Between stimulus and response....

A few months ago, on a day not too far from the end of my semiannual vacation, things started poorly: the dog had decided to relieve herself in the house, the freezer had begun to leak again, due to computer challenges it took way too long to post and tweet one of my LinkedIn articles and this dictation software is being particularly finicky this morning. Yep, it's a Murphy's Law day in the making … and yet, truth be told, it's not: the nature of my day will be determined by how I choose to react to these external stimuli. And since these are First World problems, I choose to smile and move on.…

But I'll be the first to admit that a significant motivation behind this choice of response that I'm sitting in one of my sacred places and engaging in one of my sacred activities. Chances are it would take more effort to choose this effective response were I back in the real world … and therein lies the opportunity....

Sure, intellectually, we all know that it's not the stuff that happens to us in life but how we choose to respond to it that determines our experience … but we're emotional creatures, so this intellectual and more detached approach is at best second nature: for all but an enlightened few, we have to remind ourselves to go there. My experience is that if we choose to practice our choice of reaction consciously and repeatedly for an extended period of time, it'll be far easier to let things go and live as we prefer....

Depending on what source you choose, one of my favorite quotes - and guiding principles in life - is either the genius of the eminent Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl or that of self-development guru Stephen Covey (as I've seen it attributed to them both):

But I was originally introduced to the concept by my former boss and mentor Doug Lennick, who taught me his WDYWFY ("Widdy Wiffy" or What Do You Want For Yourself) goal achievement system many years ago. Doug's formulation was that of the Dishrag Theory, as in what would you do if you stepped and slipped on an unseen in dishrag on the floor of your kitchen and fell to the ground? Chances are that, without thinking, you would react to this negative unexpected stimulus in a negative way, forgetting that even in that moment you have the power of choice available to you.

As Doug taught, in order to get what we want for ourselves - or, in today's parlance, to live our best life - we should choose to react in ways that best align with our long-term goals in life. So, if being mad at the world because you slipped unexpectedly isn't likely to lead to the happy, fulfilled life you desire, then you're better off choosing a more positive response. Don't get me wrong, this takes some practice.…

So now, when the dog can't wait to be walked, as much as I still really dislike this, I can smile and mention the "gift" that she's left to my wife and stepdaughter who are responsible for her care. (Yes, there's a story there, but not for today.…) Or when some idiot takes his amateur NASCAR status a little too seriously on the Parkway or the Turnpike, instead of getting angry as I did in the old days, I can send him a secret blessing, wish him well for the day and stay focused on my own path.

After years of practice, it turns out that I'm pretty good at choosing more effective - or, if you prefer, more emotionally intelligent - responses to unexpected external stimuli … with one exception: I'm not yet very good (read = consistently unemotional) at responding thoughtfully to people with ill intent. It's one of the things that I'm working on diligently, because Lord knows we can't control who comes into our life or how they'll behave. And, in reality, of necessity given my commitments in life, there are a few significantly disagreeable people with whom I have to deal on a regular basis, so I'm trying to approach them in the Buddhist spirit of considering them my teachers, the folks who're going to help me - through their ill actions - to be able to choose the most effective reaction in any given circumstance, especially ones that are negative in nature.

Take a moment and reflect on how you tend to respond to negative stimuli: are you unflappable and magnanimous in response or do these situations tend to get you riled up, sometimes for an extended period of time? If it's the former, then congratulations: you're one of the fortunate few who can navigate life's choppy waters with aplomb. By contrast, if it's the latter, then join the club and let's get to practicing.…

One of the most challenging aspects of making effective choices is that we often have to move beyond considerations of right and wrong: indeed, in many such negative circumstances you will find yourself in the right, but you'll also have to let this go. Sometimes life is indeed unfair and, at least in the short term, Karma's return will not be evident … but this has to be placed in its proper strategic perspective in order to be overcome (so that you can make an effective choice in the present circumstance). Put differently, the world is full of things and people who aren't right, but we can't allow them to distract us from living our best life, so, even when we may be in the right, we have to move on in the moment to keep ourselves on our chosen path.

For example, how many times has an unpleasant colleague at work or recalcitrant teenager at home presented you with situations that you'd rather avoid? If you choose to react emotionally, of course, your interactions with him or her will likely be negative in nature for an appreciable period of time. By contrast, if you stay focused on your goal - which long-term may be to achieve a certain type of opportunity at work or to live in a peaceable way at home, and in the short term may be to have a pleasant, productive and enjoyable day - then you'll most likely choose a more effective response, which, though it won't necessarily eliminate the negativity from the circumstance, will allow you to stay on track toward your goals.

