49. The Executive Pause: How Leaders Command a Room with Silence
You're in a high-stakes meeting. A question comes your way, and panic sets in. Most people scramble to answer, rushing to prove they belong… but the leaders who truly command the room operate differently. They pause, and in that silence, the entire dynamic shifts.
This week, I'm exploring the executive pause: a powerful yet underused tool that transforms how you're perceived in meetings and how you feel about your own authority. This isn't about learning another strategy or framework; it's about mastering silence as a form of leadership presence.
Listen in today to discover why silence feels so awkward, how senior executives use pauses to signal thoughtfulness and long-term perspective, and practical techniques to implement immediately. Most importantly, you'll understand how growing your executive maturity is all about changing your delivery.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why rushing to answer questions undermines your executive presence and signals anxiety rather than authority.
The reason silence feels so awkward.
How taking one inhale and exhale before responding calms your nervous system.
The difference between "chasing the room" versus "commanding the room" through strategic pauses.
How to use punctuation pauses to let your words land.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
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Ep #48: Why Real Empowerment Feels Wrong Before It Feels Wrong
Full Episode Transcript:
Picture this: You're in a high-stakes meeting. A question comes your way. You're full of panic and fear. You rush to answer it. Most people rush to answer, scrambling to prove they belong. But the leaders who truly command the room, they don't rush. They pause. And in that pause, the entire dynamic shifts.
Today, we dive into a powerful, yet underused tool. One most high achievers haven't yet embraced. It's not another strategy or a new framework. It's simpler and more potent than that. And once you claim it, you'll never walk into a meeting the same way again.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey, podcast listeners. Welcome to today's episode on the executive pause. This is about using silence as a powerful form of pausing and allowing yourself some space before speaking up in meetings. This episode has the potential of changing how you are perceived and how powerful you feel in meetings going forward. So, listen up. You might want to listen to this over and over again because there is going to be a lot to unpack here. And this is one of the skill sets that I teach my clients when they are really moving from a doer, a high-achieving doer, to an executive. I call it the path to executive maturity.
Learning the skill is one of the skills that really have people saying, "Wow, she's really an executive. She's a powerhouse." And it is learning the skill, and it'll be a little bit wobbly. If you listen to my episode on empowerment, you know that the road to empowerment is full of feeling awkward, feeling uncomfortable, and at the end of it, you feel super powerful, super certain, super clear. But the road to it may feel a little bit wobbly.
But let's just dive in and kick off, and I'm going to share some stories of my own. I'm also going to share stories from my clients, and we're going to learn this skill together today. Okay, so picture this: You're in a meeting. A senior leader turns to you with a high-stakes question. Your instincts fill the silence, rush to prove yourself. But what if, just for a beat, you didn't? What if you paused? The moment of silence is not weakness. It's actually authority, and we are going to dive into that today.
Most of us were raised to believe that silence means something's gone wrong. People are waiting. We must rush. But what if the silence is exactly where your power lives? Today, I'm going to show you how mastering the executive pause can transform the way you're heard and why it's one of the clearest markers of executive maturity. And actually, one of my clients, I'm going to shout her out, Miriam calls it the sexy pause, which it can be really sexy, right? To really own it and take that moment to take up that space. But before it's the executive pause or even the sexy pause, it is going to be an awkward pause, an awkward moment, because oftentimes, in a pause, there is silence, and it kind of feels weird.
I want to share this with you because I remember having a conversation with a senior male leader, and I was asking him a very important question about the way we were doing things, and I made really powerful points. And I asked him, "Well, what do you think?" And he took like the longest time to answer. And in my mind, I was like, "What happened? Did the phone go dead? Is something wrong?" Then I realized he is just thinking through everything I shared with him, and he is processing what I'm saying. And I did say, "Hey, are you there?" And he said, "Yes, I'm thinking." So he just like owned it. He's like, "I'm thinking." And he just took up that space and thought, and then he came back to me and shared what he was thinking.
And I actually felt very joyful in hearing his response because in that pause, I realized that the question I was giving him was complex. The recommendation I was making was clear, but the path forward was much more complicated. And I was articulating that, and he actually took the time to think that through. And when I look back at that moment, when I'm like, "Wow, he paused for a really, really long time," it helped me see that he took the time to process what I was saying, and he wanted to thoughtfully give me an answer. And I think it helped me see that what I had to say was important.
