PAUSE

You can think of Pause as your guide for helping people be productive in an unproductive environment. It's when you slow things down to develop an awareness of what your people need to do their best work. Pause is when you challenge the underlying assumptions, invite upgraded thinking, and create calm within the storm.

Shawn Vanderhoven is a partner at The Wiseman Group, a talent development company run by Liz Wiseman, the bestselling author of Multipliers. Over the last six years, Shawn has been asking the thousands of people attending his workshops and webinars: What's the biggest thing holding you back from getting things done? The most common response by a ratio of two to one: I can't focus. I'm constantly switching between tasks, and I can't get momentum in work that matters. To find the solution to this problem, Shawn ran a three-year study interviewing several hundred high-performing contributors at the world's top companies like Amazon, Google, and Tesla, to analyze the difference between leaders who were successful at unlocking their team's ability to focus on the things that mattered versus those leaders who just made our already ridiculously distracting world more distracting.
Shawn's analysis revealed twelve behaviors that differentiated these two groups of leaders, which he will share in this book.

You can think of Pause as your guide for helping people be productive in an unproductive environment. It's when you slow things down to develop an awareness of what your people need to do their best work. Pause is when you challenge the underlying assumptions, invite upgraded thinking, and create calm within the storm.
To get there, we need to follow the three disciplines of Pause: Magnify What Matters, Buffer Out Busy, and Coach Through Failure (the three sections of the book). In each part, Shawn will examine the science behind why these specific behaviors unlock people's ability to focus, and strategies that make them easy to adopt. Pause gives teams, both managers and knowledge workers, the language and system to negotiate and renegotiate how to do more work that matters when on the clock, accompanied with the boundaries that encourage a more fulfilling life when we're off.

People are frustrated and exhausted. They feel pressure to take on more than they can do. They are looking for answers that actually offer relief from being overworked but underutilized. Shawn's research brings to light new stories and practices that show us how to rewrite the way we get results without sacrificing our souls. It's more than a leadership book, it's a road map for every professional to habitually slow things down, create space to not only lead brilliant work, but to live a brilliant life.