Start with a Pause

This article looks at Awareness, one of the six capabilities in the HUMAAN Leadership Compass, through a single discipline: the pause between what triggers you and how you choose to respond. Drawing on a real coaching conversation and research from leadership and psychology, it explores why pausing, rather than reacting, is what turns self-awareness into leadership.

LEADERSHIPAISELF AWARENESSHUMAN LEADERSHIP

Roland Lewis

9/13/20267 min read

Start With Pause

The discipline of Awareness in the HUMAAN Leadership Compass

By Roland Lewis · Founder, Roland Lewis Coaching · Creator of the HUMAAN Leadership Compass · September 2026

In short

A few weeks ago, I told you the story behind the HUMAAN Leadership Compass; how Humanity, Understanding, Moral Judgement, Awareness, Accountability and Nurturing Growth came together, letter by letter, into a model for human leadership in a world where AI is entering the workforce. Today I want to sit inside one of those letters. A for Awareness.

What Awareness Means

Awareness is the disciplined capacity to recognise what is shaping a response, before that response becomes leadership action. The guiding question is simple: what is influencing my response right now? (Lewis, 2026). And there is one discipline that sits right at the centre of it - the pause.

The Question That Stuck with Me

I’ve been reflecting on a session I ran recently for a group of rural school leaders. In particular, on a question one of the leaders in the room left me with afterwards, one that has really sat with me, and have been mulling over ever since.

In the session, I talked about being confronted with a really challenging situation, and how I was able to take some time to process it, navigate it and prepare for how I was going to handle it effectively.

What was put to me stopped me in my tracks. In small, rural communities, you don’t always have the luxury of that space. You bump into people down at the shops, at the football club or just in the street as you’re walking past them.

That got me thinking. What is the best solution for someone in a situation like that, someone who doesn’t get the time and distance to prepare?

Two Ways to Prepare

The first thing that comes to mind connects with Tim Arnold’s idea of having a pre-planned conflict resolution plan. That’s proactive, intentional leadership, having something in place before you need it. There’s a lot of fabulous training out there about how to navigate challenging conversations in the heat of the moment, and one thing leaders can do is tap into that training, so they’re well prepared and already have those strategies in their back pocket.

But the other thing that comes to mind is what I know about how emotions, physiological responses and the stories we tell ourselves all play together. That interplay can be a real tool to lean on if you’re confronted by someone, inside or outside your organisation, who is challenging you and continuing to push for conflict.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

The idea of pausing before you respond isn’t just intuition, it shows up again and again in leadership and coaching research as a deliberate discipline, not a personality trait. Naval leadership expert L. David Marquet argues leaders should “start with pause” before reacting to a situation, inviting simple, low-stakes observation — What do you see? How do you see it? — because description feels safer to our brains than judgement, since it isn’t wired straight into emotion (Marquet, 2020). Michael Bungay Stanier describes the same mechanism from a coaching lens: mindfulness, he argues, isn’t a retreat or a meditation cushion, it’s “that tiny pause between stimulation and response,” the moment you notice you’re being triggered, take a breath and actively choose how to show up (Bungay Stanier, 2020).

The Discipline of the Pause

When we experience an emotion, there’s a physiological response. That response has this interaction with the stories we tell ourselves and together they create the feelings we lean into.

So, here’s what I’d encourage leaders to do. If you’re in a situation like the one described above, a challenging relationship, a conflict that keeps resurfacing and you run into that person in the street and they want to continue the altercation. Take that leadership pause. A breath, to give yourself a bit of clarity. Then, consider the story you’re about to tell yourself.

Take the pause. Then choose the story.

Choosing the Story You Tell Yourself

A person who is in conflict is in a threat state. The story they’re telling themselves is that they need to protect themselves. If they’re being aggressive, they’ve leaned into the fight response, one of the fight, flight or freeze responses we reach for under self-protection.

Now, as the leader, if you are self-aware enough (and able to take that moment to pause and tap into the story you want to tell yourself) you can actually choose not to lean into fight and defend. You can choose to lean into your mission and your purpose as a leader instead.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

This is, almost word for word, the discovery Viktor Frankl made, and Stephen Covey later built an entire habit of proactivity around: “Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose” (Covey, 1989). Covey went further, naming self-awareness, alongside imagination, conscience and independent will, as one of the human endowments that live inside that freedom to choose (Covey, 1989). It’s a freedom that depends on noticing it exists in the moment it matters, not just believing in it afterwards. Self-awareness research backs this up: internally, self-aware leaders have clarity about their own patterns and reactions; externally, they can accurately read how others are experiencing them in that same moment - and the two are not the same skill (Eurich, 2017). The HUMAAN Leadership Compass names the same discipline directly: leaders who model a pause under pressure, rather than exporting it onto the people around them, show one of the clearest behavioural markers of Awareness in practice (Lewis, 2026).

