The Room Got Very Quiet

This past week, I stood in front of about thirty people at a local college. Some were faculty, others were staff. There were some high-level administrators there, too. I was there to lead a training on restorative practices. We were in a restorative circle, talking about how hard it was to bring restorative practices to reality when everyone felt so busy. That’s when I asked the question I knew would stop everyone cold.

“What if being busy is a choice you’re making?”

Maria looked up from the notebook she’d been writing in and gave me the kind of stare that says I’m not sure if I should be offended or intrigued. I’ve learned to love that stare. It means I’ve hit something real.

Before we could get to the how of restorative practice, I needed to dismantle a story that the people in this training — and probably everyone reading this piece — have been telling themselves, probably for years.

That story is that the busy and the chaos are happening to them.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after years of working in restorative practices in professional environments: These environments don’t just tolerate frenetic energy — they reward it. The person who responds to emails at 11 pm, the one who’s always running to the next meeting, the one who says “I’m so slammed right now” as if it’s a badge of honor — these people get treated like they’re doing something right. Busyness has become our cultural currency.

But busyness is a policy. It is rarely ever a formal policy written in a handbook, but it is a policy nonetheless. It’s a series of decisions — about how we structure our days, how we respond to urgency, how we allow interruptions, how we define what it means to be a good employee or a committed professional. And like any policy, it can be changed.

When I said this in the circle last week, Maria raised her hand.

“But some of the urgency is real,” she said. “Students are in crisis. Things don’t wait.”

She was right. And I told her so. Some urgency is real. A student in a mental health crisis cannot be rescheduled. A conflict that’s about to turn physical needs intervention now. I’m not talking about eliminating responsiveness. I’m talking about the low-grade, ambient frenzy that we carry even when nothing is actually on fire. The state of permanent activation that we’ve mistaken for professionalism.

And that’s where emotional regulation comes into play.

The first skill I teach in restorative practice — before circles, before “I” statements, before any of the elegant tools — is this: noticing when you’re activated and pausing before you react.

Here’s the thing: Building a restorative culture requires us to be emotionally regulated because we cannot take in feedback when every professional disagreement or conflict is perceived as dangerous. Most professional conflict isn’t actually dangerous. It feels dangerous because our nervous systems can’t distinguish between a colleague who disagrees with you and a threat to our survival.

When we live in the frenetic energy of the workplace, we can’t tell the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and a tense email from a supervisor. It responds the same way — cortisol, adrenaline, tunnel vision, the urge to fight or flee or freeze.

And if you’re already running hot — already living in that frenetic, overstimulated state — your window of tolerance is tiny. The smallest friction tips you over. A sharp tone in a meeting. A student who pushes back. A colleague who doesn’t respond the way you expected. Things that would be minor inconveniences on a calm day become full-blown crises because you’re already on edge.

This is why slowing down isn’t just a wellness strategy. It’s a competency. It’s what makes restorative practice actually work. This is true whether I am talking about individual emotional regulation or the policy framework that slows down the work.

I watched it happen in real time during the training. We ran a practice circle — a structured conversation where people respond to prompts and everyone is heard. The prompt was simple: Tell us about a time you felt unheard at work.

What came out of that circle was extraordinary. A coordinator talked about repeatedly raising a concern in meetings and watching it get glossed over. An advisor described having a solution to a recurring problem and never being given space to share it. One woman who had been quiet for most of the morning said simply: “I stopped trying.”

The room held that. Nobody rushed to fix it. Nobody pivoted to solutions. We just let it be true for a moment. We practiced the pause. And in that pause, something shifted. People felt seen and heard.

Now, let me be clear about something, because this is where people often misunderstand the concept: Emotional regulation is not the same as being emotionally stunted.

I am not asking you to become a robot. I am not asking you to suppress what you feel or perform a professional blandness that disconnects you from your own humanity. That’s not regulation — that’s repression, and it tends to leak out sideways in ways that are far more damaging than honest emotion would have been.

You can be moved. You can let people see that you’re moved. You can say “This is hard for me to hear,” or “I’m genuinely frustrated right now,” or even “I need to take some time before I respond to this.” Those are not failures of professionalism. Those are moments of emotional honesty that build trust.

The difference is between sharing emotion and dumping it. Between saying “I’m angry about this” and unleashing that anger on the nearest person. Between being human and being reactive. The goal of regulation is not a flat line. The goal is enough steadiness that you can choose your response instead of just having one.

By the end of the training, Maria approached me. She said something I’ve been thinking about since.

“I think I’ve been confusing staying busy with staying safe,” she said. “Like if I stop moving, I’ll have to actually feel how hard this is.”

Yes. That’s it exactly.

The most restorative thing you can do for your students, your colleagues, your institution, and yourself is learn to stop just long enough to notice what’s actually happening in your body, in the room, and in your relationship.

The pause is not weakness. The pause is where everything good begins.