When Things Go Quiet
A slow patch can feel like failure – to you, and to everyone watching you. It helps to know what you're actually looking at.
There's a particular dread that comes when things go quiet. The enquiries thin out. The projects that were carrying you wrap up, and nothing has yet arrived to take their place. If you run anything – a practice, a small company, a charity – you'll know the feeling: the lull arrives, and almost at once it starts asking questions about you. Are you still any good? Is the work? Has the need for it passed?
I know it well. And one thing I've learned, slowly and against considerable resistance, is that the dread arrives long before any actual evidence of trouble. The quiet itself is enough to set it off. Something in me reads the stillness as danger and sounds the alarm, and the alarm is so convincing that I take it for information.
It isn't information. It's a body doing its job.
A slow patch, to a nervous system trained on relentless forward motion, registers as threat. It’s the same basic human machinery that’s designed to fire when you step into the road, that fires when the diary empties – the sympathetic surge, the tension, the racing mind casting about for what's gone wrong. That is why a quiet month can feel less like rest and more like impending doom. Weakness doesn't come into it. Your body has classified the lull as an emergency, and an alarmed body is not a state in which much can be seen clearly.
And that is the difficulty. When the system is mobilised like that, you lose the faculty you need: the ability to tell what kind of quiet this actually is. Because there is more than one kind.
Some quiet is stuckness – a rut, an avoidance, something that needs to be faced. But some quiet is fallow: the necessary trough after a long exertion, or before something that hasn't taken shape yet. From the inside, in the grip of the alarm, the two feel identical – both just a sense of not enough happening. And a culture that treats any pause as falling behind gives us no reason to look closer. So we file every slow patch under failure and miss the ones that were doing the work of preparation.
This is the thing most of nature never forgets, but humans often do. A dormant seed is not a dead seed. Under the surface, it is measurably busy – metabolising, preparing, holding itself in readiness for a season that hasn't come. Nothing visible is happening, and a great deal is happening. We know this about the natural world, but forget it the moment our diary goes still.
This might sound like comfortable advice to welcome the lull and put your feet up. In my experience, it never gets that comfortable; the unease doesn't lift because you've decided to be wise about it. And "just relax" helps no more than "just try harder" – both are instructions issued to a body that isn't taking instructions. The shift is smaller and more practical. Let the system settle – don’t try to force a calm. As the emergency signal subsides, your own sense of what you need becomes audible once more.
That is the part I have come to value. In the slow patches I no longer fight, my energy hasn't vanished – it has stopped pointing where I think it “should”. Maybe my system wants to learn something. To clear the clutter that had built up while I was busy. To rekindle a connection I'd let lapse. None of it looks like productivity, and all of it turns out to be the resourcing the next stretch will run on. Boredom, when you think about it, is another version of the same thing – an empty hour we rush to fill because we've been taught that empty is bad, when empty is often the doorway to something, or simply the rest that the system was asking for.
The same misreading scales up at a team and organisational level too. A charity chief executive told me recently that her team were stretched to capacity – and then, almost in the same breath, that they were twiddling their thumbs. Her board was exasperated by the mixed messages. But the board's real problem wasn't the quiet spell, nor even the contradiction. It was that no one was giving them a steady reading of what the quiet meant.
What they needed to hear was that the work moves in cycles, that this trough was expected, and that the team knew how to use it. A leader who hasn't made peace with the quiet transmits the alarm outward – as defensiveness, as mixed signals, as the impression of a hand not quite on the tiller. A leader who has made their peace can do the opposite: name the trough for what it is, show the fallow work going on beneath it, and turn what looks like underperformance into evidence of a team that reads its own rhythms well.
The discernment that begins as a private skill becomes, for anyone who leads, a public one.
The quiet will come round again; it always does. What changes, with practice, is your relationship to it. The quiet still arrives, and it can still be uncomfortable. But you get a little better at not overreacting to the alarm itself – at staying still long enough to see whether this is a field lying fallow or a thing that's actually stuck.
And when others are watching the same quiet and fearing the worst, at being steady enough to say which it is.
Sandra Cunningham - Outside In