Why the first step through change is to stop
“Let’s just be quiet for one minute,” change expert Eleanor Tweddell tells a room full of people. “Do nothing. Just sit.”
Thirty seconds in, half the room has lost it. People sneak a look at their phones, slip out for coffee, whisper to their neighbours.
Afterwards, some ask what the point was.
Eleanor, my guest on the latest Fearless Forward, was made redundant twice during a 23-year corporate career. The second time, she started a blog that grew into a community, two books and a business helping people through change. Her Change Mastery framework has five steps: pause, get messy, play, try, restart.
Some clients ask her to skip the first two and go straight to the creative part. She says no, even when it costs her the work.
Eleanor uses the framework on herself, too. Fearless Forward, she told me, means knowing when to pause and being able to say, “I’ve given this everything, and I’m at peace with that.”
Three ideas from our conversation have stayed with me:
1. The pause is a gateway, not a delay. When change arrives, our instinct may be to push through it as fast as we can. Yet without a pause, we act from reactive habit and say or do something we may later regret.
In Mindful Command, I call the pause the gateway skill. It’s the breathing space where we stop reacting and start choosing. That moment of conscious choice turns change from something that happens to us into something we are governing.
And we don’t need to wait for a door to close before we practise. The more often we pause when things are calm, the more naturally our bodies remember to pause when they’re not.
2. The same change can be a different story for everyone in the room. Eleanor asks teams to draw their own change curves and lay them on top of each other. The result is a mess, and it’s honest. A colleague who disagrees with you mid-change isn’t necessarily wrong; they may simply be somewhere else on the curve.
3. “At least you tried” should be a celebration, not a consolation prize. Small experiments let us test an idea without one terrifying leap from the known to the unknown.
And perhaps the hardest part of change isn’t actually the leap. It’s being willing to stop and quietly do nothing for one minute.
Highlights:
- [00:00:20] Eleanor’s story
- [00:02:10] Why difficult change can be valuable
- [00:03:51] Eleanor’s path into change work
- [00:06:36] Courage, identity, and supporting others
- [00:08:50] Helping teams navigate change
- [00:12:30] What change mastery means
- [00:14:32] Step one: Pause
- [00:19:40] Step two: Get messy
- [00:24:18] Step three: Play with possibilities
- [00:31:22] Step four: Try small experiments
- [00:33:49] Step five: Restart and take ownership
- [00:36:55] Change mastery as an everyday life skill
- [00:40:02] Eleanor’s fear of not reaching her potential
- [00:44:21] What fearless forward means to Eleanor
- [00:45:27] Closing reflections on change
Links:
