Participant Guide

Your guide to the
Pausa Sprint

Six weeks to see your energy clearly — and build a system that actually holds. This page is your companion reference. Return to it between sessions. All your programme links live here too.

6 weeks
3 live sessions
30″ per day
1 vitality card

Your programme links

Everything in one place

All the tools and check-ins for your Sprint — no need to search Slack. Bookmark this page and return whenever you need a link.

Week 1–2 · Pre-work
Vitality Check
40 questions, ~15 minutes. Maps your energy across four dimensions. Complete before Session 1.
Open Vitality Check
Week 1–2 · Pre-work
Mirror Check
Share with 2–3 people who know you well. Sends them a brief form. Takes them 5 minutes.
Open Mirror Check
Week 2 · Individual
17 Energy Drains
Browse all five clusters below. Choose your top 3 before discussing with anyone else — your independent read is the data.
Read the drains
Week 1–2 · Daily
Energy Diary
Three sentences, two minutes, each morning for five days. Day 5 adds two physiological signals.
Open Energy Diary
Week 3 · Session 1 prep
Session 1 Materials
Shared by your facilitator before Session 1.
Sent before Week 3
Contact
Your Pausa Facilitator
Questions about the programme, your results, or anything in between.
Direct message in Slack
One thing worth saying clearly

Everything you do in this programme is private unless you choose otherwise. Your Vitality Check scores, your Energy Diary, your drain selections, your reflections — nobody sees these without your explicit consent. The programme is designed specifically to protect your ability to be honest with yourself.


Most of us manage our energy the way we manage a phone battery — we notice it when it hits 15%, and we plug in when we have to. Pausa Sprint is a structured way to look at it before the warning appears: to understand what drains it, what restores it, and how to build habits around what you actually find.

This is not a wellness course. There's nothing to learn and then forget. The Sprint is built around what behavioural science says actually changes behaviour: starting small, tying new actions to existing ones, and building from honest data about your own patterns rather than from generic recommendations.


The programme

Your six weeks at a glance

Five touchpoints, three live sessions, one sprint card kit that travels with you throughout.

Week 1
Kick-off

You receive your Sprint Card Kit — the set of cards you'll use throughout the programme. You'll learn the BJ Fogg behaviour model and commit your first tracking anchor: the existing daily moment you'll attach your 30-second tracking habit to.

60 min · in person · your Pausa Facilitators
Weeks 1–2
Pre-work

Your Vitality Check (40 questions, 15 minutes) maps your energy across four dimensions. Your Mirror Check goes to 2–3 people who know you well. Your 5-Day Energy Diary runs each morning — three sentences, two minutes. On Day 5, two simple physiological signals. You also choose your top 3 energy drains from the menu of 17.

Async · individual · private
Week 3
Session 1 — The Map

You receive your individual Vitality Check results. The team sees its aggregate picture — without individual names. You work privately to confirm your three drains. Your first tracking card begins. Between sessions, a brief 15-minute individual conversation with your Pausa Facilitator.

90 min · in person · your Pausa Facilitator
Week 4
Session 2 — The Drivers

You go deeper into what's actually driving your lowest scores — not just naming drains, but understanding their specific shape in your daily life. You define your Personal Energy Standard: the minimum conditions you need to function at your actual level. The floor, not the ceiling.

90 min · in person · your Pausa Facilitator
Week 5
Session 3 — The Design

You co-design two personal tiny habits using the Fogg method — built around your actual anchors, aimed at your actual drains. The team co-designs one shared habit together. Your Pausa Vitality Card is completed live and sent to you within 24 hours.

90 min · in person · your Pausa Facilitator
Week 6
Handover

You see your before-and-after Vitality Check comparison — all four dimensions, six weeks apart. You receive your physical Vitality Card. The team receives the Vitality Rhythm Guide: the programme continuing under its own momentum, without Pausa in the room.

60 min · in person · your Pausa Facilitator

The framework

The four dimensions

Your Vitality Check measures your energy across four dimensions, each scored 0–100%. These aren't personality types — they're aspects of a single interconnected system. When one drops, the others feel it.

1
Physical

Sleep, movement, nutrition, nervous system regulation, physiological recovery. The biological foundation that everything else depends on.

