Pausing Long Enough to Choose

You wrote it in about twenty seconds. You read it back once, decided it was fair, and sent it. Then you thought about it on and off for a week, and you are still not entirely sure whether the other person is holding it against you or has forgotten it completely, which is its own particular kind of uncomfortable.

The strange part is that you knew better the whole time. There was no moment where you believed sending it was wise. There was simply no moment where you stopped.

Why the advice you have been given does not work

Everyone has told you to count to ten, and it is perfectly good advice for a moment you can see coming. The moments that cost you are the ones that have already made their minds up about you by the time you arrive.

Here is what is actually happening. Your body responds first, your brain attaches meaning at extraordinary speed, and your behaviour follows the meaning, all of it moving faster than the part of you that weighs consequences. By the time your judgement joins the conversation, your hands have already done something. This is why willpower feels so unreliable here. You have been asking a slow system to overrule a fast one, and the fast one has a head start every time.

The competency is Behavioural Control, which is the ability to respond to what you are feeling rather than react to it, and the journey runs from automatic to strategic.

Strategic is a useful word, because it points at something other than restraint. A strategic response is one that serves the outcome you actually want. Sometimes that means saying nothing today. Sometimes it means saying the hard thing more plainly than you would have dared while you were angry, because you can now say it in a way the other person can receive. Restraint and strategy overlap often enough that people confuse them, and they are not the same thing at all. Restraint asks what you can hold in. Strategy asks what you are trying to achieve.

The other thing worth knowing is that the automatic path is not a character flaw, it is efficiency. Your brain automates whatever you repeat, which is wonderful for driving and terrible for difficult conversations, because the reaction you have practised a thousand times is the one that runs when you are not paying attention.

One deliberate thing

You are not going to win this by trying harder in the moment, so you are going to change the shape of the moment instead.

When the urge to respond immediately arrives, do one deliberate thing before you act on it. Stand up. Walk to get water. Move the message to drafts. Say out loud that you will come back to this. The specific action barely matters, because its only job is to put a small piece of deliberate behaviour between the impulse and the outcome.

That is enough to let your slower judgement catch up, and your slower judgement is remarkably good once it is actually in the room.

Now

This week, the next time you feel that urge to respond straight away, do your one deliberate thing first, and then notice something.

Is the urge still as strong as it was?

Most of the time you will find it has shrunk considerably, which tells you something useful about its nature. It was never a decision that needed making immediately, it was a feeling that needed somewhere to go.

Occasionally you will find the urge is exactly as strong, and that is worth knowing too, because it usually means something real needs saying. The difference is that now you get to say it on purpose.