Over the years, I’ve come to rely on a few core frameworks that help me and those I work with pause long enough to respond with wisdom rather than react from habit. One is ORID: Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, and Decisional. I call it Facts, Feelings, Meaning, and Action. It’s a way of teasing apart experience, giving our brains space to slow down before racing up the Ladder of Inference—that all-too-human shortcut where we cherry-pick data, assign meaning, and leap to action, often without realizing it.

Steven Covey’s classic story captures this perfectly: A man on a train, seemingly ignoring his rowdy children, is judged harshly by a fellow passenger—until he shares that they’ve just left the hospital, where their mother passed away. Suddenly, facts expand. Meaning changes. Compassion floods in.

This also echoes The Four Agreements: Be impeccable with your word. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions. Always do your best. Simple, not easy. These principles have been part of my personal and professional path for years.

But a recent podcast with Simon Sinek brought a powerful addition. He spoke about the importance of meeting emotion with emotion, and rational thought with rational thought. That it doesn’t help to offer a critical appraisal to someone in joyful elation or calm strategy to someone whose nervous system is lit up with fear. We have to be willing to sit in the mud with them, not try to clean it up too soon.

Lately, that “someone” was me. I found myself stuck—feeling guilty and frustrated that it was taking so long to finish a simple one-pager for my offerings. I judged myself a procrastinator, a perfectionist, and felt overwhelmed. But when I paused and met myself in the mud, I realized something else was true: I was in a creative cycle. I wasn’t stuck—I was iterating. And not every pause means the same thing.

This doesn’t mean we stay in the mud forever. But it’s a reminder that presence is not passive. It’s one of the most powerful acts we can offer—to meet people (including ourselves) where they are, not where we wish they were. And from that place, when the time is right, we move forward together.

Here’s to not rushing the story—just being with it, one muddy, meaningful moment at a time.