(Let's be honest: sometimes those colleagues, teenagers and others approach us negatively precisely to get us to react poorly, so whether or not this is the motivation, it's incumbent upon us not to take the bait.)

It's funny, but one of my greatest teachers in this regard was a former assistant of mine who observed me reacting poorly when a certain unnecessarily negative person routinely contacted me to stir up trouble. After one such incident while I stewed in my office grumbling about how horrible a person this person was and feeling angry that I had to deal with her, my assistant approached me and asked me a seemingly innocent question: "You're thinking about her right now aren't you?" Wounded and angry, I turned to her with fiery eyes and almost shouted "Of course I am!" Maintaining her calm, she then asked me a second question: "Do you think that she's thinking about you right now?" I shrugged because I didn't know, but I kinda doubted it; she'd wreaked her havoc and likely moved on, gloating about the success of her evil plan.

It was my assistant's third seemingly innocuous question that has stayed with me to this day: "Who's winning?"

Indeed! And allowing my tormentor to get under my skin and then to choose to stay angry about it long after the difficult interaction had ended, I was actually helping her achieve her objective of upsetting me, so she was winning and even worse, in my poor choice of response, I was actually helping her win at my own expense!?!

To this day, when I find myself in a negative interaction with someone and I can feel negative emotions begin to well up in me, I return to and ask myself this question: who's winning? I don't know where Shazeeda is now, but on occasion I will send well wishes into the universe for her in appreciation of the gift that she gave me lo those many years ago. Who's winning, indeed....

By now, I hope that I've persuaded you that choosing effective (vs. emotional) responses, especially to negative external stimuli, is the way to go. Now let's turn to how to craft your effective response. I encourage you to use the following three-step process:

1.   Remind yourself of Frankl's/Covey's wisdom that between stimulus and response there is (always) time for choice.

2.   Remind yourself of Lennick's wisdom that because you have choice, it's imperative that you make an effective one (vs. a right and/or emotional one).

3.   Remind yourself to assess the situation carefully in the context of Covey's 3 Buckets and then proceed accordingly.

What are Covey's 3 Buckets?

1.   Bucket 1: things that you control

2.   Bucket 2: things that you don't control but can influence

3.   Bucket 3: things that you can neither control nor influence

If you think carefully about Bucket 1, you'll soon come to realize that it's the smallest bucket, numerically speaking: there is only one thing in it, me/you/us. That's right, if you think about it, the only thing that we can control in this life is ourselves.

Now I know some of you will be tempted to argue, so let me offer a conclusive example so that we can keep moving: Remember before you were a parent how you would see other people on an airplane and grumble about how poorly they controlled their children? And now that you are a parent how do you approach this/how do you see this now that you're on the other side of the situation?

Let me share my own experience in this regard: As a business traveler in my younger days, I, too, had my fair share of long flights with kids kicking the back of my chair the entire way. And because I'm older and supposedly more mature, I'd like to apologize to God and all of those parents whom I shot such dirty looks: indeed, if looks could kill then I'd be a murderer many times over. (To clarify: of the adults/parents, not the kids, of course.) But now that I am a parent - and, in fairness, am constrained by our greater awareness of constructive parenting techniques (than our parents were) - I often found myself apologizing to fellow travelers for my children's unruly behavior, especially those good folks in first class with whom I took a torturous, 6-hour flight across country with a six-month-old many moons ago.

(The irony of these situations is that my children were generally very well-behaved, but they so enjoyed airplane travel that it was hard to get them to calm down enough to meet my and our fellow travelers' expectations.)

So now I know: it turns out that just because I'm bigger and more powerful and smarter than my kids - or so I'd like to think - this doesn't mean that I can control them (especially on an airplane when they were very young, or, for that matter, in life now that they are young adults). Yep, I'm alone in my own Bucket 1, as are you.…

Bucket 2, by contrast, is full of things and other people. Think about it: virtually everyone in your life with whom you interact on a regular basis is at most in Bucket 2 for you, and even within this grouping there is a spectrum in that you have more influence with some than others. The key thing to remember is that any time you are dealing with another person or with other people, you are by definition in Bucket 2, so how you choose to craft your response to him/her/them should reflect this.

