Emotional Intelligence: Response Vs. Reaction
These beautiful NYC September days have made me particularly religious about my daily walks to the East River. Like, get out of bed, get dressed, grab a coffee, and out the door type of rhythm. On one of my recent walks, the question popped into my mind:
“What is the difference between a response and a reaction?”
That one took a while to percolate. Then, over (more) coffee with a friend yesterday, the subject came up again. He’s got a fiery constitution like I do, where our reactions to our environment and our emotional states tend to be fast and strong. Having just finished up a climbing session, he used the analogy of getting frustrated on a problem (climbing lingo for a route on the wall):
“When I’m trying a tough problem I may get frustrated. I could either accept that I feel frustrated and express that through my body in a non-harmful way (punching the mat, walking it off vocative sighs) or I could bottle it up and then yell at the staff or even bring it home and take it out on my partner.”
I replied, “So there’s your response to not yet solving the problem, which is frustration, then there’s your reaction to the frustration, which is how you frame that mentally and how you allow it to express itself.”
This provided immense clarity for me around a realization that has slowly dawned during my 29th year on the planet. That I, like so many fellow humans I know, tend to REACT to our RESPONSES - judging them, suppressing them, neglecting them, trying to fix or change them right away. At the risk of using an annoying spiritual trope, we are no longer “in our truth“ but trying to divert it in some potentially more harmful way.
I am not suggesting that we revert to being children and fully indulge our emotional responses without any mindfulness. Rather, we can marry the reality of our physical-emotional moment to the wisdom we now have access to as adults, and we can make conscientious decisions around how we are going to give life to that moment.
So as I have been building my new business, the Brooklyn Mindbody Collective, I have had moments of jaw-clenching stress as I work for hours and hours on the computer, talking with colleagues, talking with lawyers, thinking, predicting, calculating…. And I have had the choice between judging myself for feeling that stress and struggle (“Oh, I should be better than this! Just BREATHE your damn breath, Chelsey!”) or… sprawling out on my kitchen floor, rubbing my tense jaw muscles and saying to myself “Ok, it’s like this now. I’m pushing the ball up the mountain before I reach momentum. This is the hard part. Of course, it’s hard. It’s ok that it’s this way now, it won’t always be. What do I need right now?”
We can ask ourselves:
What emotion am feeling right now?
How am I experiencing that as sensation in my body (not concept/story although that can also be important)?
What do I need?
Does fulfilling that need lead to more unnecessary suffering (for myself or others) or is it pretty much harmless?
(And after 1-4) What do I feel now in my body/emotions?
Try this amidst difficult emotions/mental states… but also, I encourage you to play with it during more positive scenarios! It ain’t all about suffering. This life, this body is such a gift when we combine awareness of the given reality with mindful action. If you need some loving guidance, I am here.