What makes you hit the pause button?
Monday, as the stock market began trading and began a steady and fast fall, the circuit breaker was triggered, and all trading halted for 15 minutes. It was a safeguard put into place in 2013 that pauses trading if the market drops more than seven percent. It allows traders to take a breath, absorb the information and move forward in a more responsive manner rather than reactive.
Some argue that it didn’t work, but there is no real evidence yet. Here’s what we do know: The market had a tool in place to create a pause for response rather than reaction. We also know that the second circuit breaker that the market has set up, which completely stops trading for the day if the market drops more than 20 percent, did not have to be triggered.
“The market-wide circuit breakers are designed to slow trading down for a few minutes to give investors the ability to understand what’s happening in the market,” Stacey Cunningham, president of Intercontinental Exchange Inc’s NYSE, told CNBC.
What if everyone took the time to understand their own internal circuit breaker? What if corporations put a form of a circuit breaker in place for their organizations?
We have been and are living in volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous (VUCA) times, and this has been amplified with the COVID-19 outbreak. We are taking in information at a rate faster than anyone could have anticipated and much faster than our brain has evolved to process.
If ever there was a time or a case for our own personal circuit breaker – the time is now. Organizations that lead people have the privilege, and the responsibility, to create an organizational circuit breaker.
When coaching individuals and company leaders, we work together to notice when conditions are high that could lead to reactive versus responsive behavior. We identify the potential consequences of reactive versus response mode. We work to move to a response mode which will produce better long-term results for both the individual and the organization.
Questions I ask my clients to consider: How do we pause and create space? How do we drop the temperature?
There is no perfect blueprint and response right now. We are absolutely in uncharted waters. Allowing ourselves to notice the uncertainty and anxiety that come with this is ok and expected. The greatest power we can give ourselves and the greatest leadership that companies can give to their teams – is to practice the tools associated with a mindfulness method such as RAIN.
RAIN is an acronym for recognize, allow, investigate, and non-identify. The acronym is simple to remember and is used throughout most mindfulness teaching practices.
Many of my individual clients and companies I have worked with now practice RAIN to help create those much-needed circuit breakers. It’s not easy when temperatures are high, but it has the power to be a game changer for individuals and organizations.
RAIN helps people recognize uncertainty, pause for a bit more clarity and understanding, and then proceed with a thoughtful response. The response is guided by facts known at the time, which allows leaders to make decisions that align with individual, organizational, and in many cases societal needs.
RAIN:
- Recognize when a situation, emotion or feeling is hitting hard.
- Allow it, do not stop it. Agency comes from letting it be there and noticing it rather than running or reacting.
- Investigate it. Where am I feeling this, how does it show up in my body and what are the conditions that might be causing this feeling?
- Non-identify is the power to experience what is happening but not be identified by it. The brain will react to threats at all times. The shift from “I am” to “I have” settles the mind to allow response over reactivity.
Right now, we are in uncharted waters dealing with an intangible virus that we do not understand, in an environment that is primed for reactivity, with no one to blame. All of these factors lead to individuals and companies making decisions based off of trends, quick judgments, and partial understanding of facts. No one is wrong for this, but everyone has the ability to take a pause to create their own internal circuit breaker and move forward with greater agency for themselves and the organizations and teams they lead.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stock-market-practices-mindfulness-pam-marcheski/