This article is adapted from Cynthia Kane’s new book, THE PAUSE PRINCIPLE: How to Keep Your Cool in Tough Situations (Wiley, January 22, 2025).
You’ve got this big idea. It’s something you’ve been working on for months. It took a while to move out of the details and focus on the big picture, and you finally have the approach. All that’s left is to share the news and get your team to implement the vision. The moment you say it aloud, there’s pushback. “We don’t have enough bandwidth for this.” That one comment leads to a domino of reasons why this can’t, shouldn’t or won’t happen in the way you dreamed or when you need it. Your anger and frustration come quickly, and within seconds, you’re slamming your hand on the table, moving papers around angrily and yelling.
Maybe this behavior doesn’t happen all the time. Likely, 95% of the time, you can disagree and can hear different voices and challenge them calmly, but this other 5% of the time, when you buckle under pressure, it feels impossible not to lose your cool. And what’s hard is that these are the moments your team and those around you remember. What’s most memorable is what’s out of the ordinary — the moments that aren’t routine. When the stakes are high, and you lose your ability to respond in a measured and balanced manner, others see it, and when those in leadership roles break down, research shows so do their teams.
It’s been studied and decided that leaders who can’t engage in dialogue under pressure create a negative impact on their team, leading to lower morale, quality standards, missing deadlines and budgets. Team members are more likely to leave their jobs, shut down, stop participating and stop going above and beyond. While building trust and making your people feel safe can take years, losing integrity, credibility and professionalism takes only a few seconds.
Here, I’m going to share six mindfulness based practices you can do to start keeping your calm during difficult interactions.
1. Sensation
The practice of noticing the sensation in the body is a prerequisite for all the other practices, as it’s the awareness of our discomfort in an interaction that signals it’s time for us to use one of the other practices.
Start paying more attention to what’s happening within you during an interaction. When you notice discomfort within the body, that’s your cue to choose one of the following practices to help you feel more calm.
2. Own your discomfort
Think of the times when you’ve experienced discomfort; what do you usually do with it? For me and those I work with, we like to ignore it, pretend it’s not there or get rid of it as fast as we can. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who likes feeling uncomfortable. The reason is that we perceive uneasiness in a conversation as dangerous, which means our nervous system is like, “Hey, we gotta protect ourselves now,” and that’s when we say things we don’t mean and overreact. To be able to pause, we practice instead owning the uneasy sensation, acknowledging it and soothing it because when our discomfort is seen by us and calmed by us, it creates the bridge between stimulus and response.
3. Focus on the present
When we’re in difficult interactions, we can get easily lost in the other person or group’s words, and when this happens, we can fly off the handle, shut down, get passive-aggressive, etc. The practice here is after noticing the uneasy sensation to focus on the present moment instead of the desired outcome. In these moments we can get so caught up with what we’re trying to do or the words of the other person that our nervous system is in overdrive. Refocusing and redirecting our attention to the present moment helps us find our way out of the never-ending cycle so we feel grounded, balanced and centered again.
4. Take a breath
In hard conversations, our heart starts beating faster; we may begin to sweat more and feel discomfort in our bodies. It’s hard to get back to a base heart rate in one minute once it’s been elevated, and the only way to do it is to know how to breathe. The moment when personalities clash, our heart rate increases. To calm the moment, we learn to breathe in a moment when we feel we can’t.
5. Eyes toward another
What brought one of my clients to me was he was about to close a deal and both sides were in agreement on all but one item in the draft. This sent him straight to the orange zone, and because he couldn’t keep his emotions out of it, he was replaced. They had to find someone who could pause when challenged and who could talk to the other side to reach an agreement. We’re very focused on our agendas, and when we notice the sensation of discomfort in the body because we aren’t getting what we want, we can use the practice of turning towards the other and seeing them through friendly eyes to help re-establish connection.
6. Need to say
We plan for important conversations and meetings by focusing on the words we’re going to use with others, and we rarely, if ever, think about what we need to say to ourselves to keep our cool during these moments. We want to start to make sure we have language that helps our nervous system feel safe in these moments. What words help you to feel calm? Once you identify these words, you can silently say them to yourself during a difficult interaction when you feel discomfort in the body, and it will relax you in the moment, making it easier for you to show up in a way you respect.
These practices will make the stressful and challenging conversations easier to navigate; they will help you stay rational and be more in touch with those you’re working with, showing yourself and others that you can handle the pressures that come with your position.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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