You have heard the advice a hundred times. Take a breath. Pause before you react. Then a real moment hits, your chest tightens, and you are just standing there wondering what you are supposed to do with that pause. Hiba Tanvir builds the part everyone skips.

This week I got to sit down with my friend Hiba Tanvir. We met at Sheryl Powers' author symposium last October, I was emceeing, and we have been trading messages on LinkedIn ever since. She is an emotional intelligence speaker and an award-winning author, and she is the creator of the Play and Pause methodology and the Zest framework. She is also the one who walks into a room full of executives with a tub of Play-Doh and watches the whole mood shift.

Key Takeaways

• All emotions are welcome, but they are not equal. Hiba splits them into high-value emotions like compassion, joy, peace, and collaboration, and low-value ones like anger, shame, and frustration. The mix you live in is what she calls your net emotional worth. Aim for emotionally wealthy, not emotionally poor.
• A pause only helps if you know what goes inside it. Build two or three small moves you can run in 90 seconds or less, and practice them before the hard moment shows up. Nobody runs their first fire drill during an actual fire.
• Play changes a room faster than any icebreaker. Hand people something low threat, Play-Doh, a pen to doodle, a walk outside, and the nervous system settles, the jaw unclenches, and real conversation starts on its own.
• Play stops being play the second it has an audience. If you are doing it for a photo, for likes, or for a finished thing to show off, you have traded the benefit for the performance.
• You do not need a checklist or a blocked calendar to start. Doodle on the next call. Take the call as a walk. Pick the kind of play that is actually you, and let it happen without scheduling it.

Listen If You...

• Keep hearing "just pause" and have no idea what to do in the actual moment
• Run meetings or trainings and want the room engaged instead of glazed over
• Think showing emotion at work makes you look weak and want a better frame for it

Connect with Hiba

Find Hiba at htcompassion.com.

Her latest book, Future Ready Performance Playbook, is on Amazon. It is about staying unapologetically human in the AI era, and it goes deep on the Play and Pause methodology from this conversation.

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.