I actually call them study, adjust plan, do cycles because we often forget to study and adjust.

Without pausing. We do just that. We miss out on the study and adjusting, and these cycles become endless. Do, do, do, do or maybe plan, do, plan, do. And we’re not stopping to pause and learn. Two, pausing gives others space to think. Silence might feel awkward, but it really allows other people to process information, to form their own ideas and to find their voice, and that ownership leads to stronger solutions and greater engagement, and you create capability across the organization.

You don’t have to be the one that has all the answers all the time. And three, it shifts you from being reactive to proactive. Pausing gives you a chance to be intentional and connect with your purpose, to choose how to respond. Instead of reacting out of habit or out of feeling like you are under [00:19:00] time pressure.

I call this practice and intention. Pause a conscious moment, maybe even just five or 10 seconds to pause. To think about what your purpose is and align your actions in that upcoming moment with the impact that you really want to have.

As you reflect on today’s episode, I want you to think about how you can bring the power of the pause into your practice, like developing any leadership habit. Mastering the pause starts with self-awareness and small steps. An intentional practice in learning and reflection. So here are three ways to begin practicing the power of the pause.

First, as I challenged you earlier in this episode, count silently two 10 after you ask an open question, the very next question you ask today, notice what happens. How do you feel? How does the other person [00:20:00] respond? Two, schedule, reflection, and thinking time for yourself. And for your team, protect it. Give yourself the space to think.

Ask those questions. What can we learn? What do we need to adjust? Build in regular opportunities for people to share openly without fear of blame. And three, practice the intention. Pause. It’s a powerful neurological reset that helps you be proactive, not reactive. In our doing, doing, doing world. These practices of slowing down of the pause actually help us speed up the pause, helps us create greater clarity, ownership, and insight, and allows others to develop capability and come up with the ideas that even could be better than the ones that we generated.

Pausing is simple. It is not easy because it asks us to resist our [00:21:00] instincts, to jump in, to move things forward, to get comfortable with silence and to make space for others to share their ideas first perhaps. But as leaders, as parents, as friends, as coaches, the pause may be the most impactful action you can take.

It helps you shift from being reactive to intentional, from telling, to asking and listening, and from doing, to creating space for learning. So next time you feel the urge to jump in and share your idea, try holding back. Let the silence and the space and the pause do its work. You may find that the most powerful move isn’t what you say or do, but the pause that allows you.

And others to learn and grow. This is the power of the pause. It’s not just a practice, it’s your leadership superpower. [00:22:00] If you want to go deeper and explore some of these practices that I’ve talked about in this episode, I encourage you to check out some other episodes of Chain of Learning, including episode 13 on how to Break the Telling Habit about shifting from giving answers to asking questions and listening Episode 27 on how to become a skillful facilitator, creating space to allow greater conversation and thinking, and how to label it in episode 54.

Rediscover Ikigai, where I talk about aligning your actions with your true intention and how to create safe spaces that allow people to speak up and check out my article in Industry Week. Slow down to Speed Up, which was the inspiration for this episode, the links for all of these and other episodes I mentioned.

Here are in the show notes. And remember, leadership isn’t about how fast you move or how many answers you provide, or all the ideas you share. It’s about creating the space for others to think, [00:23:00] to learn, and to grow, and to create the space for you to do the same. The pause isn’t absence of action. It’s one of the most powerful actions you can take.

Be sure to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite platform, Apple, Spotify, or YouTube, and share this episode with friends and colleagues so we can all strengthen our Chain of Learning together. Thanks for being a link in my Chain of Learning today. I’ll see you next time. Have a great day.