E + R = O : The Power of Right Choice

What happens to us does not break or make us, how we take it, does ! Attitude is all that matters !

Jack Canefield aptly and mathematically puts it as :

E (Events) + R (Responses) = O (Outcomes).

Stephen Covey also says this in his 90/10 rule, that life is 90% how you respond, and only 10% is what happens. Indeed, in a world of dualities (?????), pleasure and pain, light and darkness, life and death etc. will co-exist always. No one on earth can escape sorrow and adversity. Even prophets and saints have had to face great challenges. But they kept up their inner positivity, their patience, their hope and courage. They had the power of a great attitude.

So we all will have physical, mental, emotional, financial, relationship, professional and spiritual problems. Even if you are good and upright, even if you behave rightly and do your work sincerely, unpleasant things will happen - your boss or your peer or one of your friends / loved ones whom you trusted, may let you down. A near and dear one may get sick or may die, you may lose your job in a VUCA world or your business may run into unexpected problems. You may have health problems. And so on...

That's the alphabet E in the equation above : the events that happen. You have no control on those events. On what happens. Do you ?

O is the outcome. We all want good outcomes. We want peace, health, happiness, prosperity. Don't we ?

So O is frozen, it is the result, something that you may aspire but not something that you can directly control. E is not in your hands. The only thing where you have a choice is how you respond. It becomes a negative, stressful reaction if you work from your ego, and keep cribbing, but it becomes a positive, constructive response when you act from wisdom and understanding. So the Gita advises, do your duty, don't worry about the outcome, nor for that matter (since the outcome is not in your hands), should you let your attachment be to inaction (evasive lethargy). Arjuna was shaken by fear and attachment, he did not want to fight, until he was given the insight. Then he rose like the mighty warrior that he indeed was. It was the same Arjuna, what changed was the perception, the attitude ! And he won, both inside and outside. But the victory had to be first inside - in his mind.

Jesus Christ who amidst great physical agony on the cross could pray, 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do' - had that inner victory (in which he transcended his body and did not allow his 'pain' to become 'suffering'. All prophets and sages had it.

So by making right responses to seemingly negative events, we can get positive outcomes.

A story to learn from : Two school boys on their way back home went swimming in a nearby pond. Competing with each other, they went too far into the pond, until they were in a difficult spot and both of them started drowning. Someone saw and saved them. As soon as they came out, both were exasperated and both made a promise each.

One said, 'Oh, I was saved. I will never ever enter water until I am a good swimmer'. He was driven by fear. The other one was wiser, he made a positive response. He knew until he entered water and practiced, he would have to continue to fear water. So he vowed, ' I shall come to this pond everyday - I shall not venture into deep waters initially, but I shall practice everyday, until I am an expert swimmer. I shall not give up'. And he soon became one.

The world would have waited for unpredictably long if Edison had given up on his experiments after so many failures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfhAIv_DmXo

And that's the secret of Stress Management. 90% of our stress does not come from what happens to us, but from how we look at and process it. And that is a choice we have.

Where we are today is the result of the choices we made in the past. By making right choices today, we can improve our present and our future.

Wisdom-guided will is what we all need. We need to understand, we need to stay calm inside, and we need to make willful, tireless effort to overcome all our challenges.

'A smooth life', my Master says, 'is not a successful life'. Just as we cannot develop our biceps and triceps without working out, we cannot be mentally strong, we cannot develop our psycho-spiritual sinews, without facing challenges, trials and tribulations. Swami Vivekananda also said, 'any day you find that you have no problems, you can be sure that something is wrong'. Churchill said during World War-II, 'let a crisis never go waste'! As I wrote in my another article, the real trouble is, we focus too hard on the events and miss the message behind them; we miss the lessons that those events bring, and then the crisis indeed goes waste. 

For that to happen, we need right attitude ! What happens to us does not break or make us, how we take it, does !

The picture above relates to a motivational talk I did some time ago for a bank's officers / faculty members at a learning institute in Greater Noida, on Holistic Stress Management. We do not need to manage stress, we need to manage ourselves - our responses which are rooted in our attitudes, perceptions and values. For more on this, please see my another posts :

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/dont-manage-stress-yourself-hans-dholakia

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/manage-energyconsciousness-timestress-hans-dholakia/

Hans Dholakia // Motivational Speaker / Corp. Trainer / Life Coach // BLENDING SCIENCE, MGMT. & SPIRITUALITY