Wednesday, December 12, 2012

React Or Respond-What Works?

Part of the process since I started to work with the Striving Styles Personality System was to take myself through the process as well. This helps me to better understand the possibilities that the SSPS has to help anyone achieve their goals, whether that is related to your career, personal life or both.

One of the aspects of  the development roadmap took me through the idea of responding to events or circumstances rather than reacting to them. While initially it seemed like a straightforward idea, like many good ideas the application proved to be a little more complicated. The SSPS tells us that the changes we want to make will take time and practice. In finding how to best utilize the respond rather than react concept this need for time and practice became much clearer. It also became clear that it is easier to change what I do when interacting with some people more so than others. My goal though is to make it work with the 'others' and I thought that was going quite well until an incident over the weekend. I found myself reacting instead of responding to a family member which did not feel great. The difference this time was that rather than worrying about it for days after I was able to recognize what happened, why it did and move on. This particular family member has a long history of 'pushing my buttons' and I have a long history of responding in exactly the way she wants me to. It has long been the 'elephant in the room' from my perspective.

Thanks to the work I have been doing over the last several months I now have the ability to stop that cycle and feel just fine doing so.
When you think about how you respond to specific people and what you would like to change about that, what are you willing to do to make it happen? Are there certain people that you frequently find yourself reacting instead of responding to? How do you feel when that happens?

Working through this process offers us not just the opportunity to change something that is not working for us but it offers a sense of having better control, without being controlling of ourselves or others. Is there someone or a situation that you would like to respond to rather than react to?