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I often hear a particular phrase every week, coming from chief executives, parents, entrepreneurs, and highly intelligent individuals. It typically sounds like this:
"I don't know what came over me." Or,
"I wasn't myself." Or — my personal favorite — "I
just reacted."
Whenever someone says it, I find myself fighting the urge to
smile. Not because their discomfort entertains me, but because I already
anticipate what the next hour will hold for both of us.
Many of us operate under the assumption that life follows a
straightforward pattern: an event occurs, then a reaction follows. For example,
if someone insults me, I feel anger; if someone criticizes me, I become
defensive; and if someone lets me down, I tend to withdraw and become quiet.
Simple. Predictable. Automatic. Except that is not what
happens. Life is a little more complicated than that. And thank God, a little
more hopeful.
The Space Nobody Notices
In one training session, I shared a diagram. Experience.
Then a gap. Then a response. A few people looked at me the way you look at
a man who has clearly forgotten to finish his own sentence. Surely there's more
to it than that? There is. We just don't tend to see it.
Between every experience and every response lies a space,
and in that space lives something extraordinary. Call it awareness. Call it the
pause. Call it the half-second in which the brain, if invited, asks: what is actually
happening here?
Most people sprint straight past it. They never even feel
the ground beneath their feet.
Experience. Reaction. Apology. Repeat.
Experience. Reaction. Regret. Repeat.
Experience. Reaction. A relationship quietly takes on
damage. Repeat.
It is remarkable how many good lives are run for decades by
a loop that nobody in them has ever stopped to notice.
The good news is that the loop can be broken. The harder
news is that no one can break it for you. Not your spouse. Not your boss. Not
your pastor. Not, I'm sorry to say, your coach. Only you get to stand in that
gap.
My Favorite Coaching Question
If we have worked together, you already know my mildly
irritating habit. People arrive expecting advice. What they get, more often, is
another question. One of my favorites is almost embarrassingly plain: "What
else could this mean?"
A client tells me, "My boss ignored my email."
Interesting. What else could that mean?
Maybe he's underwater this week. Maybe she read it, meant to
reply, but got pulled into a meeting. Maybe it slipped into spam. Maybe he
assumed someone else had already handled it. Maybe she is having the single
worst week of her career, and your email is, understandably, not an emergency.
Or, yes — maybe they are ignoring you.
Notice this. Of all those readings, only one wounds you on
impact. The rest leave a door open.
Curiosity keeps you emotionally flexible. Certainty makes
you brittle. That is why certainty feels so powerful in the moment, and why
curiosity, quieter and less satisfying, is often the wiser bet.
In Think Again, Adam Grant argues that the mark of a
genuinely sharp mind is not how often it turns out to be right — it is how
readily it is willing to be wrong on the way there. The same is true of the
emotional life. The emotionally grown-up do not marry their first
interpretation. They question it first.
The Man Who Lost His Promotion
A man came to see me once, badly deflated. He had been
passed over for a promotion he had counted on. He walked in carrying what
looked, for all the world, like disappointment. Ten minutes in, we both
understood he was carrying something heavier. He was carrying shame.
The two are not the same.
Disappointment says: “Something I wanted did not
happen.”
Shame says, "Something is wrong with me."
Those lead to two entirely different conversations, and only
one is about a job. So I asked him, "What did missing this promotion mean
to you?" He answered before I'd finished the sentence. "It means I'm
not good enough." And there it was — out on the table between us, older
than the job, older than the company.
The promotion had been alive for a single day. The belief
had been living in him, rent-free, for the better part of thirty years.
As we looked back on his early life, the pattern surfaced
almost on its own. Praise had always come with achievement. Love had often felt
like something you earned through performance. So performance quietly became
his identity. And the day the promotion vanished, his sense of worth tried to
leave with it.
Except it hadn't gone anywhere. His brain had simply been
convinced it must have. This is why coaching is so rarely about what happened
today. It is almost always about the meaning we assigned to something years ago
and never went back to check.
The Ladder We Rarely Climb Down
I often explain our reactions as a ladder. At the very
bottom is the event. Someone cuts you off. Someone forgets your birthday.
Someone ends an email about your work with one dismissive line.
Then, fast, we climb. Meaning. Belief. Emotion. Reaction.
Behavior. Consequence. And most of us are only ever aware of the top rung.
"I shouted." "I went cold on her."
"I resigned." "I completely overreacted."
But by the time you notice you are standing at the top, you
have already climbed the whole ladder — in a second and a half, without feeling
your feet touch a single rung.
