Personal Pause (OBREAU)

Inwardly focused – helping an individual step back and observe an emerging or recent situation more carefully before deciding what’s best to do

When we’re under pressure, it’s easy to constrain our thinking: reacting quickly, jumping to conclusions, assuming we know what motivates others, and/or avoiding voicing what we might need to say. The Personal Pause is a brief practice that helps interrupt these patterns before they reassert themselves.

You might spend as little as a few minutes on the Pause, or longer for a deeper reflection.

The process essentially is to choose one situation currently on your mind and work through three prompts:

• What am I noticing?
• What else might be true or real here?
• What seems most important for me now?

The aim is not to “solve” the situation. It is simply to create enough space to think more clearly before deciding on further action.

You are encouraged to use and adapt this process as per the terms of the Creative Commons licence, outlined on the Contact and Permissions page.

A Short Form of the Personal Pause

The focus here is a short form of the Personal Pause, drawing primarily on the Observation component of OBREAU. The purpose is to create a little more space between what is happening and your response. Rather than trying to analyse the situation fully or resolve it, the aim is to step back and see things more clearly.

(A fuller version of the Personal Pause, utilising all three OBREAU practices, will be made available separately.)

A Personal Pause can be especially helpful when:

• Something has happened that has unsettled or frustrated you
• You find yourself reacting strongly to another person or situation
• You are about to enter a difficult conversation or meeting
• Things are moving quickly, and you want to avoid responding automatically

Taking a Short-Form Personal Pause – Keeping the Focus on Observation

You can do this quite briefly. Perhaps set yourself a time limit, say, 15 minutes. This discourages excessive rumination or analysis. If you feel you want to stop sooner, you can. Or you can continue if, at 15 minutes, you’re still finding the exercise valuable.

The Personal Pause works best as a writing exercise. That way, you can get your observations “out of your head” and onto a page or screen where you can consider them more carefully. Once you’re accustomed to the exercise, you might find you can do it in your head.

A key throughout is to keep your focus on observable data, not interpretation or judgment. Ask yourself what a drone flying over this situation could pick up with cameras, including audio recording.

For example, “she has no respect for me” is interpretation.

That “she spoke across me twice during the meeting” is potentially observable.

Another example of interpretation is, “my manager likes to micro-manage me”. It’s also a judgment. That’s probably not the language the manager themselves would use.

You could make the statement about the manager more observable by saying something like, “My manager shows a pattern of closely supervising my work. He checked up on details that are within my job description three times yesterday.”

Another important source of observations is what’s going on inside you – such as feelings (e.g. anxious, worried), thinking patterns (e.g. repeatedly criticising yourself) and bodily sensations and behaviours (e.g. feeling flushed, speaking quickly).

Your self-observations are observable to you, not others – yet they can be helpful, along with external data points, to help you become more grounded, present, and able to see the situation more clearly.

Four Key Questions

There is no need to work systematically through these questions; they’re intended as prompts to aid your thinking, not a checklist.

How have I reacted in this instance?

Aim to describe in a sentence or two how you’ve reacted – without interpretation and without criticising either yourself or anyone else. Keep it as far as possible to what you can notice, observe about your reaction, rather than evaluating it.

For instance, with the manager managing closely example above, maybe the person taking the pause says, “I let myself get too upset when my manager steps in”. This is still interpretation: the point about “getting too upset” is evaluation – in this case, self-evaluation – not observation.

The aim is to describe your reaction in more observable terms. Doing so can open up possibilities for trying different things, and reducing the risks of harsh self-criticism.

What’s directly observable here?

Here the work is to identify a few high-quality observations – perhaps 4 or 5 – that help you gain perspective on the situation. “High quality” refers to observations that don’t just state the obvious but could be important pointers to what’s going on, or they’re interesting or significant as they could be interpreted in different ways.

You can include self-observations here, too, concerning, e.g., your emotional state or physical sensations you’re aware of. (It doesn’t matter that we’re already talked about these in connection with reacting.)

You can identify more than 4 or 5 observations if that seems helpful. But the work is to come up with a few observations worth thinking about rather than creating an extensive list for its own sake.

What else is worth noticing?

Ask yourself what you might have missed or overlooked, perhaps small details that might make a difference, patterns, or factors in the background, e.g. pressures on your work group or things that have changed recently, that might be relevant.

What am I assuming here?

Possibly you are accepting some things as truths, e.g. about the behaviour of others, that might influence what you observe. Asking yourself about assumptions you are aware of making could help you question your taken-for-granted beliefs and potentially see other things that, till now, have been out of view.

With the observations you record, the aim is to simply notice these things, not evaluate them.

Rather than “I shouldn’t be feeling this way” or “I’m taking this badly”, try something closer to: “I’m repeatedly going over this situation and blaming them”.

Your emotional response is part of what is happening and is useful information. It doesn’t by itself, though, tell you what the situation means or what you should do.

Staying with Observation

As we’ve said, distinguish as far as you can between the story you might already be telling yourself about a situation – your interpretations – and what you can notice directly.

For example:

Interpretation: “He doesn’t value my input.”

Observation: “He asked three questions of me when I was making my presentation to the team, rather than raising these directly beforehand, when I talked him through it.”

At least this gives you something to work with. You could potentially put this to the person concerned and invite a response. Perhaps they only thought of their questions after the earlier conversation with you.

You’re not trying to remove interpretation entirely. You do need to make sense of what happens as well as notice. The value of the Pause is simply in becoming a little more aware of when you have moved from what you have observed to what you think it means.

If you find yourself going around in circles, replaying events, or becoming increasingly self-critical, return to the question: What am I noticing right now?

You might then identify just one or two observations and leave the Pause there.

Finishing the Pause

Before moving on, you might ask: What seems worth paying attention to next?

You don’t necessarily need to answer this question. Sometimes the most useful outcome of a Personal Pause is simply greater awareness – noticing something you had missed, recognising the strength of your own reaction, or becoming less certain about your first interpretation.

At other times, what you notice might suggest that it would be useful to explore the situation more deeply, including other people’s perspectives and what you may need to say or do.

Those further steps are part of the fuller Personal Pause.

The brief Personal Pause can also stand entirely on its own: a small practice for becoming more observant, thoughtful and deliberate when circumstances make that difficult.

OBREAU in the Short-form Pause

As outlined here, the shorter version of the Pause is based most directly on the observation practice in OBREAU. Reasonableness and authenticity are also present, though in the background.

Reasonableness comes in with the emphasis on avoiding negative judgment of others. We’re implicitly recognising that others will have a way of understanding this issue that differs from ours. But we’re not aiming, in the short form, to specifically clarify what might be real to them. Instead, we’re taking care to avoid judging them adversely.

Authenticity in OBREAU is not about expressing whatever is on your mind. Instead, it requires staying close to the observable data and then, without judging others negatively, thinking about what is genuinely coming up for you, and what you might pay attention to from here.