Dead Fish and the Art of Deliberate Stillness

Why Leaders Struggle With Stillness (And What a Children's Game Can Teach Us)

Do you remember Dead Fish?

As a child, you'd lie completely still. No moving, no giggling, no peeking. The challenge was to pause. Be calm. Exist for a moment without doing anything at all.

Even at five, without the noise and weight of adult responsibilities, we struggled.

That detail has stayed with me. Because the assumption most of us carry is that stillness gets harder as life gets busier. Dead Fish suggests the resistance is older than busyness.

The Brain Was Not Designed for Empty

Writing in the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal observed in his Pensées that most of humanity's problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Neuroscience has since started to explain the mechanism.

When the brain is not actively focused on an external task, it activates what researchers call the Default Mode Network. This is the resting state system associated with imagination, memory consolidation, and the kind of insight that tends to arrive in the shower rather than the meeting. Stillness is not inactivity. It is a different mode of processing.

The difficulty is that accessing it requires tolerating a period that feels, physiologically, like doing nothing. For business owners and leaders running at pace, that tolerance is in short supply.

Two Things That Keep Coming Up

When I examine the resistance, two things keep coming up.

The first is the chatter. Psychologist Ethan Kross, in his research on the inner voice, distinguishes between useful inner dialogue and what he calls chatter: the repetitive, cyclical loop that fills silence before stillness has a chance to settle. Not just the external noise. The meetings, the notifications, the to-do list running quietly in the background. The internal voice too, the one that comments on the external noise and then comments on the commentary.

Everyone's chatter has a different rhythm. Noticing the gap between your external environment and your internal voice, without immediately trying to fix either, is often the whole practice.

The second is something older. From early childhood, silence is framed as absence. A gap where presence should be. In conversation we are taught to fill it. In professional settings, silence signals uncertainty or disengagement. Most of us internalise that quickly and never quite unlearn it.

What Dead Fish Was Actually Teaching

Dead Fish was not a game about being passive. It was a structured reason to stop, perhaps for the first time all day.

Research on cognitive incubation, the process by which stepping away from a problem allows unconscious processing to continue, consistently shows that some of the most useful thinking happens when we are not visibly thinking at all. For leaders and business owners making complex decisions under pressure, the pause is not a luxury. It is a diagnostic tool.

The pause is not a gap. It is where the work quietly continues.

We could probably all do with a bit more of that.

When did you last notice the difference between your internal and external chatter? I would love to hear what stillness looks like for you, or what gets in the way.