So it was like mutual, right? It wasn't just him taking up space thinking. It was literally me also seeing that he's thinking that he knows what I'm saying is important, and he wants to properly give it his time and attention. And the answer he gave back to me was very thoughtful, and I could see and sense that he really thought through it.
And what really happens in today's world when we're really transactional and when we're trying to do things really quick, we are oftentimes just in autopilot, almost zone-out mode, where we are like hearing something, replying so quickly, we're not taking the time to pause and to think. But in high-stake meetings and high-stake situations, it is so important to pause and think and really give it your time and attention. And having this pause, I'm going to share with you the internal perspective of having this pause.
But before we dive into that, I want you to know why silence feels so awkward. We have been conditioned to not waste people's time, to be fast, efficient, and prepared, to prove you know the answer right away, almost to belong. And so the result that has this happening is that silence equals danger, equals awkwardness, equals panic, and oftentimes there's a lot of over-explaining that happens because people feel the need to fill up the space. Let's not have any awkward pauses. It's so weird.
But if you think about executives who claim their worth and their pause, the way that they operate, watch any seasoned CEO in an interview or a negotiation. They don't rush. They pause. They think. They let others wait. I call this entitlement energy. And the thought process of entitlement energy is what I say is important, how I think is important. Giving you my best answer is respect. So I think sometimes people hear the words entitlement and they're like, "Oh, that's a bad thing to feel so entitled that you can just take up all this space." But as I shared in my story, there is a respect side of it, right? I may be entitled to my time to think clearly and to process what you're saying, but that doesn't mean that I'm better than you. It really just means that I respect you so much that I want to give you my best answer with my best thinking. And I can only do that if I remain in silence and respect myself and respect you and take time to truly digest what you've shared with me and to think about how to answer it before I even speak.
So it's really important when you're practicing the skill and when you're even thinking about this executive pause, to frame it in a way that is really about I am important. What I say matters. What this person is asking me matters. This person in front of me, I respect, right? So if there's any part of you that's like, "Oh my gosh, I don't want to be entitled." Well, part of what I'm going to share with you is having executive level maturity is to own that entitlement, but in a way that's also mutual and purposeful and beneficial for other people. So if that will help you embrace this in a greater way for yourself, do that because this is what it's all about. This executive pause is claiming your worth in the moment but also respecting the person in front of you enough to take that pause. And what it has us doing, and this is researched backed by Harvard, they actually do a whole article on the power of the pause. And they say that many executives don't like being described as tactical, short-term, or leading in the weeds. Yet, that's exactly what happens when you don't pause.
Research confirms what great leaders know. Pausing signals thoughtfulness, confidence, and long-term perspective. It makes you more credible, not less. So it's so important to actually practice this pause and to see it from this perspective because it is truly about honoring yourself and honoring the person in front of you. But also giving yourself, your brain, time to think through things because in our fast-paced world, what happens when we go and fill the space, we will go into that autopilot. And as I've shared this quote before with you, Joe Dispenza, who has done so much research on neuroscience and leadership, has said that when you're over 35, most of the things that you say and how you think is really an autopilot response based on your past programming, based on how you were raised, based on your conditioning, based on what got you here at this very moment, right?
Because your brain is really relying on itself, and it wants to be super efficient as well. But when we're in a high-stakes room and high-stake situation, oftentimes you're getting new data, and you're getting a new context, and you're getting new perspectives, and it's important to give yourself that time to think fully, to really give yourself that space. So, I'm going to offer you a few things to try out, and we're going to do this together, actually, a tactical way to practice this.
You want to breathe before answering because oftentimes, if you are trying to prove yourself and you're full of convincing energy, you want to jump in there. You want to say all the things super, super fast. But what that has you doing again isn't being thoughtful, isn't being slowing down and giving your brain oxygen, calming your nervous system. So when asked a question, take one inhale and one exhale, then answer it. This is where we can just all begin with this executive pause. Taking that inhale, exhaling, then answering. Even in that short amount of time, it gives your brain oxygen, time to breathe. Your nervous system calming down. You're processing the question.
And then punctuation pauses make a big difference, too. End your sentences and then count silently before starting a new one. You probably won't need to count once you've gotten this down more and once you start being much more aware of the pace and of the way you're talking, right? Let your point land with gravity. I actually did a speech class before and it was like, "You want your words to land." Like you want your words to land like a brick. And so even that image in my brain helped me see that, okay, if I want my words to land like a brick, I need to slow down, and I need to punctuate my pause, and I need to feel firm in what I'm landing, right? And not have that high pitch, which a lot of women do.