The freedom lies in learning to climb back down. To stand at
the top and ask: what belief pulled this emotion up out of me? What
interpretation built that belief? And underneath it all — what, plainly,
actually happened? Learning to climb down that ladder is, I think, one of the
most quietly liberating skills a person can possess.
Emotional Fluency Is a Superpower
Imagine landing in Japan without a word of Japanese. Every
ordinary transaction becomes an ordeal. Buying a train ticket. Asking for a
bathroom. Misunderstandings breed more misunderstandings. You spend the whole
trip slightly braced. Now imagine coming back years later, fluent. The country
hasn't changed a stone. Your experience of it is unrecognizable.
Our inner lives work exactly like that. And most adults, if
we're honest, are traveling their own emotional interior on three words.
Fine. Stressed. Angry.
Everything gets sorted into one of those three bins. That is
a little like describing every meal you have ever eaten as either
"hot" or "cold." Not untrue. Just spectacularly, comically
incomplete.
The more emotional language you can actually lay your hands
on, the more precisely you can understand what is happening inside you.
I feel overlooked. I feel powerless. I feel
embarrassed. I feel quietly hopeful. I feel conflicted, and I
don't know why yet.
Feel how different each of those is from the flat, exhausted
"I'm stressed" we default to. Precision is not a luxury here.
You cannot solve a problem you cannot name — and you cannot name what you have
never learned the words for.
The Habit That Quietly Changed My Life
People often ask which single habit has shaped my coaching
most. They brace for something impressive. A productivity system. A pre-dawn
routine involving cold water, gratitude, and possibly a spreadsheet.
The honest answer is almost disappointing.
I pause.
Not always well. Not always gracefully. But on purpose.
Before replying to the email that has raised my blood
pressure. Before responding to the criticism. Before I decide, with total
confidence, what another person's silence must mean. Before the big
decisions and, increasingly, before the small ones.
Sometimes the pause is thirty seconds. Sometimes it's a walk
around the block. Sometimes it's the whole night, and a decision that seemed
obvious at 9 p.m. seems foolish by 7 a.m.
That habit has rescued me from conversations I would have
spent months repairing. From emails that should have died in the drafts folder.
From arguments that, given air, would have grown teeth.
One of the more underrated gifts you can hand yourself is a
delayed reaction. Because clarity, in my experience, almost always arrives a
few minutes after the adrenaline has left the building.
The Wisdom Hidden in Reflection
There is a reason I push people toward journaling as hard as
I do, and it is not the reason they expect. Journals do not solve problems.
People do. What a journal does is slow your thinking down just enough for your
wisdom to catch up.
Inside your mind, thoughts race so fast that examining them
is nearly impossible. They overlap, talk over each other, compete, elbow, and
interrupt.
The moment they hit the page, something changes. They slow.
They stand still long enough to be seen. And you cross a small but decisive
line — from being trapped in your thinking to standing beside it, watching.
That is metacognition. Thinking about your own
thinking. It may be one of the most underdeveloped skills in modern life. We
spend years mastering mathematics, languages, business, and technology. Almost
none of us are ever taught to observe the one instrument every decision passes
through first — our own mind.
The Difference Between Reaction and Response
Over the years I have become convinced that a single word
separates a reactive life from an intentional one.
Choice.
Reaction feels like weather — something that happens to
you. Response is something you author.
Reaction says, "I couldn't help it."
Response asks, "What kind of person do I want to be, right here?"
Reaction rushes to protect the ego. Response quietly
protects the relationship. Reaction seeks relief. Response seeks wisdom.
Reaction is fast. Response is willing to be slow. And the difference between
them, I've found, is rarely intelligence. It is awareness.
The Invitation
At the close of Session Four, I sent people out with a
single, deliberately gentle challenge. For the next seven days, don't try to
change what you feel. Don't suppress, grade, or argue with it in the mirror.
Just notice it. Get curious. And ask five questions:
What am I actually feeling? What story am I believing
right now? What need might this emotion be pointing at? What value of mine
feels threatened? And — always — what else could this mean?
Those five questions have quietly changed more lives than
any speech I have ever given on stage. Transformation does not begin the moment
your behavior changes. It begins the moment your awareness deepens.
Every habit you have ever built stood on a thought. A belief
tinted every thought. Every belief was reinforced by an interpretation you
repeated until it felt like fact. And every interpretation came wrapped in
emotion.
This means that if you truly want to change your habits —
your relationships, your leadership, your life — you cannot start with
behavior. You have to start further down. You have to start with awareness.
Maybe the entire lesson our emotions have been offering is
that they weren't trying to control us. Instead, they aimed to help us
understand ourselves better.
If this message stirred something in you, don’t let it fade.
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