The PAUSE Button
A business leader recently related a challenging personal travel story. The international airport he was connecting through, with his family, lost his luggage. As he waited for that issue to be resolved, he also had to wait in line 45 mins to get food for his young children. Finally, they proceeded to passport control, only to have a computer flag cause him to go to ‘airport jail’ for an hour while the authorities clarified his information. He said the experience forced him to hit PAUSE. Not one, not two, but three challenges outside of his control tested his ability to keep moving forward.
Do you have days like this? In recent years I’ve discussed a similar feeling with friends. We have difficulty proceeding with our lives, feeling overwhelmed coping with not just our daily challenges, but so many massive, global issues: Russia’s unjust attack on sovereign Ukraine; gun-related violence in our communities; societal failures to defend and improve bias-less equitable treatment (gender, racial, sexual orientation, etc); a climate that is becoming increasingly hostile toward human life; economic upheaval threatening the ability to meet basic family financial needs; polarization in government when leaders are needed most… so many factors that appear outside our control, yet directly impact on our mental health and ability to confidently, positively proceed forward. At times don’t you just want to push the PAUSE button?
As I thought about my own experience with this, and searching for a solution, I had a thought from my research (as researchers, we can forget but often relate best to insights from our own work… 😊 ), that hopefully can help, at least for the short-term. First, I needed to better understand; what is the PAUSE button really?
During my dissertation research, I had the opportunity to spend time with work teams that similarly described this PAUSE, as their brains tried to account for and respond to a new situation full of uncertainties and challenges. The teams were created by putting together professionals from different cultures, who had never worked together, and were expected to deliver results in a relatively short time frame. The members also paused, trying to decide how to proceed at their first meeting.
Daniel Kahneman, in his insightful book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes two mental systems working together but often in conflict: System 1 seeking scripts from past experience to guide our response to situations, and System 2 evaluating the effectiveness of the response, or seeking data for a better response. For most scenarios during our day the systems work well together, but when faced with situation that is beyond our experience, we slow down our response to provide time for System 2 to gather data and proceed consciously in an appropriate manner. Fighting against this process, however, is an ego that seeks an immediate response, something, anything, we can use to act now and arm-twist System 2 to accept the response. And during ‘cognitively busy’ periods, we are susceptible to either accepting inappropriate responses, or overloading System 2. I believe this latter result is the PAUSE button.
So let’s define the PAUSE button as a positive response by our brains, accepting we do not know how to respond and choosing not to proceed. We will NOT proceed with life as if this new information is not beyond our experience, and IS beyond our ability to proceed without a new strategy.
If we can accept our PAUSE as a healthy cognitive response, how do we move forward?
First, our PAUSE may not just be a stimuli-response problem. Interviewing work team members, we learned that part of the reason they paused was to seek data to reinforce their expectations. That’s correct. Even though this was a new team, comprised of four people from different cultures who had not worked together before, each member had still tried prior to the meeting to anticipate what to expect. Before talking with their new team members, each member drew on whatever pre-meeting data (stereotypes, gossip/rumors, wildly inaccurate guesses) they could to try to prepare themselves, and develop a plan from past experiences on how they would respond. The PAUSE was an effort to validate (and rarely to reject) their expectation data. Rather than simply beginning the experience by seeking to learn about each other, the first instinct was an ego-driven process to confirm what they had anticipated.
But we should not be too critical of this effort. Yuval Noah Harari presented in his book Sapiens research about our species’ evolutionary process, suggesting survival over competing species was primarily based on social cooperation, to collaborate and connect large numbers. The connection linking these large numbers, though, could not be a common experience. Rather he explains we build fictions, sometimes from reasoned dialogue but often based on as little as oft-repeated gossip, that are ‘constructs’ or ‘imagined realities’ we can use to connect us. We need these constructs to succeed in a very large, complex world. But while a construct can feel as solid as the company you work for or laws of the country in which you live, they are still fictions that can be as weak as a house of cards.
When faced with a perceived failure of our constructs, is it any wonder we seek to pause? A few years ago I had to hit PAUSE in my own life, to try to come to grips with a country/culture construct that I could no longer reconcile with what I was experiencing around me. No matter how many times people I valued and respected tried to open my eyes, I fought for my construct, until my System 2 finally threw up its hands. My construct did not exist in reality. Painful? Most definitely. Reluctantly, I had to accept that I had simply been trying to validate my expectations, and what I desired of the world, but to move forward I needed to seek new data, to create a new construct.
Research and personal experience offered me some help. But a truly valuable insight came from a perspective beyond my understanding. A 22 year-old friend of my son shared his efforts to deal with a surprise diagnosis of lung cancer. “As my peers celebrated their senior year of college and I nervously awaited blood tests, biopsies, and echocardiogram results, I felt confused and filled with uncertainty.” He described many of the same phases of dealing with grief any of us might experience in his situation. “However, after the chaos passed and the intrusive thoughts subsided, all I was left with was acceptance. I had to accept that the life I’d been living was on pause indefinitely. I would have to derive meaning from the situation to build a new life in the interim. And so, I chose to look at my diagnosis as an opportunity.”
He refused to let his expectations, what his life should be, keep him from defining a reality that would allow him to move forward. In a phrase that I’ve come to embrace for myself, he said “everything does not happen for a reason. Instead, you have to be able to find reason in everything that happens.” And for him “finding reason allowed me to assign meaning to my circumstances — empowering me to maintain a more positive outlook on life in the present”. Clearly this is someone whose System 2 could have become overwhelmed and shut down. But instead, he found a way to let go of his past reality, and create a new model forward. (to read his story from his words, go to https://tannerchauck.medium.com/seasons-i-have-cancer-56681359e3)
RECOMMENDATION: Next time you hit the PAUSE button, and freeze or feel overwhelmed by life’s challenges and want a way forward, try removing your own expectations. Maybe the world is not fair. Maybe airports don’t know how to run efficiently. Maybe people make mistakes, during the brief moment in time that intersects with your life, and it isn’t directed at you personally. Maybe much of what you believe about the world around you is based on limited and flawed data, and it will fall short of the reality you wish exists. While we should not, and must not, stop expecting the world to be a better place, when faced with multiple situations beyond our control and needing a way to proceed forward, I’ve found some success in letting go of the expectations defining my response to a difficult situation. I had to accept the world is flawed, comprised of humans still evolving, and falling short of my ideals. Sounds easy, but particularly during ‘cognitively busy’ times (hard to find times that aren’t today) it takes a little bit of strong-arming our System 2 process.
Please do not read this as a suggestion we do not continue to pursue a better world than the one we live in today. Putin and his government must be stopped and punished; our society must find new solutions for controlling access to and use of guns; we must seek a better balance between human activity and a stable climate; we must do better to support our fellow human beings’ needs in a (thankfully) wildly diverse world. We all need to be part of these solutions, as I refuse to live in a world where we do not seek to create a better life for each other, and punish those who forget we are living in an interconnected world and are all responsible for building a positive, shared experience. But just for today, to let go of the PAUSE that is based on the world failing to meet our expectations, I’ll remember it is a journey, and proceeding forward requires letting go of the expectation we are close to the end.
Dan McGurrin, PhD
Dr. Daniel (Dan) McGurrin is exploring a new chapter in his 27-year university-based career. After beginning his L&D work in Hungary during the 90s, Dan has returned to Europe to continue a career spent working with HR and Business Leaders to develop learning activities aligned with strategic initiatives. In addition to teaching and consulting projects, Dan is supporting Tepper Executive Education at Carnegie Mellon University as they expand their programs in Europe.
