The Importance of Pausing to Reflect

Speed feels productive—until it doesn’t. We open up a counterintuitive path to better leadership by making space for short, structured reflection that turns noise into insight and motion into meaningful progress. 

With a candid story about Fiona, a newly minted director drowning in 70-hour weeks, we trace how a 15-minute weekly ritual and three simple questions exposed learned helplessness on her team and sparked a shift from doing to leading.

Across the conversation, we break down why reflection is where experience becomes wisdom and how the brain’s pattern recognition needs space to work. 

We tackle the busy trap and the myth that there’s “no time” to pause, then show how reflection actually creates time by cutting rework, clarifying priorities, and improving decisions. 

You’ll get three practical approaches you can adopt today: build a small, reliable ritual; use high‑quality questions to focus your attention; and capture insights so they become action. 

We also share coaching prompts that move teams from dependency to ownership, so you can step out of the weeds and into true strategic leadership.

By the end, you’ll have a clear playbook: fifteen minutes, three questions, one concrete change each week. Expect calmer execution, fewer fires, and a team that thinks for itself. 

If this conversation helps you, follow the show, share it with a leader who needs it, and leave a quick review so more people can find these tools. Then block your calendar—what will your first reflection window be?

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Pausing Matters
• 0:23 A Culture Of Busyness
• 1:36 Fiona’s Turning Point
• 3:46 Reflection Creates Wisdom
• 5:26 Three Practical Approaches
• 7:37 A 15-Minute Challenge

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Hello and welcome back to Leadership Horizon. I'm Lois Burton, Executive Coach and Leadership Development Specialist. So today we're diving into something that might seem counterintuitive in our action-obsessed business culture. We're talking about the power of pausing to reflect. Because here's what I've learned through my work with executives across the globe. The quality of your leadership is directly proportional to the quality of your reflection. I have spoken about pausing in previous episodes, and a couple of times I've given you some tips to try around this. But today I wanted to devote a full episode because I think it's so important and yet can feel so difficult to achieve. So let me ask you something. When was the last time you truly paused? Not scrolled through your phone waiting for a meeting to start, not sat in traffic thinking about your to-do list, but genuinely stopped, stepped back, and reflected on where you are, where you're going, and how you're showing up as a leader. If you're struggling to remember, you're not alone. In fact, you're in the majority. We live in a culture that glorifies business. We wear our packed calendars like badges of honour. We've somehow convinced ourselves that constant motion equals progress. But here's the truth that I've seen play out time and time again. Activity without reflection is just noise. Let me share a story with you about a leader, our co-fiona. She came to me three years ago as a newly appointed director of a financial services division. Brilliant mind, exceptional track record, promoted quickly through the ranks because she was a doer, a problem solver, someone who got results. But six months into her director role, she was drowning. In our first session, she told me she was working 70 hour weeks, firefighting constantly, and somehow her team's performance was declining. Her direct reports seemed disengaged, strategic initiatives were stalling, and she couldn't understand why, because she was working harder than she'd ever worked in her life. So I asked her a simple question. She looked at me confused, really confused, and she said, What do you mean? I'm thinking all the time. No? When do you pause and reflect? When do you step back from the doing and actually examine what's happening? The silence that followed told me everything I needed to know. We started with just 15 minutes. Every Friday afternoon, Fiona blocked out 15 minutes to sit with three simple questions. What worked this week? What didn't work? What does this tell me about what needs to change? She was wobbling on it initially. She thought it was going to be a waste of time. 15 minutes she could be using to clear her inbox or prepare for Monday. However, she committed to it. Within a month, something shifted. She noticed a pattern. The fires she was fighting weren't random. They were symptoms of a deeper issue. Her team had become dependent on her for every decision. Because that's what she trained them to do. By swooping in to solve every problem, she'd accidentally created a culture of learned helplessness. That one insight, born from just 15 minutes of weekly reflection, changed everything. She began coaching her team to solve problems. She stepped back from the doing and stepped up into genuine leadership. Six months later, her team's performance had turned around completely. And Fiona, she still had occasional 50-hour weeks if she was traveling or there was a project that genuinely required more of her attention. But most of the time, she was working normal hours and delivering much better results than before. So why does this work? Why is pausing to reflect so transformative? It's because reflection is where the learning happens. It's where experience becomes wisdom. I often say to leaders, you don't learn from experience, you learn from reflecting on experience. Think about it this way: your brain is an incredible pattern recognition machine, but it can only see patterns when you give it space to process. When you're constantly in motion, constantly reacting, you're operating on autopilot. You're running old programs, repeating familiar patterns, whether they're serving you or not. Reflection disrupts that autopilot. It creates a gap between stimulus and response. And in that gap lies your power as a leader. Now I know some of you will be thinking, Lois, I don't have time for this. You don't understand how busy I am. But here's what I've learned. That resistance, that voice that says I don't have time is very often the thing that's keeping you stuck. The leaders who say they don't have time to reflect are usually the ones who need it most. They're caught in the busy trap, moving fast, but not necessarily moving forward. And here's the irony. Reflection doesn't take time, it creates time. Because when you pause to reflect, you identify what's not working. You spot the time wasters, the energy drains, the patterns that are keeping you stuck. You make better decisions, which means fewer mistakes. You become more strategic, which means less biofighting. So how do you build reflection into your leadership practice? Let me share with you three approaches that have worked well for people I coach based on the research I've done in positive psychology and emotional intelligence. First, create rituals. I've talked about this before, the power of rituals. Don't rely on finding time to reflect. You won't. Instead, build it into your rhythm. Maybe it's 15 minutes every Friday afternoon like Fiona. Maybe it's 20 minutes every morning before anyone else is awake. Maybe it's a longer session, once a month. What matters isn't the specific ritual, it's that you have one. Secondly, use questions of your guide as your guide. The quality of your reflection depends on the quality of your questions. The human brain works better in the presence of a question. Some of my favorites, what worked this week? What didn't work? What does this tell me about what needs to change? These are the three that worked well for Fiona. Some others are, what am I learning right now? Where am I getting in my own way? What's the pattern here? If I was coaching someone in my situation, what would I ask them? And basically what needs to change? Thirdly, capture your insights. Reflection without action is just daydreaming. So note down whatever you discover. Do that in whichever way works best for you. Some people speak it into their phones, some people write it down. Whatever works best for you. But capture it so that you can notice what patterns emerge over time. And most importantly, identify one thing you'll do differently based on what you've learned. Here's what I want you to take away from today's episode. In a world that rewards speed and action, the most powerful thing you can do as a leader is pause. Because the leaders who shape the future aren't just the ones who move fast. They're the ones who know where they're going and why. Pausing to reflect isn't a luxury. It's not self-indulgent. It's not a waste of time. It's how you transform experience into wisdom, how you turn challenges into opportunities for growth, and how you evolve from simply doing leadership to truly being a leader. So here's my challenge to you this week. Pause, just 15 minutes, choose three questions, see what emerges, because I promise you the investment of 15 minutes could change the next 15 years of your leadership journey. Thank you again for joining me today on Leadership Horizons. If this episode resonated with you, subscribe wherever you get your podcast and share it with another leader who needs to hear this message. Until next time, keep pushing those boundaries and expanding your leadership horizons!