You always have freedom to respond

Now days, I don’t know for some reason, I am always reading (listening  ... courtesy www.audible.com and my iphone) a self help book. Reading them is helping me shed more light on my day to day activities.  As I am the most irregular person known to me, I consider this as a daily moral dosage I need to keep my ducks in a row. They seem to help me .... But at the end of  2012, I will update you all if the change is real….. Yes, I plan to write 52 blog entries by end of this year about my “Aha” moments in understanding a self help principle or concept or quote or any inspirational stuff which makes real sense to me.

Now let’s go to this week quote

“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, Man's Search for Meaning

 I read this in “Be Proactive” habit chapter of Stephen covey’s best seller “The 7 habits of highly effective people". When I hear him say this again in the audible book, I was almost jumping with an “Aha” moment…   Read it again. ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space (Most of us are not aware of this, we directly jump to a response). In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lie our growth and our freedom ‘… Yes. In a simple terms it is telling us that we have a freedom to choose our reaction for every stimulus (A hate speech/hard word of a person you love.. a irritating activity of a innocent kid…. Abrupt order of a boss who dont want to understand you…. A unexpected betrayal of friend….   Almost everything happening to you)

Viktor Frankel is saying this after his “extremely hard “ (He almost lost every known family member in Nazi camps) experiences  he faced as Jew in Hitler’s death camps.  He became aware of this freedom to choose a response for every hit, every wound he received from ruthless officers ,as he turned inward for peace and freedom.  He internally decided to not to take the pain he was put through to his heart.  He was able to stay calm in the middle of excruciating pain with the understanding that if his is not letting his inner self feel the pain, it won’t…penetrate.   It did not … He survived.

In words of Mahatma, it is “They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them”

Think about this, your boss calls you to talk about a missed dead line.Fom the moment call started he  keeps talking about how you could have done otherwise as per his ideas and avoided the mess. He is creating doubt on your very own strength areas and making big fuzz out of it. Your immediate response can be in two ways.

Either to defend to all your activities and go for a rough and tough fight with him. Which will spoil a relationship which should work for long time.. Or he will start doing bad things directly or indirectly…  

You can completely feel bad about yourself and your decisions and start doing everything in his way or do nothing. 

But if you are aware of the freedom you have between the stimulus you received and response which will work constructively, You can take a moment to analyze exactly what went wrong for real… and what you could have done better and reply to him that you understand there was a mistake, you take responsibility for avoiding it in future and why  you think what you will do will definitely avoid this in future. Instead of shouting or weeping you can react calmly like this (without any real hard internal feelings). Either he accepts or declines make no difference to you because you understand what went wrong and what should be done right next time. You understand that is your opportunity to growth.

Once I started pondering on this, I found applications for this every minute. Please think about this and let me know if you found any “aha” application. “Happy New Year Friends”.