Flow: Take Pause

Breathing has an ebb and flow.

No matter the task before from sleep to running at top speed, your breathing develops a cadence. It accounts for inhalation and exhalation. Often, it introduces a pause in-between them that allows for thought, or physical flight as in jumping.

Humans aren't typically good at that part -- the pause. We get an email and leap into a response. Or, we engage in every conversation at the moment it finds us, whether or not we are ready to engage. We treat all invitations to communicate as equal when they clearly are not.

The invitation today is to take a pause. To realize that very few email or voicemail messages are actual emergencies. That you can and should consider your response, or even whether it requires a response. To acknowledge that all conversations do not need to happen right now and that they may in fact be better conversations in a few minutes, or even on another day altogether.

While you are at it, measure those pauses in breath and see what else changes.