Space Between
I re-read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning early in the pandemic. Over the last 22 months I keep coming back to one of Frankl’s more famous quotes:
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.
It is interesting the frequency with which many of the words in this quote have been appearing individually in the news and in our lives across the last two years.
Stimulus has largely shown up in our lives as a financial term — i.e., economic stimulus. The emotional stimuli communicated by Frankl might more often be referred to these days as triggers.
Response has lately to do with how we as individuals or citizens or nations are responding to the pandemic, or how and when one side is choosing to respond to an argument put forth by another side.
We have also been hearing a lot about space. Mostly, because there are some famous and infamous and all other kinds of people actually traveling to space or planning to travel to space. The kind of meditative, theoretical space broached by Frankl has been less a part of our everyday lexicon.
(An aside: I was fortunate recently to see John Mulaney perform live, and he has a great bit about space — the science-y kind of space you travel to, not the in-your-head kind. Spoiler alert, John doesn’t get the appeal of traveling to space or living there. It’s a funny bit worth checking out on your google machine.)
Power and choice and freedom are all big, strong words that lately get a lot of airtime. These words can each have hugely positive connotations or be negatively triggering depending on their contexts.
Growth, like stimulus, gets mainly framed nowadays in economic terms — growth in asset values, growth in cryptocurrencies and NFTs, growth in the number of cargo ships in the Pacific, growth in prices.
Growth is the word in Frankl’s quote that I find most intriguing. Growth of the personal, emotional kind. It is an ingredient of change and somehow wrapped up in love which is, after all, the goal. I would like to play a role in steering a broader dialogue toward that type of growth in 2022 and beyond.
I have been fortunate this year to work with a client (“George”) who is very focused on his own personal growth, and on the growth of those around him. One of the things I have noticed and admire about George is how he responds to me when I bring him some kind of issue (or trigger or stimulus) which requires his response.
George listens very carefully to my explanation of the issue. He pauses. He asks a few clarifying questions. If the topic is what I perceive to be bad news, George often reverses perspective to evaluate it from another angle and says something like, “What if we imagine this is good news?” He plays around in that potential reality for a bit.
Then George offers me what he supposes will be his response based on a first read of the situation, and he follows with something along the lines of “I’ll give you my final answer once I sleep on it” (or “in a few hours” based on whatever is our deadline). In some cases, after what he refers to as “think time,” George’s final answer differs from his initial response. In other cases, his response is that he does not think the situation requires him to respond.
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Several things occur every time I bring an issue to George. Most importantly, the dire urgency, the fire of the situation dies down. George receives the information and chooses to widen the space as much as possible between receiving it and responding. Letting the state of affairs breathe and settle results in a better outcome, and a higher likelihood that all parties involved come away feeling like they won, or at least that they were heard.
I also appreciate that George always responds with something. He creates that space but then he makes a call which spawns action. I have worked with people who appear wise at first because they widen the space between stimulus and response, but they widen it to infinity and they never move to a decision or create forward motion. In George’s case, I have witnessed him personally grow through his evaluation of a set of circumstances, and I and others who are involved in that situation have grown as a result of the actions that occur on the other side of the decision. That’s good leadership, George.
It is tempting to think of stimuli or triggers only in negative terms, especially in this day and age. Bad news hits us — a positive covid test, a national border closing, a top candidate receiving a counter-offer, a trusted relationship faltering, a child getting rejected from her dream school, a parking ticket — and we feel the need to swiftly react and try to solve or at least address the problem. The idea of pausing or creating space feels stressful and counterproductive.
The same is true for positive stimuli. Something great happens and we want to immediately share or post the news, whereas sometimes it is best to wait for others to catch up.
But whether positive or negative news, there is value and growth, and freedom, for ourselves and those around us, when we pause and create space before responding.
I have found this to be the case for me personally. The less reactive I am, the more I can widen the space between a trigger and a response, the more effective a decision-maker I can be, and the more value I can be to others. Sometimes the result is a realization that a response is not required at all, that the situation will move forward naturally with its own momentum without my weighing in.
There is another Frankl-esque quote I love that comes from a more recent source:
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Boy, does that one land as we near the end of 2021!
In 2022, I plan to take the words of Viktor Frankl and Ferris Bueller to heart. I want to emulate for others what George has shown me this year. To be someone who understands the power of the pause, how to let a sitch breathe throughout whatever time is allotted before a response is required.
Out of all of the words in that incredible Frankl quote above, I want to talk more with people about Growth (in non-financial terms) in 2022. Maybe we can start a movement, or at least a conversation.
Jeff Constable
12.23.2021
Song Recommendation(s)
This is another three song recommendation month, all having to do with space and change, tracing through the last 50 years: Changes by David Bowie (1971), The Space Between by Dave Matthews Band (2001) and Malibu by Miley Cyrus (2017). Enjoy, and happy holidays!
