20 Dec 2021 · 3 min
Brendon Burchard argues that pausing before reacting to setbacks trains your nervous system for bigger challenges. Impulsive reactions default your mind to panic. Instead, breathe, examine your thoughts, and act deliberately, a practice great leaders have used for centuries.
Chapters
Delay your emotional response. Someone writes you a bad email, right? A customer, coworker, and you get pissed and all the fire is coming up and you just feel like you're going to spit acid at the world. You're so angry. What do you do? Well, learn to delay the time between stimulus and response. Right before you jump to anger, can you see the email and not get to anger? Delay that, Delay that emotional response a little bit more, right? It's so easy to just go with the emotions, but often the way to cope and be resilient more is to think about the thoughts that you are having and ask, are these thoughts that I'm having? Are these emotions that I'm having actually supporting me in coping with this, moving through it, or serving as a role model? Are these thoughts and emotions I'm having actually helping me cope with it, move through it well, or be a role model. And so I think that all the time, you know, when there's thousands of people who's part of this community that we deeply care about, and all of a sudden our live cast goes dead, we don't freak out. We just don't. We just say, okay, take a breath, let's go through this checklist, let's check this. Plug that thing in, do this thing, let's go. That's all you can do. But if you let yourself freak out, it end. If you, like, go to immediate freak out, then what ends up happening is you're also training your mind and your body to go to immediate freak out. The way that you deal with every little bit of surprise and every little bit of drama and every little bit of disappointment is only setting you up for how you're gonna deal with the next one. So if you're freaking out about all the little things, when that big thing happens, you're gonna be a disaster. So what I tell people all the time is go through the day and start training yourself to delay response response time. If you feel a negative emotion coming on or you want to immediately fight back, or you want to immediately say something negative, just breathe it out a little bit and kind of wait and see a little bit. Read any great spiritual text and you will see that every single great spiritual guru, every single great spiritual leader of any times in any faith, they had a calmness when the drama was around. They didn't jump to anger. Often they asked questions, often they delayed their response. Some would ask a big question and they'd say, ah, good question. They'd close their eyes and they'd meditate for 20 minutes and come back with something like, we're in such a culture of, like, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed. Answer, answer, answer, answer, respond, respond, respond. Retaliate, retaliate, retaliate. I'm kind of like, take a breather. Don't let anybody fool you into thinking you need to reply immediately to anything. Like, life is on your clock. It's on your timeline, and you need to start with that as a presupposition. So when a negative event happens as an example, and everyone's like, brendan, what do we do? Often I just take a breather, and I think about it for a minute, and then I'm decisive, and we move. Sam.