12 Skills Fundraisers Need for What Comes Next: #8 Strategic Stillness

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Or, put another way, "Whew! We made it and won't even look at 2025 in the rearview . . . "

I sat down to write this post and my Gen-X roots took over and I've got the Violent Femmes stuck in my head: "Eight, eight, I forget what eight was for . . . " But did you know that VF's "Blister in the Sun" is the perfect earworm eraser? It's true. Try it next time you get a song stuck in your head, start with "When I'm walkin' I strut my stuff . . . " It'll knock out any tune that's in your head and will not get stuck itself! Except, apparently, for other Violent Femmes' songs. This digression brought to you by ADHD and strong coffee . . .

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We're here to talk about Strategic Stillness, the eighth out of twelve skills for fundraisers to develop in the new year to face whatever challenges and opportunities may come our way.

What Do We Mean By Strategic Stillness

Let’s get this out of the way first, Strategic Stillness is not 'doing nothing'.

It’s not disengagement. It’s not avoidance. And it’s definitely not pretending things aren’t hard.

Strategic stillness is the deliberate choice to pause long enough to respond wisely instead of reacting reflexively.

If you work in fundraising, the pressure to react is constant. Predictions. Warnings. Benchmarks. Hot takes. The low-grade panic that hums in the background of almost every conversation about money, donors, and the future.

Some of that information is useful. Some of it is accurate. And some of it is simply loud.

Strategic Stillness is how you keep the loudest thing from becoming the most important thing.

It’s the moment between stimulus and response where discernment lives. It’s what allows Systems Thinking to stay intact instead of collapsing into whack-a-mole. It’s what makes upstream thinking possible and downstream planning realistic.

Without stillness, everything feels urgent, every signal feels like a directive.

Without stillness, borrowed anxiety starts making decisions for you.

Fundraisers are often told to move faster, do more, respond sooner. But speed without steadiness doesn’t produce clarity. It produces churn.

So How Do You Actually Develop Strategic Stillness?

You practice it.

Not perfectly. Not all the time. But intentionally.

One way is by creating small pauses before you respond — not hours, sometimes just minutes — especially when something triggers urgency or fear. Strategic stillness grows when you resist the reflex to answer immediately and instead ask, What’s actually being asked of me right now?

Another practice is learning to orient yourself when things feel overwhelming. A simple reframing of the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise can be surprisingly effective for fundraisers:

1. Start with five things you know to be true — about your donors, your work, or your organization.

2. Then name four things you know are good — strengths, relationships, progress that still exists.

3. Identify three things you know you can influence or fix, even if they’re small.

4. Recall two people you trust for guidance, not noise.

5. And finally, choose one thing you can change or do right now that moves you forward with integrity.

Strategic stillness also strengthens when you curate your inputs. Fewer sources. More trusted ones. Less scrolling. More thinking.

You don’t need to know everything to make a good decision — you need to know enough, and you need to know yourself.

And finally, stillness develops when you notice your own internal narration. When the voice in your head becomes absolute, catastrophic, or shaming, that’s usually a cue to pause, not push harder. Stillness is how you regain authorship over that story.

Because what you model matters.

Your steadiness becomes someone else’s permission to breathe.Your calm becomes a container for better decisions.

In a season when uncertainty feels unavoidable, strategic stillness is how you remain capable.

This year, don’t confuse motion with progress.

Practice the pause that makes progress possible.

P.S. I don't necessarily mean practicing yoga or traditional mindfulness here, although those are both wildly helpful and wonderful, "strategic stillness" is more about being in the moment and present enough to really listen to what's being said or what's needed to make a decision or move forward. You could call it Selective Hearing - not the kind of selective hearing your teenager has on trash day or a Golden Retriever who's discovered something stinky and fascinating on a walk, but the kind that actively hears what's being said and what's needed without applying other frameworks to it. Active Listening is a close, adjacent skill as well.