‘Instead of saying, "That's my recommendation. I think we should move forward." A lot of women will say, "That's my recommendation. I think we should move forward?" And so if you listen to my second piece, right, it's much more uncertain. It's more questioning. It's not an affirmative. It's a question. And we want to be affirmative. We want to be assertive. We want to be clear. We want to own our authority. That's what executives do.
So, let's practice this. I want for you to actually dive in and exercise with me because this will help you to really see what the difference is. So first, say the sentence out loud, and I want you to rush it, no pauses, all in one breath. This project is off track, and if we don't adjust quickly, we'll miss our deadline, lose credibility, and burn out the team. Go ahead and say it. Don't stop. Don't breathe. Just spill it out.
Now, I want you to notice, how did that feel? How did it feel for me to rush saying it? Maybe breathless, maybe like the weight of your message got lost. That's what's happening when you don't pause. This is what happens to a lot of women when they rush and say a whole bunch of things, and then men say, "Oh my gosh, she's very emotional. She needs time to breathe and to take a breath." What they're noticing is your anxious anxiety leaking out of you and into the words, and they're not even listening to your words.
They're listening to the tone and the emotions of what you're saying, and they're like, "Okay, we need to slow down because Sarah's freaking out," or "Sarah needs to take a breath because we're not with her, and she seems really, really intense," right? So instead of actually hearing your words, feeling comforted by your words, which is what we want to do as leaders, people feel scared. They feel like you're rushed, that you need help. There's something wrong with you, right?
So let's now do it again, but this time with those executive pauses, and I will guide you, and you will notice yourself saying these words, and notice how it feels as these words land. Just like I said before, right? We want it to land like a brick. We want to give ourselves time to say it, and we want to slow everything down, slow the pace down. This project is off track. If we don't act quickly, we'll miss the deadline, lose credibility, and burn out the team. So say it again with me. This time, pausing after each phrase. This project is off track. If we don't adjust quickly, we'll miss the deadline, lose credibility, and burn out the team.
Do you feel the difference in your body, in your voice? Even as you hear my voice slowing down, talking it one step at a time. The first version runs past people. The second one lands. That's the power of the executive pause. It slows you down. It signals authority. And it makes the room listen.
The third thing you can do is eye contact. Hold eye contact with people, right? Especially if you're in person and even on Zoom. You want to pick the person, maybe the most senior level person, and have some direct eye contact. Look directly at that person for 1 or 2 seconds before you respond. You can even do this as a presentation. You want to give yourself some pace. You want to ground yourself. This signals weight, confidence, and presence, right? If you notice people that are really nervous, they're oftentimes looking down, they're oftentimes staring at their notes, they're oftentimes very fidgety. What we want to do is calm ourselves down, feel really grounded in our bodies, and take the time to pause because we want to have people with us, and we expect to have people with us. This is part of executive maturity.
So try one of these in your next meeting. Notice how the room reacts differently. Notice how you feel differently in your body as you practice these. And remember, it may feel awkward first. I actually had a client do this, and she said, "Oh, people were really kind of like, 'Oh, Sarah, are you still there?'" you know, kind of like I did in my meeting. And she said, "Yeah, I'm just thinking." She just claimed that moment for her. "I'm just thinking." But she told me how impactful it made it for her to show up increasingly in rooms with more senior level people, to give herself that space, to take up that space to pause.
And it's really not because you changed your content. It's because you changed your delivery. And this delivery matters. The more you are getting visibility, the more you are rising in your leadership, the more the way you present and your leadership presence matters. So this is really going back to the embodiment of being an executive, of being somebody that is worthy of taking up space and leading and commanding a room.
When I talk about executive maturity, it is really shifting from your identity of being a doer to being somebody that's leading. This isn't about pausing for 2 seconds. It's about how you see yourself as a leader. This is really what the whole podcast is about. Of course, I give you tactical ways of doing this, but it's about executive maturity isn't rushing. It's setting the tempo of the room. When you pause, you're not losing time. You're commanding it. Mature leaders don't chase the room. They change the room. You're not chasing to get your last word in. You are commanding the room. You're leading people. And in order to lead people, you need to lead yourself first. You need to calm your nervous system down. You need to give yourself space to answer, space to think, space to process.
