How a Few Seconds Can Create the Leader You Want to Be
- 5 hours ago
- 9 min read
Written by Jonathan Rozenblit, Leadership Development Coach
Jonathan Rozenblit is a Professional Certified Coach (ICF-PCC), author, and podcast host who specializes in helping corporate professionals discover and develop their unique practice of leadership. His focus is on the inner work of leadership, creating conditions for people to be, bring, and do their best.
Leadership shows up in the smallest moments. The few seconds between something activating in you and how you respond often shape relationships, reputations, and results far more than any strategy session ever will. This article explores what becomes possible when leaders develop the practice of noticing what is happening inside them, pausing to check in with how they want to show up, and experimenting with a more productive response than the automatic reaction that would otherwise have happened. It is an invitation to consider that this practice, built over time and used in the moments that matter, may be one of the highest return investments available in the practice of leadership.
The reaction is wired in
You feel it before you think it. A comment lands wrong in a meeting. News arrives that you were not expecting. Someone pushes back on a decision you just made. In that instant, something activates inside you. Your chest tightens. Your jaw clenches. Heat rises. Your mind floods with reasons why this is a problem, why you should respond, and why you need to set things straight right now.
That activation is wired in. Your brain detects threat and mobilises a response in milliseconds, faster than conscious thought can catch up. This is how human beings are built. It served our ancestors well. It still shows up today, in meetings, in conversations, and in moments when something does not land the way we expected.
Research on negativity bias shows that our brains are built with a heightened sensitivity to unpleasant news. We notice what could go wrong before we notice what could go right. We feel the sting of criticism more acutely than the warmth of praise. This bias is automatic. It happens before we decide it should. It is part of how we are wired.
The activation itself is not the issue. Every leader feels it. The senior leader who just learned about a missed timeline in front of peers feels it. The manager who receives pushback in a meeting feels it. The executive who hears criticism of their decision feels it.
What separates leaders is what they do with those first few seconds after the activation arrives. Some leaders move straight from activation to response. The thought comes, and the words follow. The reaction is immediate. Other leaders pause. Something in those first few seconds shifts. Instead of being carried forward by the activation, they stay with themselves long enough to notice what is happening. Long enough to remember what actually matters in the moment. Long enough to choose how they want to show up.
That pause is part of what we will explore in this article. What happens in it. Why it matters. How to make it part of how you lead.
The core disciplines as the practice
The pause alone changes nothing. You can hold back your words and still be churning inside. You can wait a few seconds and then respond exactly the way you would have responded immediately. Pausing is not the practice. What you do inside the pause is.
Leadership Practitioners, the kind of leaders who prioritise creating conditions for themselves and others to be, bring, and do their best, work with three core disciplines: noticing what is happening, pausing to create a moment, and experimenting with how you show up. These disciplines, when put together, create the conditions for something different to happen.
Noticing begins simply. It is paying attention to what is happening in you when something activates. The tightness in your chest. The heat rising. The thought that arrives. The urge to speak. Most of the time, these signals pass through without much attention. You feel them and move forward. Noticing is different. It is deliberately paying attention to what you are sensing, what is present in your body, and what is moving through your mind. You are recognising that something is happening.
Once you notice, you pause. That pause gives you the opportunity to check in with yourself. How do I want to show up here? What is my intention? What mindset am I bringing? From there, you experiment as a way of trying out a more productive response than the automatic reaction that would otherwise have happened.
The practice as an investment
A few seconds of noticing, pausing, and experimenting might not feel like much. It is easy to dismiss it as a small thing. A minor adjustment in how you show up. And yet, those few seconds compound into something larger.
Consider what happens when you react. The words come out. The tone lands a certain way. The other person responds to what they experienced, often defensively. Now you are managing the fallout. You are clarifying what you meant. You are spending energy on repair. Hours might pass before the interaction settles. Weeks or months might pass before trust fully rebuilds. In some environments, a single reactive moment can follow you indefinitely. People might forgive. They might also never forget.
Now consider what might happen when you notice, pause, and experiment. You recognise what is activating in you. You check in with how you want to show up. You try a response that aligns with that intention. The other person experiences something different. They feel seen rather than attacked. They are more likely to engage. The moment moves forward rather than spiralling.
The few seconds you invested in noticing and pausing cost you nothing in the moment. But the return compounds. Trust builds. Relationships strengthen. Your reputation grows. Over time, people choose to bring their best thinking to conversations with you because they trust how you will receive them.
The math is simple. A few seconds of practice versus hours or days of repair. A moment of intention versus a moment that might stay with them.
When you frame it this way, the practice becomes one of the highest return investments available to you as a leader.
In real life
A senior leader sits in a cross-team meeting with peers. The intent of the meeting is to surface timelines, risks, and issues across projects. Midway through, one of the senior leader’s direct reports raises their hand. “We’re not going to hit the timeline on the client deliverable,” they say. “We found some technical obstacles we didn’t anticipate.” The senior leader feels something shift inside immediately.
Not just the missed timeline. The fact that the senior leader is hearing this for the first time in a room full of peers. They know their team. They know how to help unlock obstacles. And they were not given the chance. The thought arrives fast: If they had told me earlier, I could have helped. I could have brought resources. I could have talked to the client. This did not have to happen this way.
