Alexandra Niel walks through five steps to stop reacting and start responding to life's triggers. The method includes understanding what sets you off, using breathing techniques like box breathing, controlling what you can and letting go of the rest, and starting small with everyday situations like your commute.
Do you react to what's happening in your life or do you respond? Today I want to take you through 5 simple things that you can do to actually take control and stop reacting and start responding. Because what happens is when you react to what is happening in your life, you actually give up control over not just yourself but over the events. When reacting is your go-to setting, unfortunately, what happens? The emotion gets in there, tempers flare, things can exaggerate, things can get blown out of proportion. Whereas when we respond, we actually take a moment to think about what the most appropriate response to the situation should be. And just taking that split moment to just think, take a breath, really makes a huge difference. When we react, we inject a lot of uncertainty, we inject, you know, a lot of emotion. When we respond, we calm things down, we take things down a notch, we're able to pull our thoughts together so that we can actually come back with an intelligent response versus, you know, a fly-off-the-handle kind of response. So here are the 5 steps that you can take to start to learn and condition yourself to respond to situations instead of reacting to a situation. And the first one is you have to understand your triggers. We respond in certain ways because it's obviously ruffling our feathers in some way. So try to figure out where is that coming from. Right? If, if you can dive deep into your own self, do some of that homework and do some of that digging deep, whether you do it through journaling, whether you do it through meditation, whether you do it through having a discussion with someone, doesn't matter. But it's important to understand where that, you know, that reaction is coming from so that you can then resolve what the root cause is, and then you can move on, and then you can start responding over reacting. So that's the first one. The second one is be a participant in your own life. Don't abdicate the control that you have over your own life. Get out of that victim mentality. Sometimes when we react, we're doing so because we feel somebody's wronged us. Well, people generally don't do things specifically against us, but really more for themselves. So when you can take control over your triggers and you can take control over your emotions and not let them get out of control, then you become the active participant in your life and you, you fall back on that victim mentality a bit less, which allows you to respond over reacting. The third thing is take a breath, right? I have a friend who has this beautiful process when he starts to feel himself, you know, kind of getting hot under the collars and things are starting to bother him and he can feel his emotions escalating. He'll do what he calls quarter breathing. And what that entails is taking a breath in for 4 beats, holding it for 4, exhaling for 4, and then holding for 4. And through that, you know, he'll do it once, 2, 3, 4 times depending on how much the mustard— in French we say how much the mustard has gone up his nose. And then, you know, he can then— sometimes he just has to take a step back so he can do that quarter breathing. But that allows him to show up in a better way and respond versus reacting to, to what's happened. Learn that you need to control what you can control and just release the rest. Let it go. There are things that happen that we can't— there's nothing we can do. It is what it is. Wondering, why is this happening to me? is counterproductive. You might also want to twist the question and say, you know, ask, "Why is this happening for me? What can I learn from this situation?" So that you take that power back, so that you start to really think more critically and more intentionally about how you should be responding to the situation. So don't abdicate your control over your life by reacting and exploding. Really take that back and figure out, you know, what are the bits that you can control and then letting go of the things that you can't. And then the last thing is start by taking small steps. I remember when I was driving a lot more, I used to have an hour and 15 minutes or an hour and 20 minute commute to work each way. And I used to get so aggravated because people would cut me off all the time. Right? Who's had that happen to them? I know I have, and I used to get so under the collar or hot under the collar, and I used to get so aggravated. But I realized that the only person that was actually engaged in this was me, right? The guy in the other car or the woman in the other car couldn't care less, couldn't hear me, couldn't do anything, wasn't probably even aware that they had done something that had so deeply offended me. So, That's when I started to be like, you know what, it doesn't matter. It's like, you know, uh, who did I hear recently say this? Don't, uh, Tony Robbins said don't sweat the small stuff, and everything is small stuff. So those things, you know, try to start there in terms of being able to control how you react and how you respond to a situation, because at the end of the day when we react, it can make us feel pretty miserable, right? It can get in the way of us following our dreams and doing the things that we have a passion for, um, because we get flustered in the process. So just remember, right, take a step back, take a breath, control the things that you can control, let go of the rest. And, you know, start chasing that dream that you have. Start living the life that you want to have because life is just simply too short. So I hope this has served you, and, um, you know, enjoy the journey, enjoy the learning, and I will talk to you soon. Take care, bye!
