PURSUING PAUSE
The most counterintuitive habit you will ever build, and why your brain has been waiting for you to build it
I remember a conversation with a Majot Project Director after a project he had led went badly sideways. Not for lack of effort. The team had worked incredibly hard. But it finished late, over budget, and left everyone bruised. When I asked what he would do differently, he did not hesitate. “I would have pressed pause earlier and reset the team.” Why did he not? “We were so busy and under pressure we thought we just had to keep going.”
That is the trap I see most often. It is not that capable leaders lack direction. It is that they are so productive, so genuinely good at moving forward, that they can travel a long way in the wrong direction before they realise it. Pause is not about slowing down. It is about making sure the speed is pointed somewhere worth going.
One of the things I consistently advise leaders to do is build the Superhabit of Pause. To actively pursue it. But when I use that phrase, I always think it is worth unpacking what pursue actually means, because the word carries more weight than most people realise.
Follow the word
Pursue did not arrive in English fully formed. As with most words it transformed: Latin into French into English. Persequi became poursuivre became pursue.
Per, meaning thoroughly or completely. Sequi, meaning to follow. To follow through. To chase after persistently. To follow permanently.
From its origins, pursue does not describe a one-time effort. It describes a sustained orientation, something you keep following through on completely, not just when the diary allows it.
The ancient Greek word used in the scriptures for “seek” carries the same weight. Zeteo means to keep on seeking, to continuously pursue, to make something an ongoing priority rather than a passing intention. Not a moment of resolve. A direction of life.
Both words land in the same place: pursuit is a commitment, not a moment.
Which makes the question sharper. If to pursue something means to follow it through completely and persistently, what are you actually pursuing? And are you sure the answer is still correct?
The honest problem
Most leaders I work with are not failing. They are succeeding, fast, hard, and consistently. The problem is not performance. It is that nobody designed a pause point into the system to check whether the performance is still aimed at the right thing.
The system does not build that pause in. It rewards motion and treats stillness as weakness or indecision. So leaders keep going, capable, productive, and occasionally travelling a long way in a direction that no longer serves them.
That is not a character flaw. That is a design problem. And Pause is the design solution.
Capable leaders are rarely short of motion. They are short of the pause that tells them whether the motion is still pointed the right way.
What the brain is actually doing
Here is where the neuroscience adds something important, and genuinely counterintuitive.
Daniel Kahneman’s foundational research describes two cognitive modes: System 1, which is fast, automatic, and pattern-driven; and System 2, which is slower, deliberate, and values-aligned. Under sustained pressure, most leaders default to System 1 all day. It is efficient, but it defaults to the familiar, responds to urgency, and reaches for yesterday’s answer even when today’s situation requires something new (Kahneman, 2011).
Research on the Default Mode Network adds another layer. This brain network, anchored in the medial prefrontal cortex, becomes significantly more active when we stop directed task activity. It governs self-referential thought, future planning, and what researchers describe as the brain’s coherent internal narrative, your sense of who you are and where you are going (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna and Schacter, 2008; Raichle, 2001).
That is not rest. That is the brain checking whether the direction is still correct.
The moments leaders dismiss as unproductive, the walk, the quiet before a decision, the deliberate breath, those are precisely when the brain recalibrates course. Pause does not just slow the brain down. It turns the right parts on.
Pause does not slow the brain down. It turns the right parts on.
The Superhabit that sounds wrong
This is why Pause is a Superhabit. Not just a good habit, but the foundational one. The condition under which everything else stays honest.
Without it, capable leaders keep executing against assumptions that quietly stopped being true. Identity drifts while performance continues, until someone looks up and realises the destination shifted without them noticing.
The director I mentioned at the start did not lack capability. He had plenty of it. What he lacked was a built-in moment to ask: are we still pointed the right way?
That is the question Pause protects. And for a productive leader moving fast, it is the most important question there is.
Try this
Before your next significant decision, take 90 seconds. Close the laptop. One slow breath. One question: Is this still the right direction, or am I just very good at moving?
That is System 2 getting the access it needs. That is the Default Mode Network doing what it was built for.
That is pursuit.
If this resonates and you want to go deeper on Pause as a leadership practice head to stevemacdonald.co.
Steve
References:
Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain’s default network. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 1–38.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Raichle, M. E. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676–682
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