Picture this: you and your sweetheart are taking a jolly stroll down the street, and a ferocious dog breaks lose of the owner’s leash and starts charging towards you – barking, drooling and everything. What would you do in that moment?
If your response is not that you’d quickly abandon your “sweetheart” and jump over the nearest fence, then I’d have to give it up for you…you are somewhat of a superhuman!
Human beings and animals have similar tendencies when confronted with unexpected circumstances that our brain judges as harmful or a threat to our survival – we either fight or flee. Scientists say we don’t have much control over it; the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal-cortical system do all the work for us. While this might be true, and backed by extensive research, I’d like to propose that there could be a third response – an addition to the renowned fight or flight combo. In fact, I’d suggest that it’s the first of the three.
The fight or flight response assumes that once we experience the said “shocker”, we have no time to choose our response, so we default to primitive response and either fight or flight depending on what our hypothalamus tells our body to do. However, as Viktor Frankl once said, “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.”
When we experience a shocking event, we don’t have to fall back to our primitive settings. There’s a brief, very brief, lapse of time where we get an opportunity to tell our brain how to respond. At first, this brief time lapse might seem non-existent, but the more you become conscious of its existence, the more you’re able to harness it. It appears that this time lapse grows in length as you practice noticing its presence.
Back to our initial example of the ferocious dog. If you took advantage of the time lapse, instead of flight, you could’ve allowed yourself the option to choose another possible outcome: stoop low and pat.
To be effective leaders, we must practice taking control of our emotions. In a rough situation when everyone is either fighting or fleeing, we must show that we are not simply responding to our default settings. We must show that we are in control of our emotions and our responses. Choosing calmness in the middle of a seemingly chaotic circumstance will make our leadership heritage indelible.
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Ugo is an energetic and dynamic speaker. He is the founder of NEU Gen Leaders – a youth leadership organization with a mission of helping the youth discover their life’s identity and mission. He is the author of the book “Secrets of Academic Excellence”.