So this episode is really about executive maturity, and one of these skill sets is owning the executive pause. And as one of my clients said, the sexy pause, right? You make it your own. You make it about you, and you make it about taking over, taking command of the room because you are supporting the room in its leadership, and you can't do that unless you lead yourself first.
The pause is not empty. It's full of your power. Practice it, claim it, share this episode with a woman you know who's tired of rushing and ready to be heard.
All right. That was today's episode. Go out, practice the executive pause, embrace the awkwardness until you can fully own it as your own, and you will be so powerful and so potent. People will wonder what happened. How did they grow so quickly? How did they change so much? Doing these little tweaks is going to make a big difference as you continue on your path of executive maturity.
All right. Have a great week ahead, and I will see you soon. Take good care.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Today, we dive into a powerful, yet underused tool. One most high achievers haven't yet embraced. It's not another strategy or a new framework. It's simpler and more potent than that. And once you claim it, you'll never walk into a meeting the same way again.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey, podcast listeners. Welcome to today's episode on the executive pause. This is about using silence as a powerful form of pausing and allowing yourself some space before speaking up in meetings. This episode has the potential of changing how you are perceived and how powerful you feel in meetings going forward. So, listen up. You might want to listen to this over and over again because there is going to be a lot to unpack here. And this is one of the skill sets that I teach my clients when they are really moving from a doer, a high-achieving doer, to an executive. I call it the path to executive maturity.
Learning the skill is one of the skills that really have people saying, "Wow, she's really an executive. She's a powerhouse." And it is learning the skill, and it'll be a little bit wobbly. If you listen to my episode on empowerment, you know that the road to empowerment is full of feeling awkward, feeling uncomfortable, and at the end of it, you feel super powerful, super certain, super clear. But the road to it may feel a little bit wobbly.
But let's just dive in and kick off, and I'm going to share some stories of my own. I'm also going to share stories from my clients, and we're going to learn this skill together today. Okay, so picture this: You're in a meeting. A senior leader turns to you with a high-stakes question. Your instincts fill the silence, rush to prove yourself. But what if, just for a beat, you didn't? What if you paused? The moment of silence is not weakness. It's actually authority, and we are going to dive into that today.
Most of us were raised to believe that silence means something's gone wrong. People are waiting. We must rush. But what if the silence is exactly where your power lives? Today, I'm going to show you how mastering the executive pause can transform the way you're heard and why it's one of the clearest markers of executive maturity. And actually, one of my clients, I'm going to shout her out, Miriam calls it the sexy pause, which it can be really sexy, right? To really own it and take that moment to take up that space. But before it's the executive pause or even the sexy pause, it is going to be an awkward pause, an awkward moment, because oftentimes, in a pause, there is silence, and it kind of feels weird.
I want to share this with you because I remember having a conversation with a senior male leader, and I was asking him a very important question about the way we were doing things, and I made really powerful points. And I asked him, "Well, what do you think?" And he took like the longest time to answer. And in my mind, I was like, "What happened? Did the phone go dead? Is something wrong?" Then I realized he is just thinking through everything I shared with him, and he is processing what I'm saying. And I did say, "Hey, are you there?" And he said, "Yes, I'm thinking." So he just like owned it. He's like, "I'm thinking." And he just took up that space and thought, and then he came back to me and shared what he was thinking.
And I actually felt very joyful in hearing his response because in that pause, I realized that the question I was giving him was complex. The recommendation I was making was clear, but the path forward was much more complicated. And I was articulating that, and he actually took the time to think that through. And when I look back at that moment, when I'm like, "Wow, he paused for a really, really long time," it helped me see that he took the time to process what I was saying, and he wanted to thoughtfully give me an answer. And I think it helped me see that what I had to say was important.
So it was like mutual, right? It wasn't just him taking up space thinking. It was literally me also seeing that he's thinking that he knows what I'm saying is important, and he wants to properly give it his time and attention. And the answer he gave back to me was very thoughtful, and I could see and sense that he really thought through it.
And what really happens in today's world when we're really transactional and when we're trying to do things really quick, we are oftentimes just in autopilot, almost zone-out mode, where we are like hearing something, replying so quickly, we're not taking the time to pause and to think. But in high-stake meetings and high-stake situations, it is so important to pause and think and really give it your time and attention. And having this pause, I'm going to share with you the internal perspective of having this pause.
