Between Stimulus and Response
In his book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen R. Covey has this phrase, “Between stimulus and response is our greatest power – the freedom to choose.” Today I would like to write my thoughts about what this means.
Every day each of us has a myriad of different stimuli that occurs. The shower is too hot, too cold, our hair is not combing well, or is, our breakfast is too this or that or the other, our car won’t start, or does. Good or bad, everything we do or everything that happens is some sort of stimulus or another. Fact is, what you are reading right this very minute is stimulus.
Like it or not we cannot ignore, overt or delete it from our lives. We may, however, respond. In fact that is the only thing that we can do. Every response is evidence of the choice we took as a result of the stimulus.
The water was too cold, we flinched and pulled back our hand, or maybe we chose to leave that hand in the cold water and reached for the hot water knob with the other hand to turn it up. All were choices to respond to the simple stimulus of the water being too cold.
Each minute of every day is filled with the same opportunities to choose how we will respond to the stimuli that occur. Right now you can choose to read on, stop reading, you can choose to believe what you are reading, or disbelieve what you are reading. You can smile you can frown; you can laugh or even cry. But the simple truth still exists – you have a choice how you will respond; followed by another and another choice, and so goes life.
Some people choose to respond to certain stimuli in very disproportionate ways; meaning that the response is either way too big or way too small in proportion to the stimulus. Good examples of this would be a person not showing any emotion when their dearest loved one passes away, or a person laughing uncontrollably at something that was extremely insignificant.
Some people choose inappropriate ways to respond. Others try avoiding responding all together; failing to realize that avoiding is a choice and therefore a response. In fact there are many different ways in which people choose to respond. Some are positive, some are negative, some productive, some destructive, some valuable, some unnecessary, some kind, some mean, some fun, some boring, some . . . you get the picture.
We each have the same ability too. There is not a single person that I can think of who is exempt. Take a moment and think about it. Can you think of anyone who is exempt?
There may be some who are limited in the amount of options they have in their responses but nevertheless they have the freedom to make choices and therefore responses. Take a baby for instance; a baby can’t use the get-up-and-walk-away response because of physical inability but we have each heard the cry-at-the-top-of-your-lungs response plenty of times.
Tomorrow I will explore 7 different kinds of responses that are used.
 Your assignment today is to get a piece of paper and write a list of the different stimuli that have happened in your last hour. This is how I would like you to do it. Divide the paper into three columns. At the top of column one write, “Stimulus”, here you will write what the stimulus was. In column two write, “Choice”, here you will write what choice you made for that given stimulus. Then in column three write, “Alternatives” here you will write down at least two different choices you could have made instead of the one you made. Notice in column three how many different alternatives you can come up with. We will talk about that later. Go do you assignment. |
To your creations,
Michael Claridge
