Making Space for Choice

This quarter, I set an intention to focus on increasing my energy. I was feeling depleted after a momentous spring quarter. I thought the answer would be more meditation, better planning, and lots of exercise. 

We know that energy is a balancing act. There are the things that nourish and improve our energy and there are just as many that deplete us.

However, I’d become numb to the constant interruptions that were taking me out of the present moment, depleting my energy, and making it harder to make positive, aligned choices. 

Awareness Creates Choice

There’s actually good research connecting awareness and choice. Without awareness, our thoughts, emotions, and impulses tend to move straight into action. We feel the urge, and we act on it. Shout when we’re angry. Reach for the phone when we’re bored. Say yes when we mean no.

Awareness creates a gap between what we notice and how we respond. That gap is where choice lives. Stephen Covey referred to this as the proactive model. When we have a gap between the stimulus and the response we can make an intentional choice based in self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and independent will. 

We need that to counter the conditioned ways of being, i.e. picking up or phone when it buzzes even if we are in the midst of something special or important, habit loops that are easily created, constantly get reinforced, and difficult to break. 

A habit loop looks like, Trigger -> Behavior -> Result. So if your phone buzzes (trigger), check it to see why (behavior) -> dopamine hit from satisfying your curiosity (result). 

You can avoid this by turning off notifications, but you haven’t really broken the habit loop, you’ve avoided the trigger but the loop still exists.

Adding awareness to this cycle looks like,  my phone interrupts and triggers me, I choose to stay engaged with what I’m doing, I experience the greater reward of staying aligned with my goals and values. 

Creating Space to Respond

I needed some space from my phone to realize how hardwired those habit loops had become. And I know from the commitments that our clients make around their phones that I’m not the only one dealing with this. But the concept is much larger than just our phones. When our attention is constantly pulled elsewhere, we are overly stressed, hurried, or anxious. There’s no room for awareness, and the gap for making intentional choices doesn’t open. Now all I can think is how do we create more space, even a little, to give ourselves room to notice before we react.

So this week, a question instead of an answer: where in your life could you create a little more space? Open the gap. Not to fill it with something new. Just to see what choices you make when you give yourself the room to choose rather than react?