Power of the Pause

A work of art, way before it becomes a masterpiece, must start with a plain white canvass. Hidden, and yet unborn, inside it lie the ponderings, the passions and the promise of hope and beauty. The artist’s creativity would be severely crippled, every time he picked up his brush, if the solitude of white on the canvass did not lure him to conceive and co-create a brand new reality. Just like masterpieces require the emptiness of a canvass to creatively explode upon; our conversations also need momentary silences, pauses, to express and highlight the magic and motivation which lie hidden in our hearts and minds.

Job applicants, job interviewees, salespeople, managers and even senior executives across industries fall into this trap of speaking up without thinking in. We forget to recognize and give way to the feelings within. This constant shooting-from-the-hip-ness adds nothing but more noise to the din and the mindlessness that engulfs our world. This aimless and excessive thoughtless verbosity is a waste of ammunition and a massive waste of human energy.

A pause, before, during and even after conversations adds color, rhythm and a panoramic elegance to conversations. A pause, properly orchestrated, is one of the most powerful dynamics of speech. It allows the speaker and the listener to assess thoughts, structure ideas and tap into the deeper recesses of our wisdom and instinct. In the language of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a pause allows us to align our internal resources of intellect, emotion and authentic self with our external resources of the body, speech and action.

In conversations, before interactions, we can chose to stop, to slow down and be still for a few seconds. This will allow us to put a leash on the chain-reaction of reactive behaviour. This can lessen our spinning off in the usual way of defend, offend, talk up, talk down and constantly justify our past performances. A pause is power and a pause induces empowerment and trust, as it makes the other person feel listened to. This little pause then becomes a source of powerful human energy.

The way to increase the amount of pausing before, during and after all our interactions is to keep a mindful awareness on our breathing. Every now then the din and the clamour of the world that surrounds us tends to take over and engulf us in its toxicity but an awareness on our breath acts as an anchor and helps us manage emotions. A visible sign, and constant life-saver of emotional intelligence is a smooth, deep and a rhythmic flow of breath.

In many of my workshops, I profess the 3P method of powerful connection, engagement and influence. In any interaction plant yourself in a position where you are physically stable, at ease and have good visibility and exposure. After planting, pause deeply to gather your thoughts and visualize empowerment of the listeners and a successful outcome of the conversation. Finally, project yourself with power and confidence keeping the goals of the interaction authentic, integral and driven by purpose. This will align your internal and external resources and also evoke excellence from others. That, in essence, is leadership and coaching for excellence in action.

Pausing consciously is a momentary respite between being completely self-absorbed to being awake and present for others and for life. Our conversations need these momentary silences and pauses, to express and high-light the magic and motivation which lie hidden in our hearts and minds.

Raju Mandhyan
Author, Coach and Trainer
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Leadership Conversations

Over the decades, the idea of Leadership has been made out to be like a huge, ambiguous and an incomprehensible thing. People go about making assessment about how grand, how perfect and how very important leadership is but the million-dollar truth is that leadership does, and can, always happens in tiny instances and tiny interactions we call “conversations.”

All of our grandest achievements, every life-changing incident, in reality, pop out from the wellspring of our beings as an idea, a thought or as an emotion. At the root level it is like an abstract seed that has to take form, which has to be substantiated, structured and styled in a way to be accepted by the world outside of our beings. This process requires generating, sorting, challenging and then simplifying it to be presented in a written or a spoken form—conversations!

I am firm believer of the fact that every word we express creates change, however minuscule, but it definitely and surely creates change. And, the kind of change our words create is a secondary question. A story that blurs through my mind is that of a father who hands his young son a bunch of nails and asks him to go and hammer the nails in the trunk of a large tree in their backyard. The son, without asking for any reasons from his Dad, does just that. A week later, the father instructs the son, again, to go out into the backyard and pull the nails out from tree-truck. This time, the son obeys but comes back curious and annoyed at having labored purposelessly when the father explains, “Son, our words are like the nails you hammered into that tree. When used for a purpose they can build and when used senselessly they can, like the scars left in the tree-trunk, create permanent damage.

Now, I take back the word “minuscule.” Every word we express, gives a new direction to who we are, what we want to become and how we want to influence people and the processes that surround us. So, as when an idea, a thought or an emotion pops up from the wellspring of our minds and intellect, it would behoove us let that idea or emotions pass through severe, internal, quality control. Ask yourself, if the thought your expressing has ethical groundings. Check if it will do justice to a positive, constructive purpose for all those it addresses. Verify and future-pace the long-term output it will create and then finally, with utmost care, express it with a willingness to learn from it and openness towards the feedback and the results it generates. That is leadership conversations in a nutshell.

Raju Mandhyan
Author, Coach and Trainer
www.mandhyan.com

Insights On Insights

The world does move at a maddening pace and I'd like to adhere to the adage that life is not just about adding speed to it. So when the rest of the word is up and tweetering, I decided to get on the blogging bandwagon. Here's my first song, hope you like it.

It is kinda' strange that nowadays everyone is out putting out something onto the cyberworld. Everyone is out there, busy, making a guru-of-sorts of himself. And, yes, of course, that list does include me. So, to set the pace and to get you all, hopefully, on my page I wanna' tell you what Insights is going to all about.

I am of the belief that everything changes all the time, consistently and constantly. We create the change, we are created by the change and we are affected by the change. It is a, forgive me, but a crazy, riotious, almost incomprehensible cycle of madness and mayhem. A cycle of time, space, elements, energy and emotions that is unstopping, unforgiving and has been around for for eons and eons. What each eon, each age and every individual does is to take an ever-so-tiny snapshot of this humongous change and present it all those around like a proud Dad showing off pictures of his newborn to his friends. What the Dad does forget it that world has seen ziliions of babies like his own before. And, that is quite alright given our limited worldview which is clamped between our perspectives of time and space.

So, that is what Insights is going to be all about_a tiny little snapshot through my personal camera. The lenses of my camera are named Clear Communication Skills, Creative Thinking and Conscientious Leadership. Compound all these together and measure the size of my worldview and you have the words "Change" and "Insights."