Most leaders treat momentum as something to build and protect — but the Zen tradition has a strange corrective hiding in its tea ceremonies and rock gardens: deliberate discontinuity. The 16th-century tea master Sen no Rikyū designed each tearoom entry around a crawl-through opening called a nijiriguchi, so low that samurai had to remove their swords and bow their heads to enter. The architecture forced a break in the self. Not humility as a virtue to perform, but as a structural interruption — the space between who you were outside and who you become inside. Modern organizational psychology calls something adjacent to this 'psychological safety,' but that framing keeps the leader at the center, managing others' comfort. Rikyū's insight runs deeper: the container you build determines what quality of attention is even possible. If your meetings, your one-on-ones, your own morning routine have no nijiriguchi — no designed moment of discontinuity — then whatever mental furniture you carried in from the last crisis will fill the room before anyone speaks. Build the low doorway. It doesn't have to be literal.

What is one recurring context in your week where you arrive already full — already mid-thought — and what would you have to physically change about how you enter it to create even a four-second gap?

Drawing from Japanese Zen aesthetics (Wabi-cha tradition) — Sen no Rikyū (茶道 / Way of Tea, 16th century Japan)