But before we dive into that, I want you to know why silence feels so awkward. We have been conditioned to not waste people's time, to be fast, efficient, and prepared, to prove you know the answer right away, almost to belong. And so the result that has this happening is that silence equals danger, equals awkwardness, equals panic, and oftentimes there's a lot of over-explaining that happens because people feel the need to fill up the space. Let's not have any awkward pauses. It's so weird.
But if you think about executives who claim their worth and their pause, the way that they operate, watch any seasoned CEO in an interview or a negotiation. They don't rush. They pause. They think. They let others wait. I call this entitlement energy. And the thought process of entitlement energy is what I say is important, how I think is important. Giving you my best answer is respect. So I think sometimes people hear the words entitlement and they're like, "Oh, that's a bad thing to feel so entitled that you can just take up all this space." But as I shared in my story, there is a respect side of it, right? I may be entitled to my time to think clearly and to process what you're saying, but that doesn't mean that I'm better than you. It really just means that I respect you so much that I want to give you my best answer with my best thinking. And I can only do that if I remain in silence and respect myself and respect you and take time to truly digest what you've shared with me and to think about how to answer it before I even speak.
So it's really important when you're practicing the skill and when you're even thinking about this executive pause, to frame it in a way that is really about I am important. What I say matters. What this person is asking me matters. This person in front of me, I respect, right? So if there's any part of you that's like, "Oh my gosh, I don't want to be entitled." Well, part of what I'm going to share with you is having executive level maturity is to own that entitlement, but in a way that's also mutual and purposeful and beneficial for other people. So if that will help you embrace this in a greater way for yourself, do that because this is what it's all about. This executive pause is claiming your worth in the moment but also respecting the person in front of you enough to take that pause. And what it has us doing, and this is researched backed by Harvard, they actually do a whole article on the power of the pause. And they say that many executives don't like being described as tactical, short-term, or leading in the weeds. Yet, that's exactly what happens when you don't pause.
Research confirms what great leaders know. Pausing signals thoughtfulness, confidence, and long-term perspective. It makes you more credible, not less. So it's so important to actually practice this pause and to see it from this perspective because it is truly about honoring yourself and honoring the person in front of you. But also giving yourself, your brain, time to think through things because in our fast-paced world, what happens when we go and fill the space, we will go into that autopilot. And as I've shared this quote before with you, Joe Dispenza, who has done so much research on neuroscience and leadership, has said that when you're over 35, most of the things that you say and how you think is really an autopilot response based on your past programming, based on how you were raised, based on your conditioning, based on what got you here at this very moment, right?
Because your brain is really relying on itself, and it wants to be super efficient as well. But when we're in a high-stakes room and high-stake situation, oftentimes you're getting new data, and you're getting a new context, and you're getting new perspectives, and it's important to give yourself that time to think fully, to really give yourself that space. So, I'm going to offer you a few things to try out, and we're going to do this together, actually, a tactical way to practice this.
You want to breathe before answering because oftentimes, if you are trying to prove yourself and you're full of convincing energy, you want to jump in there. You want to say all the things super, super fast. But what that has you doing again isn't being thoughtful, isn't being slowing down and giving your brain oxygen, calming your nervous system. So when asked a question, take one inhale and one exhale, then answer it. This is where we can just all begin with this executive pause. Taking that inhale, exhaling, then answering. Even in that short amount of time, it gives your brain oxygen, time to breathe. Your nervous system calming down. You're processing the question.
And then punctuation pauses make a big difference, too. End your sentences and then count silently before starting a new one. You probably won't need to count once you've gotten this down more and once you start being much more aware of the pace and of the way you're talking, right? Let your point land with gravity. I actually did a speech class before and it was like, "You want your words to land." Like you want your words to land like a brick. And so even that image in my brain helped me see that, okay, if I want my words to land like a brick, I need to slow down, and I need to punctuate my pause, and I need to feel firm in what I'm landing, right? And not have that high pitch, which a lot of women do.
‘Instead of saying, "That's my recommendation. I think we should move forward." A lot of women will say, "That's my recommendation. I think we should move forward?" And so if you listen to my second piece, right, it's much more uncertain. It's more questioning. It's not an affirmative. It's a question. And we want to be affirmative. We want to be assertive. We want to be clear. We want to own our authority. That's what executives do.
So, let's practice this. I want for you to actually dive in and exercise with me because this will help you to really see what the difference is. So first, say the sentence out loud, and I want you to rush it, no pauses, all in one breath. This project is off track, and if we don't adjust quickly, we'll miss our deadline, lose credibility, and burn out the team. Go ahead and say it. Don't stop. Don't breathe. Just spill it out.
