Practical Wisdom — A Tool for Managing Your Reactions

Hi, it’s Paul Krismer. I’m coming to you from Mobile, Alabama, where I’m here to speak at a conference and I’m just loving this city. It’s really quite fun, but as a typical American city, it’s also so designed for cars. It was hilarious. I was at this tourist site to see this battleship today and I was, I thought it’s close enough to the hotel, I’ll walk, and I look on Google Maps and sure enough, it says you cannot walk to this location. And as I took my Uber to get here, sure enough, there was this long tunnel I had to go through with it had no pedestrian access so you could not walk to this location. Anyway, I want to share with you a really kind of interesting study, very recent, done by a woman named Karen Bolen. Dave will maybe put a link to the study below and it’s fascinating. It was designed for educators and in particular for them to be able to do interventions with youth in terms of them reacting to their circumstances in their life. So both to ground the reaction and the response on the part of students and also for educators to have a tool that’s readily useful and simple. The tool is called practical wisdom. I’m gonna share it with you today. It’s got these three components called react, reflect, and respond and it’s really quite beautiful in its concise effectiveness. Stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world so stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so there’s this lovely good study called practical wisdom and it’s got these very applicable, easy model for helping people work through personal circumstances. So the three components: react, respond, and reflect. And you know what’s interesting, if we talk about the first one about reacting, it might surprise you that this is actually more difficult than it might sound because the reaction is just natural, it just is whatever it is. But the tricky part is, we’re not always sure what it is that we’re feeling. Men often have a hard time understanding what they’re feeling. Emotional intelligence is just more commonly found on average in women than in men and so men are struggling sometimes, and some women of course too, with knowing exactly what’s going on. We tend to intellectualize the response. So if a teenager gets insulted by a friend at school or a boss passes someone over for a promotion, we have this reaction and if we get busy in our head thinking about it and trying to intellectualize what’s going on, we may miss out on the data that is the emotion. And of course, emotions are filled with data. They’re not direction, they don’t tell us where to go, but they do tell us what’s going on, what’s going on physiologically and emotionally for us. And if we can’t actually accurately know what our reaction is, what our emotion is, we’re kind of not getting the data we need in order to make an informed response.

And so when we’re working with people on what their reaction is, often we need to get them out of their head and so we say, look, emotions happen between your chin and your waist. And there’s factual truth to that too. There’s tremendous volume of neurons, brain cells, the same as brain cells in our hearts and in our guts. And so there’s a huge amount of feeling that’s happening there. So if the boss has looked someone over for a promotion we say, what are you feeling? Well, I’m frustrated, I can feel that in my gut, and it’s like it feels like guts and knots and I’m angry, I can feel it in my throat, and I’m just like I’m ready to yell. Aha, okay, good, we’re getting in touch with what the emotions are by getting in touch with the body. So we say, where in your body are you feeling something? And that may help a person identify what the emotion is. Or we might even say, try to make more tangible the intangible experience of emotions. We might say, you know what does it look like, if it had a color, what color would it be? And as you ask these kinds of exploratory questions, people sometimes become much clearer about what their emotional experience is. And then you’ve got the data, you know what exactly is going on from an emotional perspective in this set of life circumstances that somebody’s having. We understand what our reaction is. We get clear about the emotion and then there’s the reflect part.

And the reflect part calls upon us to know what’s important in our lives. You know, we’ve got options as we reflect about how we might want to react to this situation or how we might want to respond. And as we reflect and we are clear about our values or what’s most important, it informs the correct response. So we might say, well who do I want to be in this circumstance? Or what’s important to me in this situation? That is a pretty helpful series of questions to ask. Because we have this huge emotional response, we come clear what it is, I’m angry, I’m frustrated or whatever it is, and then we can say, well what’s really important to me in these circumstances? What way is my values going to drive me? And there’s really good evidence that the clearer people know their values, the more meaning and purpose they can derive from their lives and manage to escape the worst of responding and reacting to circumstances because they’re grounded in their own values.

And so again, you know, I can I’ve often pointed people in this direction but it’s a very good values exercise on my website that again Dave will put a link in the description below. It can really help you on so many levels in your life to get clear about what’s important. And the third item of this 3R practical wisdom: react, reflect, and respond is then actually to take action. And taking action can include taking no action. Right, and so that’s an important option to have as we say, oh I feel this frustration and anger, I’ve reflected on what’s important and given that reflection, I know that the most wise thing I can do in this circumstance is to do nothing. It can inform the wisdom of the response. Let’s say that the circumstances are something that leads to a reaction of loneliness. And of course, loneliness is a horrible feeling. It’s a super strong human drive to take action. And if we reflect on what’s important, then so we react it, we recognize our loneliness and then we say, well what’s most important to me? That may inform the way we respond. You know there’s healthy social interactions and there’s unhealthy social interactions. And in the study, they talk about teenagers and teenagers might do all kinds of things to be able to get human experience that could be unhelpful in the long run, go to the wrong party, hang out with the wrong people, take drugs to be popular or sleep around. You know all the kind of things that maybe will have downstream unintended, unwanted consequences.

Well, through this reflection exercise, saying again what’s most important, might inform a response that’s a much more socially healthy, long-term beneficial response. So, practical wisdom, I wonder if you could think about its application in your own life. To receive your reaction, recognize what the emotion is, reflect on what’s important to you, and then respond in an informed, wise way. Maybe even just as a practical exercise, when this video ends, you could look to some emotional circumstance in your own life that happened very recently, and just walk through, intellectually, what this model would look like had you applied it at that time.

And you may have found that you’ve done just the right thing in that moment, which is great. You’re verifying it, the model would work. You can see that you’re actually applying it, maybe in an unintended, natural way. Or you might see that you could have reacted somehow a little bit differently, and feel that this model might be a benefit to you. If you like this kind of content, please click like. It helps the analytics so more people get to see the stuff and live a happier life.

Also, you might want to share this with your friends, family, colleagues at work if you think it might be helpful to them. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time. Bye for now.