The Power of Pauses: Embracing “Ma” in Leadership and Life

In this final episode of 2024, Nathan Freeburg reflects on the concept of Ma, a Japanese idea of the "space in between" that fosters creativity, clarity, and connection. Inspired by Albert Read's The Imagination Muscle, Nathan explores how Ma can enrich leadership, parenting, and daily life by valuing pauses, silence, and purposeful disconnect. Through personal stories, cultural insights, and practical takeaways, Nathan invites listeners to create more space in their lives for reflection and innovation.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The meaning of Ma and its role in Japanese culture.
• How to integrate the beauty of pauses into leadership and parenting.
• Practical ways to embrace silence, reflection, and purposeful disconnection.
• Why the spaces in between tasks and moments matter more than we think.

Key Takeaways:

1. Value Pauses for Reflection and Innovation
   • Take intentional breaks to spark creativity and thoughtful decision-making.
   • Schedule time for team brainstorming or personal reflection without an agenda.
2. Embrace Silence to Build Deeper Connections
   • Allow pauses in conversations to foster meaningful dialogue and trust.
   • Practice listening instead of filling every moment with noise.
3. Create Space for Purposeful Disconnect
   • Set aside device-free moments or quiet hours for focused work.
   • To cultivate clarity, incorporate small habits, like avoiding phones first thing in the morning.

Episode Highlights:

• Nathan’s love of reading and how unexpected lessons from books influence leadership and parenting.
• The concept of Ma as “the pause where life deepens its imprint,” and its presence in Japanese traditions.
• Reflections on Jerry Seinfeld’s “garbage time” and how it parallels the idea of Ma.
• Practical steps to honor pauses in leadership, family life, and personal growth.

Additional Resources:

• Book: The Imagination Muscle by Albert Read.
• Related Leadership Vision Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes: Click Here.
• YouTube video on the power of silence in conversations.

Final Thoughts:
Nathan challenges listeners to reflect on how they can embrace Ma in their lives and leadership. By honoring the spaces in between, we can rediscover what truly matters, foster creativity, and cultivate stronger connections with others.

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going!
Share how you’re incorporating Ma into your leadership or personal life:
📧 Ema

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You are listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg and for our final episode of 2024, I wanted to share an idea with you. That's something that I'm going to try to do more of in my life in this coming year and I want to invite you to do the same. So first, a little story. A little story.

Speaker 1: 0:24

I love reading. I read a wide variety of books, from fiction and nonfiction, spanning all kinds of genres and disciplines biographies, spy novels, thrillers, mysteries, a few books on neuroscience, and I just read a book about castles. It's super fun. I love it. I set a goal every year for myself to see if I could read more books than the year before. It's a way to stretch my thinking and just find. For me, it's really fun to find unexpected connections to leadership and parenting and performance and growth and just life in general, and I'm always trying to draw lessons from whatever it is that I'm reading and apply it to my life, like what's going on right then in my life, I've gained lessons on parenting from spy novels and I've learned leadership and business lessons from parenting books, and I've just found lots of helpful lessons from other sources and other things that you may not always think of as top of mind when you think of that topic. Basically, I'm just trying to read widely and learn lots and then apply those lessons to my work, to my family and to other areas of life, and so what I came across recently I think is going to be helpful to you as you think about your leadership this year.

Speaker 1: 1:49

A few months ago, on our weekly visit to our local library, I stumbled across this book, the Imagination Muscle, by Albert Reed. In short, this book is about growing the thing in us that leads to more imaginative ideas and solutions to the problems we face in our lives. It explores how we can strengthen our imaginative capacity, whether in the arts, business or personal growth, by simply expanding the types of inputs that we give ourselves and applying those lessons more broadly. So you can tell why I was immediately drawn to it. Now, towards the end of the book, page 248 to be exact, there was a section on a concept from Japanese culture called ma, a word that I'd never really heard of before, but I almost immediately recognize it as something that I need more of in my life.

Speaker 1: 2:32

So what is ma? Well, ma is a Japanese concept of the space in between. It's not just emptiness between objects or moments. It's a space that actually holds its significance and beauty. Albert Reed describes ma as the pause where life deepens its imprint. It's the silence, not the noise, the restraint not the excess. It's the thoughtful deliberation between actions, the stillness between moments and the pause that allows creativity and imagination to bloom. Now, in Japanese culture, they find this concept of ma everywhere. It's in the deliberate pause at the end of a bow. They find it in the space between the spokes of a wheel and even the simplicity of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, where a single flower and a crooked branch can create balance and evoke meaning Versus. When you think of like a US or Western culture flower arrangement that is just packed so full of greenery, you can't really tell what is going on. Ma reminds us that the space between things or the pauses in life are not empty. There's a reason for them. They're essential. They allow us to recalibrate, to reflect and rediscover what's important Now.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a different idea for this, that he calls garbage time. When he's talking about the time that he wants to have with his kids, he talks about it as some of the most important hours that he spends with them. It's the time when you're just driving to a practice or you're waiting in line or whatever it is that you're doing. Between the things that you're quote unquote doing, he says you're just sitting there having a bowl of cereal and not talking. That's everything he says.