The senior leader’s jaw tightens. They feel the pull to respond. To say something in the moment that makes clear how problematic this is. To signal to their peers that they do not tolerate surprises like this. To make sure everyone in the room knows this was not their doing. Then something else happens.
In the moments before words come out, the senior leader pauses. In that pause, they notice what they are feeling. The frustration. The sense of being sidelined. The instinct to protect their reputation in front of peers. They also notice something else.
Their direct report looks nervous. They just admitted to a miss in a room full of senior leaders. The senior leader recognises that their direct report made a choice to surface the problem rather than hide it. That took courage.
The senior leader checks in with themselves. How do I want to show up here? They think about what matters most. Building trust with their team. Creating conditions where problems surface early. Showing their peers what leadership looks like in a difficult moment. The senior leader takes a breath and speaks.
“Thank you for surfacing this. I appreciate you bringing it forward rather than letting it surprise us later.” The leader pauses. “I want to understand what happened. I want to help. Can we grab some time after this meeting to dig into it together?”
The room moves on. The senior leader’s peers do not say anything. No one comments on the miss or the response. But later, one of them pulls the senior leader aside. “That was a good move,” they say. “The way you handled that. A lot of leaders would have come down hard. Your team member will remember that.”
In the days that followed, the senior leader and their direct report dug into what happened. The obstacles were real. But so was something else. The direct report had been hesitant to raise the issue earlier because they were not sure how it would land. They had previously worked with other leaders who responded to early warnings with anger, even when they asked for them.
This senior leader’s response, genuine curiosity and a desire to help, changed something. After one of their working sessions, the direct report paused before leaving. “I want to say something,” they said. “I was scared when I brought that up in the meeting. I thought you were going to be angry with me. But the way you responded, it made me feel like I could actually trust you with the hard stuff. That means a lot.”
The senior leader nodded. They did not need to say much. The direct report had just named exactly why those few seconds of pause mattered.
Over the following weeks, the team started to surface risks earlier. They trusted that bringing problems forward was safer than hiding them. The project timeline issue was salvaged. A relationship that could have been damaged strengthened. The senior leader’s reputation with their peers grew because peers noticed how they handled the moment and how they chose to invest in their relationship with their team over protecting themselves in the moment.
The few seconds of pause, the moment of checking in with how they wanted to show up, and the choice to experiment with a more productive response were small investments that compounded into something much larger.
Making the practice your own
The senior leader in that story felt bothered. That bother was real. It did not disappear because they paused. What they did with it is what is important. They noticed it. They acknowledged it internally. Then they made a conscious choice about what to focus on and build. That is what the practice is.
The practice does not ask you to ignore the bother or pretend it is not there. It asks you to notice it, acknowledge it, and then choose what you want to focus on. The senior leader could have focused on the fact that they were not told earlier. They could have focused on the miss, the surprise, and the sense of being left out. Instead, they chose to focus on something else: trust, an environment where honesty is welcome, and conditions where people feel safe bringing their real concerns.
That choice, what to focus on and what to invest energy in, is available to you in every moment. The practice does not require dramatic situations. It can be built in small, ordinary interactions where the stakes feel low. A conversation with a colleague. A comment in a meeting. Feedback that lands wrong. These are the moments where the skill of noticing, pausing, and experimenting develops. Each small moment is a deposit into your capacity to choose differently when the stakes are higher.
Over time, the practice becomes part of how you lead. You notice. You pause. You experiment. The conditions you create reflect the choices you are making, moment by moment.
Conclusion
The practice of noticing, pausing, and experimenting is one of the highest return investments available in the practice of leadership. It asks for a willingness to develop that capacity over time and then choose to use it in the moments that matter.
Those few seconds are always available to you. In meetings. In conversations. In moments when something activates and the pull to react is strong. The choice to notice what is happening, to pause and check in with how you want to show up, and to experiment with a more productive response shapes the moment in front of you and the conditions you create over time.
The senior leader in this article developed their leadership one moment at a time. One choice at a time. The practice grew through repetition.
The same is available to you. The next time something does not land as you expect, notice it. Pause to check in with yourself. Experiment with responding in a way that aligns with how you want to show up as a leader. That is where the practice begins.
Next steps
If this article resonated with you and you would like to explore noticing, pausing, and experimenting further, check out the self-paced guidance I have put together, Practice the Core Disciplines, which you can get on its own or as part of the complete Leadership Practitioner Essentials pathway.
If you would like to continue exploring how the practice of leadership shows up in everyday moments, you can also join me on Substack, where I share reflections, stories, and invitations into this work.
Read more from Jonathan Rozenblit
Jonathan Rozenblit, Leadership Development Coach
Jonathan Rozenblit guides corporate professionals through their journey of discovering and developing their unique practice of leadership so that they can create conditions for themselves and others to be, bring, and do their best at work. Jonathan holds Professional Certified Coach credentials from the International Coaching Federation, is the co-creator of the Leadership Practitioner program, a program that equips individuals with practical tools to inspire trust and cultivate collaborative cultures where people can bring their best selves to work every day, co-host of the Leadership Practitioner podcast, and co-author of 'The Essential Leadership Practitioner: A Framework for Building a Meaningful Practice of Leadership'.
