React, Respond, or Create?
What kind of life do you want?
Perhaps you’re familiar with the saying that it’s better to respond than to react. True. To react is essentially to do something without thought.
One reason people react is that they do not see or understand what is driving them beneath the surface. The cause is often biological.
It’s well established in neuroscience that our emotions and many of our reactions originate in the limbic portion of the brain, while our rational thinking is tied to the cerebral cortex.
The limbic system operates hundreds of times more quickly than the cerebral cortex. This speedy reaction is important in life-threatening situations when you have no time to think and must react quickly.
However, when it comes to ordinary tasks, it is best to allow the rational, thinking portion of the brain to have time to process the feelings and emotions of the limbic system so you can choose your response more deliberately.
Think about a time when you became angry, such as when someone cut you off in traffic, nearly causing an accident. If you’re like many of us, you probably reacted quickly with an outburst of anger, which might have included a few choice words. That was a reaction!
The same thing can happen when someone says something that triggers you. Your limbic system goes into its fight-flight-freeze mode and you may hastily react, perhaps speaking sharply or yelling at them. Alternatively, you might want to run or shut down.
Many people go through life in a reactive mode much of the time, reacting to things without thinking. What quality of results do you think they reap?
How can you move to a more thoughtful manner of responding rather than reacting? First, you must recognize that the limbic or emotional center of your brain can be hijacked. This will cause you to quickly react, even when it would be better not to.
In high-stress situations, such as in an accident or when you’re under extreme pressure, you can expect to react quickly and not necessarily appropriately.
But not everything is an emergency — is it? What about other areas of your life, such as what you do with your time? Are you allowing circumstances or the environment around you to dictate what you do — or do you pause, look at the situation, and make a thoughtful decision?
Responding requires that you think and make a better decision than you would normally make in a purely reactive mode. If you give yourself time to think before you react, you will most likely get a better result.
Responding in a thoughtful way, rather than reacting, is part of being more responsible. Responding means you took the time to consider and weigh the options and then chose the best one.
To become the leader in your life, you must at least reach the level of being able to respond. Reacting is not leading yourself. Reacting is allowing someone or something else — outside circumstances — to control you and your destiny.
To respond means you take the leadership reins and become responsible to yourself and your principles. To respond is to take the time needed to allow the rational part of your brain to catch up with the limbic system, so you can make a decision that will serve your higher desires.
The better the quality of the questions you ask yourself, the better your response will be, and the better the outcome. You must see what is happening, think about it, and then act in a way that will deliver a better result.
While responding is better than reacting, there is an even higher level of self-leadership — that of creating. As with responding, you give thought to the best options you see in a situation. But in creating, you take it to a deeper level, delving into what you really want or need.
Simply responding is not going to provide you with what you may need at the deepest level. Responses, even highly mature ones, can be rooted in many things and can sometimes stifle your ability to create.
If you simply respond based on what you already know, or based on how life and people have conditioned your thinking, it can be hard to be creative.
Rather than saying, “I want to begin saving money for retirement, so I’m going to invest heavily in my retirement plan,” ask yourself better questions. Is my retirement plan the best possible way to increase my long-term savings? If you apply your creativity to a situation, you might come up with something entirely different, something beyond the obvious.
Take this article for example. It’s a way for me to share a part of myself, impart wisdom to others, and create a lasting legacy for what has helped me succeed in life. In a way, creating this and other articles and books are part of my retirement plan — not just monetarily, but to leave a mark on the world. But it took self-leadership to write these words!
This higher level of leadership, personal or otherwise, is about vision and direction. First, you must see what you want to create as clearly as possible. Then you must take action and keep making course corrections to stay on the right path, going in the right direction.
In fact, leadership is always about direction. What you do determines the direction you go and where you wind up.
Allowing yourself to be primarily in a reactive mode will take you in one direction and give you one set of results. To be more thoughtful and responsive will take you in another direction.
To create something new will bring entirely new results, in an entirely different direction.
The choice is yours. React and be led or lead by being more deliberate in creating what you want.
Here are some examples of reacting, responding, and creating:
Someone cuts you off in traffic and rather than allow it to trigger you, you pause, take control of your breathing, calm yourself, and become thankful that there was no accident. This is a more effective response to the situation.
What can you create in a situation like this? If you use the near-accident to strengthen your ability to pause and not be triggered, to become thankful instead of resentful, and to reframe the situation (maybe the other driver is having a really bad day and didn’t see you), you begin to create something totally new.
If a near-accident makes you more determined to stay alert in traffic and pay closer attention to the road, you’re going in an even better direction.
When you pause and think of a careful response, those adrenaline-spiked reactions dissipate completely. Each time something triggers you, you use it as an opportunity to improve your ability to create a new way to act and bring less stress and more joy into your life.
Or, let’s say you are feeling pressured because you are getting older and haven’t saved enough for retirement. Instead of just reacting with worry — which has known ill effects on your health — you decide to notice the trigger, slow down, and give some thought as to what to do.
Your thoughtful response is to try to save as much as you can and keep on working. To take this to the next level of creating what you want, perhaps you can enlist the help of others — a financial planner, for example — and take up learning more about the subject of growing the investments you have.
A truly creative approach to retirement might include learning more about what it will take to live the lifestyle you really want to live, evaluating cost-effective locations to live in once you do retire, or thinking about retirement-friendly part-time jobs.
If you’re a business professional, maybe you’ll branch out and start consulting, using your expertise. This creativity might give you more scheduling flexibility to accommodate your retired life.
The options are endless, but you’ll need the skill of thoughtful self-leadership in order to envision opportunities and thus see the entire situation in a different light to create something else entirely.
Any form of creativity is bound to give you a better result than simply reacting by worrying.
To move from reacting to responding to creating, you simply need to pause, think, and develop a vision of what you really want — and then begin the work of moving in that direction.
You can create what you want if you are willing to become responsible and lead yourself in a way beyond where reacting or responding will take you.
©2020 BillAbbate.com
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