Speaker 1: 4:14

Now, as I reflected on this idea of Ma, I realized how relevant it is to our leadership, to our creativity and obviously to our parenting and perhaps every single aspect of our lives. So often we're just rushing I know I am from one thing to the next, from meetings to projects, to school events or personal milestones that we kind of forget to honor the spaces in between. But it's in those spaces, those pauses, that's where the beauty and imagination and creativity can thrive. According to Reed, now, in leadership, these moments of ma might be the time between big projects or financial deadlines and the stillness after or between meetings. In parenting, maybe it's the quiet before bedtime or that time riding in a car when you can have a meaningful conversation or not say anything at all. In our personal lives, maybe it's early in the morning, in that stillness, before anybody else gets up, and we have anything that we absolutely have to do.

Speaker 1: 5:13

Ma teaches us that in those moments when we can slow down, we can pause, when we can breathe, not just to rest, but in those moments we can actually create space, can breathe not just to rest, but in those moments we can actually create space for something new to emerge. Now, there really isn't a comparable word for this idea of ma in English, and maybe it's just because our Western society and culture are too uncomfortable with these spaces or these ideas of pause. But I want to challenge you and honestly, I wrote this thing and I'm recording this mostly for myself. But I want to challenge you and, honestly, I wrote this thing and I'm recording this mostly for myself. But I want to challenge you and maybe this is something that we can all do together that as we think about the beginning of the next season I'm recording this here at the beginning of December 2024. So, as we think about the year ahead, or if you're listening to this in the summer, as you're thinking about even tomorrow or the next season, whatever that is I want to challenge you with these three takeaways as you try to implement some of the concepts of MA into your daily life. These are just three simple activities you can, like I said, do today, or maybe spend some more time thinking about how you might implement them as part of a broader team initiative.

Speaker 1: 6:19

So the first one is to value pauses for reflection and innovation. Leaders often feel pressure to keep moving forward, to make every moment of every day an opportunity to do something, but Ma teaches us that pauses are essential for thoughtful decision making and creativity. Now, this might sound counterintuitive, but schedule regular time for personal reflection or team brainstorming sessions where maybe the focus isn't really on any immediate outcomes, but it's just on imagining new possibilities or just thinking into what could be. This is time when you're just there, with no particular agenda. These pauses can be moments of great clarity and inspiration. I would also encourage you to have these pauses in your day as often as you can.

Speaker 1: 7:05

The second one, or the second challenge, is to embrace silence to build deeper connections. I found this video on YouTube there'll be a link in the show notes of a I think it was a Japanese professor talking about how, americans, they want to fill every single second during a conversation with just more conversation, and at Leadership Vision, we've talked a lot about the importance and the power of listening, and so, with that in mind, in your next meeting or your next one-on-one conversation, don't rush to fill the silence. Instead, maybe allow some pauses to happen. Naturally, that was an intentional pause. This can encourage deeper thinking, more meaningful contributions and maybe even a stronger sense of connection among your team or with whoever it is that you're talking to. Silence can be uncomfortable Just then, it was uncomfortable for me to do that, and maybe it's just uncomfortable at first, but it can also be incredibly powerful for building trust and fostering authenticity.

Speaker 1: 8:06

And third, and finally here, create space for purposeful disconnect. It's really popular right now for like a digital detox or to get off of social media, and I highly encourage you to do those things because in our hyper-connected world, purposeful moments of disconnect they're just more important and harder to come by than ever. So try setting aside some device-free time during your day or creating quiet hours for your team just to focus deeply, without any distractions. These moments of Ma can recharge your mind and cultivate creativity in ways that maybe you didn't realize. Maybe you didn't even know that you needed them. Encourage your team also to use these intervals just to reflect and refocus before diving back into their work Something that I do that's a really small thing is that I leave my phone up here in the studio to charge overnight, instead of grabbing it first thing when I wake up. It's a physical barrier. I have to, you know, walk part of the house over here to above the garage to get it, and I just I don't do that in the morning until I absolutely need to. And so I have these times, these moments of reflection, that I would really encourage you to find ways to do Now.

Speaker 1: 9:16

The beauty of Ma lives in its simplicity and its profound impact. The beauty of Ma lives in its simplicity and its profound impact. As leaders, we're often so focused on action and output that we overlook the power of the spaces in between. But by intentionally embracing these pauses whether for reflection, silence, garbage time or purposeful disconnect we can lead with greater clarity, creativity and presence. Now, as you think about your year ahead or maybe it's even just the day ahead I want to encourage you to take time to identify and honor the Ma in your own life and in your leadership. Create some space for yourself and your team, and definitely your family, just to slow down, to reflect and recalibrate. It's in these pauses, in these moments, in these spaces between things that we rediscover what truly matters and where the seeds of our most imaginative ideas are planted, and, hopefully, with a little more space in each of our lives, we can be more fully present for the most important parts.

Speaker 1: 10:14

Thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, as always. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode or any of our other material that we've put out there, and I would would love to hear your thoughts on this episode or any of our other material that we've put out there, and I would also love to hear how do you find, how have you find? How are you finding, however you want to say that space to honor the in-between moments? Let us know, let's keep the conversation going. You can reach out to us, nathan, at leadershipvisionconsultingcom.

Speaker 1: 10:39

You can visit us on the web, leadershipvisionconsultingcom. You can find us on Apple iTunes, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. I would just love to. Maybe we can encourage each other. What are the ways that you're finding space? What are the ways that you are creating and making and cultivating space to flex your imagination muscle and apply that to bigger and deeper problems in your life? Thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast. You can click on the links in the show notes for more information. My name is Nathan Freeberg and, on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.