Now, I want you to notice, how did that feel? How did it feel for me to rush saying it? Maybe breathless, maybe like the weight of your message got lost. That's what's happening when you don't pause. This is what happens to a lot of women when they rush and say a whole bunch of things, and then men say, "Oh my gosh, she's very emotional. She needs time to breathe and to take a breath." What they're noticing is your anxious anxiety leaking out of you and into the words, and they're not even listening to your words.
They're listening to the tone and the emotions of what you're saying, and they're like, "Okay, we need to slow down because Sarah's freaking out," or "Sarah needs to take a breath because we're not with her, and she seems really, really intense," right? So instead of actually hearing your words, feeling comforted by your words, which is what we want to do as leaders, people feel scared. They feel like you're rushed, that you need help. There's something wrong with you, right?
So let's now do it again, but this time with those executive pauses, and I will guide you, and you will notice yourself saying these words, and notice how it feels as these words land. Just like I said before, right? We want it to land like a brick. We want to give ourselves time to say it, and we want to slow everything down, slow the pace down. This project is off track. If we don't act quickly, we'll miss the deadline, lose credibility, and burn out the team. So say it again with me. This time, pausing after each phrase. This project is off track. If we don't adjust quickly, we'll miss the deadline, lose credibility, and burn out the team.
Do you feel the difference in your body, in your voice? Even as you hear my voice slowing down, talking it one step at a time. The first version runs past people. The second one lands. That's the power of the executive pause. It slows you down. It signals authority. And it makes the room listen.
The third thing you can do is eye contact. Hold eye contact with people, right? Especially if you're in person and even on Zoom. You want to pick the person, maybe the most senior level person, and have some direct eye contact. Look directly at that person for 1 or 2 seconds before you respond. You can even do this as a presentation. You want to give yourself some pace. You want to ground yourself. This signals weight, confidence, and presence, right? If you notice people that are really nervous, they're oftentimes looking down, they're oftentimes staring at their notes, they're oftentimes very fidgety. What we want to do is calm ourselves down, feel really grounded in our bodies, and take the time to pause because we want to have people with us, and we expect to have people with us. This is part of executive maturity.
So try one of these in your next meeting. Notice how the room reacts differently. Notice how you feel differently in your body as you practice these. And remember, it may feel awkward first. I actually had a client do this, and she said, "Oh, people were really kind of like, 'Oh, Sarah, are you still there?'" you know, kind of like I did in my meeting. And she said, "Yeah, I'm just thinking." She just claimed that moment for her. "I'm just thinking." But she told me how impactful it made it for her to show up increasingly in rooms with more senior level people, to give herself that space, to take up that space to pause.
And it's really not because you changed your content. It's because you changed your delivery. And this delivery matters. The more you are getting visibility, the more you are rising in your leadership, the more the way you present and your leadership presence matters. So this is really going back to the embodiment of being an executive, of being somebody that is worthy of taking up space and leading and commanding a room.
When I talk about executive maturity, it is really shifting from your identity of being a doer to being somebody that's leading. This isn't about pausing for 2 seconds. It's about how you see yourself as a leader. This is really what the whole podcast is about. Of course, I give you tactical ways of doing this, but it's about executive maturity isn't rushing. It's setting the tempo of the room. When you pause, you're not losing time. You're commanding it. Mature leaders don't chase the room. They change the room. You're not chasing to get your last word in. You are commanding the room. You're leading people. And in order to lead people, you need to lead yourself first. You need to calm your nervous system down. You need to give yourself space to answer, space to think, space to process.
So this episode is really about executive maturity, and one of these skill sets is owning the executive pause. And as one of my clients said, the sexy pause, right? You make it your own. You make it about you, and you make it about taking over, taking command of the room because you are supporting the room in its leadership, and you can't do that unless you lead yourself first.
The pause is not empty. It's full of your power. Practice it, claim it, share this episode with a woman you know who's tired of rushing and ready to be heard.
All right. That was today's episode. Go out, practice the executive pause, embrace the awkwardness until you can fully own it as your own, and you will be so powerful and so potent. People will wonder what happened. How did they grow so quickly? How did they change so much? Doing these little tweaks is going to make a big difference as you continue on your path of executive maturity.
All right. Have a great week ahead, and I will see you soon. Take good care.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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