06.03.26
We are trained to move fast. Every course, every podcast, every mentor conversation eventually circles back to the same idea: speed is survival. Get more done. Optimize your day. Stack your habits. Move before someone else does.
And I get it. I have lived that. I still live it. There is real value in urgency, in momentum, in refusing to let inertia win. I built ColsenKeane over sixteen years while holding down multiple jobs, and none of that happened by sitting around. Hustle matters.
But I have been learning something lately that runs against the grain of everything I was trained to believe about how to operate, and I want to share it with you because I think it might change something for you the way it is slowly changing something for me.
The pause is everything.
Here is what I mean. When I am moving fast, cranking through my to-do list, pushing emails out, firing off responses, solving problems as they come in, I am operating from a place I would call my lower self. I am reactive. I am running on instinct and adrenaline and whatever emotion is closest to the surface. Most of the time that serves me fine because most of what I deal with in a day is routine.
But some things are not routine. Some things deserve more than my first reaction.
When I write an email in the heat of frustration and send it immediately, I usually regret it. When I fire back a response to someone who pushed my buttons before I have had time to breathe, it rarely lands the way I intended. When I rush to solve my kids' problems instead of letting them sit with those problems long enough to figure them out themselves, I rob them of something.
And here is the thing: I almost never regret waiting. I have sat on emails for 24 hours and then rewritten them completely because a day of distance showed me something I could not see in the moment. I have delayed responses that I was sure were correct and discovered I was wrong, or that the situation resolved on its own, or that the problem was not actually mine to solve.
The pause is not about being slow. It is not about procrastinating or avoiding hard conversations or letting things fester. I want to be clear about that because if you are wired the way I am, your brain will immediately try to weaponize this idea and use it as an excuse to put off something you need to actually do.
The pause is specifically about not letting your most reactive version of yourself make decisions that deserve your more thoughtful version.
When I pause, a few things happen.
First, I stop jumping to conclusions. My first read on a situation is often colored by whatever stress or frustration I was already carrying into it. A day later, I can see it more clearly.
Second, I stop assuming the worst. This is a big one for me. My instinct when something goes sideways is to assume the darkest interpretation. Pausing lets me consider that there might be a different explanation.
Third, I stop assigning blame. When something breaks in a business, the first instinct is to figure out whose fault it is. The pause gives me time to ask a better question, which is usually: what do we actually do about this?
Fourth, I find something closer to grace. That word might sound out of place in a conversation about business, but I mean it. The pause is where I find the version of myself that responds to people the way I actually want to, not the way my worst moment would have.