In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln sat down at his desk to write one of his generals a long, scathing letter.
General Gordon Meade, then commander of the Union Army, had disobeyed the President’s orders to capture General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army when the South found themselves trapped between the Potomac River and the North.
Lincoln was furious for Meade’s insubordination and wrote a letter to reflect as such.
But Meade never received the letter—Lincoln never sent it. Instead, he signed it, folded it up, and put it in his desk drawer, where it would remain. Unread.
Lincoln’s habit of writing and shelving “hot letters,” as he called them, was not an isolated incident.
Years earlier, Lincoln had learned the consequences of his actions, after the politician James Shields had challenged him to a duel in response to a letter Lincoln had published, publicly denouncing Shields as a “fool as well as a liar.” (Luckily for Lincoln, the duel was called off moments before it began and the young lawyer walked away, unscathed.) [1]
Lincoln’s brush with death reminded him of the value of keeping one’s opinion to oneself.
But it also imparted a lesson that Lincoln practiced earnestly until his untimely death: the art of thinking before acting, otherwise known as pausing.
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We’re all guilty of letting our emotions get the better of us and making decisions that felt right at the time, but ended up costing more later.
We lash out at a colleague that leaves constructive feedback. We fly off the handle at a throwaway comment, heightened by our sense of insecurity.
In our decisive moments, we can allow our emotions to control us. Or, we can manage and think through our emotional reactions.
We can choose to guard ourselves against strong emotions. We can choose to remind ourselves of what’s within our control.
And, we can choose, as Lincoln did, to outline our feelings, and safeguard ourselves from acting out of impulse.
Practice pausing more often. It might just save your life.
Footnotes
[1] Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 by Michael Burlingame.
[2] Thank you to Noah Goldstein for introducing me to the idea of pausing in his book, The Little Book of Yes: How to Win Friends, Boost Your Confidence and Persuade Others.
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