A friend gave me some great feedback the other day. I was confiding about a work conversation that hadn’t gone at all the way that I wanted it to.

“He asked this question and my mind blanked, I didn’t know what to say.”

“So what did you do?” He asked.

“I babbled,” I confessed. He raised an eyebrow. “My mind blanked.”

I had confided in this friend because he almost always seemed poised and unflappable.

“It’s probably not as bad as you think,” he reassured me. “You generally read as calm. But there’s no harm in pausing and giving yourself a moment when you don’t know the answer. In fact, I think it makes you look kind of intelligent.”

A good recommendation. I don’t know why I panicked when I was asked the question, but knowing I had blown that part of the discussion threw me off for the rest of the call.

“Look,” my friend continued. “You’ve got this. You know what to do. You don’t need to prove that you’re more than you are, just be yourself. Yourself is what they want – so give them that.”

One of my yoga teachers says something similar: You be you. I think she means, stop comparing yourself to the other people in class and do what you can do.

That’s one of the benefits of meditation – it’s like a giant pause, where you don’t have to say anything, you don’t have to have any answers.

So back to the mat. And reach for a pause.