The Calm Advantage

When I was in my mid-twenties, I was sent to Raipur to help set up a private university.

I was young. Much younger than everyone else in the room.

Most days, I sat across Governors, Chief Ministers, and senior officials who had been in public life longer than I had been alive. I didn’t have a team with me. I didn’t have a rulebook. Half the time, I didn’t even know what the right process was — only that I was expected to move things forward.

In the beginning, I thought I needed to impress people.

So I spoke faster.
Prepared more slides.
Tried to sound certain, even when I wasn’t.

It didn’t work.

What helped wasn’t better arguments or sharper thinking. What helped was learning to sit still in the middle of uncertainty. To listen. To not rush the silence. To stay steady when outcomes were unclear, delayed or plainly unfair.

Then, one day, a Supreme Court judgment shut down all private universities in the state. Overnight, the institution we had built no longer existed — at least on paper. Everyone panicked. Meetings became louder. Decisions became impulsive.

I felt the fear too. But I noticed something important: the moment I lost my calm, I also lost my ability to choose well.

That experience changed me.

It taught me that calm isn’t weakness.

It’s what keeps you standing when the ground moves.

We tend to admire quick thinkers, don’t we?
People who respond instantly. People who always seem certain.

But in real life (especially when you’re leading, parenting, or teaching), certainty is rare. Things are messy. Incomplete. Sometimes, still forming.

In those moments, calm becomes useful.

Not the calm of silence or avoidance. The calm that allows you to stay present long enough to decide what actually matters.

Over time, I began to notice a pattern in myself (and later, in children and teams around me). When situations went wrong, the outcome depended less on intelligence and more on how quickly someone got emotionally overwhelmed.

That’s when I started using a simple loop. I still use it. I see teachers use it. And children, interestingly, learn it faster than adults.

I call it the Calm Loop.
1. Notice → 2. Name → 3. Normalise → 4. Navigate → 1. Notice → 2. Name → …

The first step is noticing what’s happening inside you.

For me, it rarely starts as a thought.
It starts in the body.

A tight chest.
A sharper voice than I intended.
The urge to fix things immediately so the discomfort goes away.

As a parent, this often happens before I realise I’m upset. The situation hasn’t changed much — but I have.

Noticing doesn’t calm you down.
It just interrupts the reflex.

Nothing else works until this step happens.

That brief pause, even if it’s silent, is where choice returns.

If you’re reading this during a busy week, don’t wait for a big moment.

Just pay attention once:
to your body, not the situation.

The tightening. The speed. The shift.

That moment of noticing is already enough.
You don’t need to do anything else yet.

Once I notice, I try to name it.

“This is anxiety.”
“This is fear.”
“This is me wanting control because things feel uncertain.”

Naming doesn’t solve anything.
But it slows me down.

It creates a little space between the feeling and the response — enough space to remember that I don’t have to act immediately.

Children pick up on this more than we think. When they see us pause instead of pounce, they learn that emotions don’t have to take over the room.

When you catch that feeling, try saying its name — even if only to yourself.

Not to fix it. Not to justify it.
Just to acknowledge it.
I’ve found that once something is named, it stops demanding my full attention.

After that, I remind myself: this is allowed.

Parenting is uncertain.
Some days are heavy.
Struggle doesn’t mean I’m failing.

This matters deeply for children.

When we treat frustration and confusion as normal, children stop trying to escape them. They stop hiding mistakes. They stay in the conversation.

Normalising doesn’t excuse behaviour.
It removes fear.

And without fear, learning has room to happen.

If things feel hard right now, resist the urge to clean it up or explain it away.

Let the mess exist for a moment.
Children don’t need us to turn every struggle into a lesson.
Sometimes they just need us to stay with them without rushing past it.

Only then do I act.

Not perfectly.
Just on purpose.

Sometimes that means holding a boundary calmly. Sometimes it means letting something go and returning to it later. Sometimes it means saying, “I didn’t handle that well. Let me try again.”

I’ve learned that calm moves through people.

Children mirror parents.
Teams mirror leaders.
Classrooms mirror teachers.

No one absorbs calm because we explain it to them.
They absorb it because we carry it.

Often, the calmest person in the room shapes the room without saying a word.

When you do respond, do it slowly.

Say less than you usually would.
Choose the tone you want your child to remember, not the words you want them to obey.
Calm has a way of doing work that instructions never can.

Just pause once.

When something feels urgent — a message, a question, a reaction — wait a moment longer than you normally would.

Notice what you’re feeling.
Name it.

Let it be human.
Then respond.

That pause doesn’t make you slower.
It makes you clearer.

You don’t need to be calm all day. No one is.
You only need one moment where calm leads instead of urgency.

Pay attention to what changes when it does.

With love and joy,

Yeshwaanth
Founder and CEO, 21K School

Connect with me: linkedin.com/in/yeshwanth

P.S. I’ve been writing this newsletter because parenting and learning are questions I’m still living inside — not topics I feel finished with. This is the eleventh edition, and I want to pause and check in with you. Is this kind of reflection useful to you? Are there moments, questions, or tensions in parenting or learning that you’d like me to write about next? If something comes to mind, just reply to this email. I read every response.

P.P.S. One last, lighter question — what are you reading right now?

The future belongs to people who can stay steady when others rush.