Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.— Viktor E. Frankl
If you are aware of a recurring pattern of acting counter to your interests, you have a puzzle to solve: Why do you do it? Specifically, what is going on in the space between stimulus and response that causes you to react to the things that happen as you do?
The Personal Research Tool is designed specifically to focus in on the causes of your emotional reactions, when that reaction was excessive or counter-productive. The possibility that another person would react differently to the same antecedent event suggests that it would have been possible for you to have responded differently. So there must be something within you that caused you to react as you did. Knowledge of what that is can be used to your benefit.
This personal research is not designed to make you happy or to get you to believe nice things about yourself, but to enable you to react to the things that happen in ways that you judge to be more advantageous. To do this research, you will have to shift from the first-person perspective of the one who experiences the emotional reaction to the third-person perspective of a dispassionate observer so you can observe dispassionately what is going on in the space between Stimulus and Response.
Instructions:
Use the Personal Research Tool as soon as possible after you experience any overly strong or regrettable emotional reaction.
- Complete the third column [col C] first. Here you will name the emotion you experienced — e.g., anger, fear, frustration — and rate its intensity from 1 [very low] to 100 [strongest emotion you’ve ever experienced — resist the urge to label everything a 100].
- Next, complete the first column [col A]. This column is for your description of the antecedent events that evoked the emotional reaction. If you can, use play-script — that is, write a description that would it enable someone who was not there to visualize or act out the events.
- The middle column is where we do our detective work. Here you will identify the interpretation that turned the antecedent event into the particular emotional reaction that you experienced.
[Note: We are not looking for the rational, healthy analysis of what happened, but the interpretation that caused the emotional reaction you experienced at the time].- Recall: What thoughts or images went through your mind at the moment that may account for your emotional reaction?
- Probe: While reviewing the episode from your current perspective, what abstractions come to mind? Ask yourself questions such as:
- What does this event say about me?
- What does this mean about my life, my future?
- What was I afraid could happen?
- What does it mean about how this person (or other people in general) think about me?
- What does it mean about this other person (or other people in general)?
- What images or memories does this situation trigger?
- Go Deeper: You can continue to research the answers you get by asking yourself follow-up questions such as: "If this interpretation is valid, what does that say about, me, the other, or the future?"
Click here to download the Personal Research Tool
Using the Knowledge You Acquire
The Personal Research Tool will reveal how your interpretation of the antecedent condition influenced your reaction to it. After you observe a few such episodes, you will probably notice that between the stimulus and your response to it, there is an interpretive lens that is similar from episode to episode. This lens, which you may label as a perspective, belief, or premise, determines your interpretation of the antecedent event and ultimately your reactions to it. If you want to change how you react, change the lens through which you interpret the things that happen.
A Payoff of Knowing Yourself
After around three or four Personal Research observations you will probably be able to deconstruct your trap. This is a significant milestone, because now, as an adult who has developed the skills of rationale analysis and of detecting BS, you can mindfully restructure the interpretive biases that were conditioned into you when you were a child or that you developed as an adolescent. Once you understand how these beliefs and perspectives influence your reactions, you can take the time to dispassionately restructure them so they promote responses more compatible with your interests and principles.
Focusing your attention on reshaping the space between stimulus and response is a noble endeavor. This may involve developing a philosophy of life that will serve as the basis of interpreting the things that happen, or learning to recognize irrational interpretations, or follow another approach to exercise your will. The important thing is that the version of you that defines your path of greatest advantage is represented in that space between stimulus and response.