Signs of depletion: waking unrefreshed, afternoon crashes, getting ill more frequently, a body that feels like it's running on fumes.

2
Emotional

Emotional awareness, regulation, and relational capacity — feeling what you feel without being overwhelmed, connecting without losing yourself in others' states.

Signs of depletion: feeling flat or numb, reactivity that surprises you, absorbing others' moods, narrowed emotional bandwidth.

3
Mental

Cognitive clarity, focus, decision quality, and the capacity for genuine rest. The ability to think clearly and switch off when the day ends.

Signs of depletion: difficulty concentrating, decisions feeling harder than they should, a to-do list that never clears, inability to genuinely rest.

4
Purpose

Connection to meaning — the sense that what you do matters, to you and to something beyond you. Often the last to deplete and the hardest to name when it has.

Signs of depletion: going through the motions, doing good work without feeling it, a low-grade sense of drift that's hard to articulate.

85–100%
Well-resourced
Strong foundation, fine-tuning only.
70–84%
Functioning
Operating well — 1–2 habits will move things.
55–69%
Running low
Significant depletion affecting decisions and presence.
Below 55%
Depleted
Actively undermining the other dimensions. Primary focus.

Your scores are your starting point. Not a judgement. A map.


17 energy drains

Understanding what depletes you

Naming something specifically is more useful than naming it generally. "I'm stressed" is a starting point. "I'm losing energy to open loops and decision fatigue" is something you can design a habit around. Tap each cluster to explore.

A
Internal Psychology
How you relate to performance, identity, and meaning
Fear & Performance Identity — allowing fear of failure or judgement to shape your decisions and the energy you bring to work.
Perfectionism & Rumination — the loop of "not good enough yet" that consumes energy through endless checking, redoing, and replaying.
Identity Fusion & Role Entanglement — losing the boundary between who you are and what you do, so every professional setback feels personal.
Joyless Execution / Purpose Drift — going through the motions without feeling connected to why the work matters.
B
Cognitive & Mental
How you manage information, decisions, and attention
Open Loops & Mental Clutter — unresolved tasks, unfinished conversations, and unmade decisions running constantly in the background.
Decision Fatigue & Cognitive Overload — the cumulative cost of too many decisions, too many inputs, and too little time for the mind to reset.
Digital Addiction & Constant Availability — the habitual pull toward screens and the expectation of always being reachable.
C
Physical & Nervous System
What isn't being restored, and what the body is carrying
Lifestyle Gaps — consistently neglecting the physical foundations — sleep, movement, nutrition — that everything else depends on.
Recovery Debt / Accumulated Health Deficit — the compounded effect of months or years of not fully recovering — a deficit that doesn't clear with a single good night's sleep.
Nervous System Dysregulation / Hypervigilance — a nervous system stuck in high alert: difficulty switching off, sleep that doesn't restore, a body that can't fully relax.
D
Relational & Social
How you're affected by and affect the people around you
Wrong or Draining Relationships — relationships that consistently take more energy than they return, at work or outside it.
Leadership Loneliness & Structural Isolation — the specific exhaustion of being responsible without peers who truly understand the weight of it.
Emotional Contagion & Carrying Team Energy — absorbing the emotional states of colleagues and feeling it in your body long after the conversation ends.
E
Environmental & Systemic
The context you're operating in — beyond immediate control
External Hostile Environment — operating inside a structure, culture, or context that works against you: bureaucracy, instability, or values misalignment.
Financial Stress & Uncertainty Anxiety — the background noise of financial pressure that makes it hard to think clearly about anything else.
Work-Life Entanglement / Boundary Collapse — when work expands to fill all available space and the boundaries between professional and personal life have dissolved.
Lack of Recognition & Invisible Value — doing meaningful work that consistently goes unseen, unacknowledged, or undervalued.
When you receive the full drain menu in Week 2

Read through all 17 at a calm moment. Alone. Not in a rush. Trust your gut over your analysis — the first reaction is usually the honest one. Choose your top 3 before discussing with anyone else. Your independent read is the data.


Behavioural science

How habit design works

In Session 3, you'll co-design two personal habits using BJ Fogg's behaviour model. Understanding it in advance makes the design session more useful — and your habits more likely to hold.

