Slowing Down to Speed Up

Serendipity?....

I like to believe that chance doesn’t really play a part in how things come together, but rather, we are able to see the connections that were, and are, products of our growth, wisdom, and for lack of a better word, just paying attention.

I was just visiting with my friend Kim Axtell who is the Director of Mathematics and Science at Ft. Worth ISD and we were talking about how to make changes in classrooms, with teachers, with administrators, and she mentioned “slowing down to speed up”.

The same day, I had the opportunity to visit with Emily Shisler at Bellwether and the concept yet again came up as we talked about the implementation of new curriculum and the pitfalls and advice I would give to anyone looking to make a similar move to using High Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM).

I found myself quoting Kim, “Slow down to speed up”.

When I was a kid, maybe seven or eight, I would go into the woods with my grandfather.? He had purchased about 30 acres of land in east Texas. It was really just a thicket of hardwoods nestled between endless other acres of hardwoods – essentially, the middle of nowhere.

I can remember times he would take me into the woods far enough away from camp that a clear path back wasn’t available. He would then hand me a machete, and say, “take me back to camp”.

This was obviously a practical skill in understanding my surroundings, being prepared should anything happen and I need to navigate on my own, but like the wisdom of grandfathers tends to do, there was more to this exercise.? Taking the machete, finding a direction, I put my hands to work and immediately began chopping straight away through the tangled underbrush and forging a path back to camp.

After working up a sweat, and clearing some path, but not making very much headway, I heard a voice from in front of me.

It was my grandfather calling to me.

He had found a less direct route but was much clearer.

His lesson for me, sometimes the straightest path isn’t always the clearest.

To find that path, we need to stop, pause, look, take in all our surroundings and provide ourselves with a moment to find the best way. A clarity of vision by slowing down.

There’s a great article in Fast Company this month about Slowing Down to Speed Up – again, maybe serendipitous? It mentions that “Neuroscience supports the idea that structured reflection enhances cognitive performance and decision-making. Harvard Business School research has shown that leaders who regularly engage in structured reflection improve their productivity and performance by 23%.”

“There are two critical ways slowing down improves leadership effectiveness:

It activates “diffuse mode” thinking. When we take breaks from active problem-solving, our brains process information in the background, leading to creative insights and better solutions.

It improves emotional intelligence. Leaders who pause before reacting better navigate difficult conversations, manage conflict, and lead with empathy—key traits that drive engagement and retention.”

Each December, I host a professional learning retreat for our curriculum subject matter experts, our campus instructional coaches, our instructional deans, and my content directors. We always begin with “gestational silence”. We define it as a moment, one small moment, that opens into stillness before it closes and brings us back to the work at hand.? It is the space between the inhale and the exhale. It is the briefest moment of stillness and quiet before the cycle begins again.??

Often we don’t notice the space between – we instead focus on the motion, the action, the work and not the pause.

Silence and stillness is where we find calm.

Stillness is the listening and learning during the pause before we respond.

We were hosting a “Strong Finish” mini-PD for our Grade Level Administrators recently and we were reviewing a new dashboard we created to pull all our data sources together that heat-mapped everything imaginable.? It’s a great tool, but the conversation immediately went to the desire for it to tell us “what to do” to intervene for kids and teachers alike. I stopped them and asked them to pause a minute.?

The purpose of the dashboard wasn’t to provide answers, but to help everyone ask better questions.

Purposeful pausing, intentionally stopping to gain our bearings, and be reflective about our direction, creates space for strategic thinking. It builds culture around critical thinking and achieving goals because it allows us the ability to find clarity in the vision.

It allows us to see past the underbrush all around us and make necessary adjustments to finding our way back.

Take a moment to slow down.

Reflect.

Ask better questions.

If we do, we won’t need hindsight quite as much – we will have the foresight to better navigate all the complexities of leading change.