If you have real clarity about what that mission is, if what you want is a harmonious, respectful community in your organisation or your school, that’s the narrative you lean into.

The intense emotion. The intense physiological response. Paired with a genuine desire to respond in a way that supports your vision and your mission. That combination is what allows you to navigate the conversation in a non-adversarial way because you have the peace of mind, and the direction, to lead the conversation to where you actually want it to go.

The Same Pause, Turned Outward

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

The same pause protects the judgements we make about other people, not only the ones we make about ourselves. Amy Edmondson makes the point sharply: when someone deliberately sabotages a process or breaks a clear safety rule, blame is appropriate, but everything short of that is a judgement call that cannot be made without more context. Someone who seems careless might simply be exhausted after being rostered onto two shifts back to back; if so, the harder question may be about who assigned the roster, not who fell asleep (Edmondson, 2023). Awareness, in other words, isn’t only about pausing before you react. It’s about pausing before you decide what someone else’s behaviour means.

Questions worth sitting with

• What’s the story you default to telling yourself when someone triggers you?

• Where in your week could a five-second pause change how a conversation unfolds?

• What’s the mission or purpose you want to be leaning into, the next time you’re tested?

The Takeaway

In short: Awareness isn’t about having more feelings, or fewer of them. It’s about creating enough space between the trigger and the response that you get to choose what happens next; with your own patterns and with the stories you build about other people.

I hope you find this useful. A small, deliberate discipline that changes what happens next. If you’ve got a strategy of your own for holding the pause, especially in those smaller, close-knit communities where you can’t always get distance from a situation, I’d love to hear it, so email me at roland@rolandlewiscoaching.com

Awareness starts with noticing. It only becomes leadership once you’ve paused long enough to choose.

Let’s keep sitting with the letters, one at a time.

Lead on. Lead well.

Roland

Awareness is the work that happens below the waterline — before Accountability ever has something to answer for.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the HUMAAN Leadership Compass?

A six-capability model for human-centred leadership in the age of AI, built from Humanity, Understanding, Moral Judgement, Awareness, Accountability and Nurturing Growth (Lewis, 2026).

What is Awareness in the HUMAAN Leadership Compass?

The disciplined capacity to recognise what is shaping a response, before that response becomes leadership action. Its guiding question is: what is influencing my response right now? (Lewis, 2026).

What is “the leadership pause”?

The deliberate gap a leader creates between a trigger and their response — a breath used to gain clarity and consciously choose the story they tell themselves, rather than reacting on instinct in a difficult moment.

Is the leadership pause the same as mindfulness?

Not exactly. As Michael Bungay Stanier puts it, mindfulness isn’t a ten-day silent retreat or a meditation cushion — it’s the tiny pause between stimulation and response, the moment you notice a trigger and actively choose how to show up (Bungay Stanier, 2020).

How do you practise the pause in a real conflict?

Take a breath to give yourself clarity, then consciously choose the story you’re about to tell yourself, rather than defaulting into a fight, flight or freeze response, so your reaction serves your mission rather than your threat state.

About Roland Lewis

Roland Lewis is the founder of Roland Lewis Coaching and creator of the HUMAAN Leadership Compass, a cross-sector leadership coaching and consulting practice serving leaders across business, education, not-for-profit and government. Before moving into coaching, he spent over a decade in educational leadership, including as an Assistant Principal, working across whole-school wellbeing, student voice, disability inclusion and instructional coaching. He holds a Cert IV in Business and Workplace Coaching and is working toward ICF credentialing.

References

Bungay Stanier, M. (2020). The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever. Page Two.

Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.

Edmondson, A. C. (2023). Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Simon Element.

Eurich, T. (2017). Insight: Why We're Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life. Crown Business.

Lewis, R. (2026). The HUMAAN Leadership Compass (Version 2.0). Roland Lewis Coaching.

Marquet, L. D. (2020). Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don't. Portfolio/Penguin.