A quick example: If your office at work or workspace at home is messy, this is a Bucket 1 situation because you control whether you choose to clean it up or not. By contrast, if you share an office at work or workspace at home and either or both of these becomes messy, you're in a Bucket 2 situation because courtesy and decorum require you to negotiate with the other person (or persons) to develop a plan to address the situation. Think about it: it is a Bucket 1 choice for you to clean up your own part of the mess, but it's at best a Bucket 2 proposition to encourage others to join you in cleaning up their part.

Further, Bucket 3 is much bigger than we might suspect or than we appear to think based on our actions. For example, what's in Bucket 3? Well, a number of things that tend to get us unnecessarily upset, including, among many others, the weather, traffic and the failure of our favorite sports teams to do what they're supposed to do when we want them to do it. Think about it: does it make any sense to let our mood be affected by weather that we can't control or to be aggravated by the traffic we inevitably encounter if we live in any major modern urban or suburban center or to be enraged that despite our passionate and quite vocal cheering at the TV our favorite sports teams seem not to rise to the occasion too often?

And that's the point: we have no control or influence over the situations, so it's best that we learn to let them go by refraining from reacting emotionally to them. Yes, I know that it's hard not to be angered by that a--hole who just cut you off in traffic or by the reality that it's going to rain all of the day of your daughter's very expensive wedding that was supposed to be held outside or by just about everything that the New York Knicks and/or Jets do repeatedly, but what does allowing negative emotion to build up us accomplish? How does allowing ourselves to be subsumed by the negative in life help us? We all know that it doesn't, but, truth be told, it's hard to train ourselves to overcome this natural, negative reaction.

So now we're back to where we began: that in virtually every situation in life we have the power of choice, so it's incumbent upon us to make an effective, non-emotional one that allows us to stay focused on and moving toward our most meaningful goals in life, the primary one being to enjoy our journey. So, yes, as hard as it may be sometimes to let go of your righteous annoyance and/or anger, you absolutely must and for your own benefit.

What benefit, you might ask? Well, there are actually several major ones, but let's focus on two: first, the research is clear, voluminous and conclusive that allowing ourselves to experience negative emotions for extended periods of time really, truly damages our bodies, minds and souls (and, for you skeptics/if you don't believe me, research the hormone cortisol and its impacts); and, second, remaining focused on what matters most to us and on how we want to live our lives by avoiding the distraction of the emotional rabbit holes that negativity offers gives us the best chance to live on purpose and in the way we most prefer. So, not only is negativity bad for you, but it also distracts you from living the way you most want, hence the imperative to make the most effective choices in the myriad situations that life presents.

In this spirit, then, I'll close by wishing you the desire and discipline you'll need to make the most effective choices for how you want to live your life, and, in keeping with one of the themes of this piece, will acknowledge that it's a Bucket 2 situation for me....

(But you realize that it's a Bucket 1 opportunity for you, right?)

(Photo credits: https://quotefancy.com/quote/783470/Caroline-Myss-Managing-the-power-of-choice-with-all-it-s-creative-and-spiritual; https://www.zazzle.com/murphy+was+an+optimist+gifts; https://me.me/i/between-stimulus-and-response-there-is-a-space-in-that-7547123; https://projecthelping.org/power-choice/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xQVMQ1XGmg; https://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-because-stuff-happens/; https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-EVKM-QTwg3I/VugXrq5TZrI/AAAAAAABcTM/nBNHLMDHZGQ/s1600-h/ChooseWisely_eb8044f3.aspx%25255B7%25255D.jpg; https://capitolhomehealthcare.com/surprising-stress-triggers/keep-calm-and-don-t-stress-36/; https://mycampaigncoach.com/whos-winning/; https://quotefancy.com/quote/909281/Stephen-R-Covey-Only-as-we-keep-an-open-communication-with-our-deep-inner-life-will-we; https://www.directcreative.com/blog/beat-your-control; https://www.pluckys-secondthought.com/kids-on-a-plane-how-to-have-a-good-flight/; https://nypost.com/2015/04/20/the-8-worst-types-of-kids-to-deal-with-on-a-plane/; https://nypost.com/2015/04/20/the-8-worst-types-of-kids-to-deal-with-on-a-plane/; https://www.wcnc.com/; https://www.wired.com/2017/02/not-even-street-closures-can-make-san-francisco-traffic-worse/; https://twitter.com/nyjets; https://i.pinimg.com/originals/21/be/14/21be14bb5800546dec3b3bd3131be6d1.jpg; https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ed/f0/a5/edf0a59ee8ff4fde57e5daa44ac03004.jpg)