Member-only story
My Top 3 Tools for Life: Part 1 — Mastering the Art of Pausing
This is part one of my series about the top three tools I learned about in 12-step recovery. Mind you, I have an entire tool shed of tools now, thanks to recovery. But these three have been at the top since the very beginning and remain there. They are: pausing (the topic of today’s essay), reaching out, and keeping the focus on myself. The next two essays will be about those topics.
Before recovery, I’d heard things like, “Count to 10 before responding when you’re angry” but it never occurred to me that that could apply to me. After all, I was hardly ever angry (or so I thought). I didn’t make the leap to the fact that counting to 10 is a way to pause, or what the effect might be. I just wasn’t that aware.
Why pausing is so important
I’m going to start with why pausing is so important. Then I’ll talk about learning to do it in the moment no matter how stressed you are. Many of us react rather than respond to situations, especially when we’re stressed out. The problem with that is when we react rather than respond, we haven’t put any thought into our response. We’ve just let our bodies take over. The most likely thing to come out of us is not from a place of calm thoughtfulness and often, can make the situation worse.