M
Motivation

Why it matters to you right now. Real but unreliable — highest immediately after a session, doesn't survive to Day 7. Don't build your system on it.

A
Ability

How easy the action is. The easier, the less motivation you need. A habit should be completable in under 30 seconds — even on your worst day.

P
Prompt

What triggers the action. The most reliable prompt is an existing habit — something you already do every day without thinking. The anchor carries the new behaviour.

After I [existing anchor],
I will [tiny new behaviour],
and immediately I will [celebrate — feel good, even briefly].

The celebration wires the habit faster than repetition alone. A quiet internal "yes" is enough.

The most common mistake is designing habits that are too ambitious. An ambitious habit survives motivation spikes and fails on hard days. A tiny habit survives hard days and accumulates.

In Session 3, you'll be asked: "Is this doable on a day when everything goes wrong?" If the answer is no — make it smaller. The most effective habits are designed precisely against your top drain, not as generic good intentions.


Session 2

Your Personal Energy Standard

A Standard is not a goal. Goals describe where you want to get to. A Standard describes the minimum conditions you require to function at your actual level. The floor, not the ceiling.

Most people have never made this explicit. They know when they're operating below their standard — things feel harder, decisions take longer, they're more reactive, less present. But without naming the minimum conditions, there's nothing to protect.

Your Standard · Question 1
Three things I will protect — conditions that are non-negotiable for my baseline functioning.
Your Standard · Question 2
What I will stop treating as optional.
Your Standard · Question 3
What I will say no to in order to protect this.
The question that helps

Think of a time in the past 12 months when you were operating at your actual best — not peak, not extraordinary, just genuinely yourself. What conditions were present? That's the map of your Standard.


Week 4 · Private reflection

The Tuesday question

Midway through the Sprint, you'll receive this question via Slack. It has nothing to do with tracking or habits or scores. It is this:

Private prompt — for your notebook only
Imagine it is two years from now and the energy problem is solved — not perfectly, but genuinely. You have found your own way to sustain yourself.
Describe a normal Tuesday in that version of your life. What do you do in the first hour of the morning?
What kind of work fills your day — and how does it feel from the inside?
What have you stopped doing that used to drain you?
What does your evening look like?
Write whatever comes. A paragraph is enough. Nobody will read this — it is for you.

Fogg's habit architecture is excellent at making behaviour easier. What it doesn't address is why people who know what they should do still don't do it. The barrier is rarely inability — it's disconnection from meaning. This question makes the destination real enough that the small daily actions feel worth it.

At Handover, you'll be asked one question about it: "Has the answer changed at all since you wrote it? Even slightly?" You don't need to share what you wrote. The shift — however small — is what matters.


What you receive

Your Pausa Vitality Card

Completed live in Session 3, sent digitally within 24 hours, delivered physically at Handover. It's your reference point for the next six months — not your verdict.

Pausa Vitality Card · Your name · Sprint 2026
Physical
— %
Emotional
— %
Mental
— %
Purpose
— %
Top drain
Named in Session 2 — yours to hold.
Personal Standard
One sentence. Defined in Session 2.
Habit 1
After I [anchor], I will [tiny action].
Habit 2
After I [anchor], I will [tiny action].

The bars above are illustrative — yours will be filled with your own Week 0 scores. In six months, if you look at this card and your scores have shifted, you'll know why.


After Handover

The Vitality Rhythm

At Handover, the team receives the Vitality Rhythm Guide — the programme continuing without Pausa in the room. One condition: keep the monthly 30 minutes.

1
Energy level this month, 1–10. What's behind it?
2
Is your tiny habit still working? What needs adjusting?
3
What is our shared team habit doing — or not doing?
4
One thing this team could do differently next month?

Every six months, revisit the 17 drain menu individually. Has your top drain changed? Bring what you find to the following monthly check-in. This is how the Sprint stays alive without Pausa needing to run it.


"There's a specific kind of person who gets the most from this Sprint. Not the one with the most insight, or the lowest scores, or the most motivation. The one who is willing to be honest with themselves."

The design protects your honesty. Your job is to bring it.
Six weeks from now, you'll have a map of your own energy that most people never get.
That's worth the 30 seconds a day.

— Yaro, co-founder of Pausa