I’m not sure if you’ve heard that one about the Polar Bear who walks into a bar, have you?
Well, a Polar Bear walks up to the barman and says, ‘I’d like a pint of —–‘
And the barman says, ‘Why the big paws?’
(Get it?)
Dreadful I know…
Anyhow, that pause is something I’ve been working with for a very long time without giving it proper attention.
It’s the same pause which Viktor Frankl addressed in his quote:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is the power to choose our response.In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
It is the same pause, the same space that the interviewer tells the interviewee to stop, take stock and just b-r-e-a-t-h-e when the interviewee gets all tensed up and forgets that time and space is available.
These same situations occur for people who have anticipatory responses like public speaking and performance fears, work-related stress, generalised anxieties and the much feared PTSD.
Well, the good news is that this space, this pause, is our friend.
A forgotten friend that we’ve neglected for so long, and within that pause we have an incredible amount of resourceful options available to us at any given time in which we can help us generate a completely different set of responses other than the bog-standard fight, flight, or freeze syndrome.
We can stop and wait.
Wait until the clouds pass so that only the blue sky remains. We can learn to accept uncomfortable feelings in a way where we do not become part of them or allow them to control us but instead impartially recognise the deeper intention of un-met needs.
We can slow down our thoughts, loosen our muscles, and consciously decrease the speed of our heart rate, disassociate, and adopt the position of witness.
So many choices available within The BIG Pause.
Clearly you will see some of the influences relating to my BIG Pause concept. Essentially it’s mine. I own it. And you should own yours. In the times where you need it most, in personal or work life.
I will confess that the BIG Pause’s influence is a combination of the different processes I discovered and experimented with over the years, everything ranging from mindfulness and meditation, NLP, new code, hypnosis, reframing, disassociation, psychosensory techniques, existentialism, you name it.
But at that end of the day, it’s only a Pause.
One which you can introduce in a variety of ways.
This is what I will coach you through on my mindset skills academy (currently under construction which will have a separate page on this site.) I will teach how to stop yourself and stop the world.
You can introduce the BIG pause in a variety of ways
That’s if you can get over the illusion of not being able to find the time to create a BIG Pause?
It is an ideal opportunity for person-centred people to borrow one of my most hidden and widely used processes.
On the Big Pause, I explore the options available to us and where it sits within breathing patterns, how to create a clean space where we can invite in the BIG pause in and allow ourselves more time, taking the first step towards transforming our emotions and perspectives.