Respond-Ability: Are You Arguing With the Universe Part 1
Respond-ability: Have you ever felt like you & your life were being dictated by outside forces?
Or maybe you find yourself feeling angry, stressed & overwhelmed more often than not?
Hi, I’m Jana Hennemann, and today we’ll be discussing responsibility, or RESPOND-ability as I call it.
It seems the topic of the month is tantrums, arguing for your limitations, arguing with the Universe or just arguing in general.
Hey, no judgment! I, too, am guilty as charged. But as we’ve discussed in the past, the best way to figure out a path – be it in life, relationships, business or health, we have to course-correct. Tap that rudder. Pivot. Adjust. Modify. You get the idea.
Why I bring this up is because a lot of our results have to do with being respond-ABLE to situations. Are you able to respond to a situation or do you simply react to a situation.
I have a group of friends who talked about this not too long ago, and one of the goofy ones said his process is
- React and throw a tantrum
- Be sad for a little bit
- Angrily respond to the situation
- Go back to life as per usual.
He’s a goofy goober. That’s his process – if we could all minimize the emotional reaction bit we would overcome perceived challenges much quicker and quite possibly enjoy the process.
Responding to a situation is rising to meet the challenge or experience. Reacting to a situation is more emotional. Maybe you’ve seen this before in the form of road rage. Or perhaps you’ve had a colleague or family member snap at you unexpectedly. Maybe you did the snapping. Again! No judgment.
The point is this: being respond-able to a situation and reacting to a situation are two different approaches to an experience.
What is Respond-Ability?
We often see it in nature. When a baby cub is born, you won’t see a mama bear go down to the river, get all the fish she can get so her cub never has to fish again.
No. She teaches the cub how to fish so he can rise to meet that challenge. The challenge of hunger and needing to fend for oneself.
I’ve done it with my kiddo. I remember she went through this phase where she would lose her house keys at a near-constant rate.
After about the third time, I told her that if she loses her key again, I’m not paying for it. She had to pay for it and she had to go into the key machine and figure out how to make it.
She was about 8 or 9 at the time. And guess what happened. The following week, she lost her key.
So we hopped in the car where I waited, and she had to nervously and timidly go into the store by herself, and figure out the key machine using her own money.
She did NOT like the punishment. And come to think of it, it wasn’t a punishment. It was me holding her accountable for the results she kept experiencing.
She came out of the store a few minutes later, proud of herself for having figured out how to do things without her mother helicoptering over her.
The point is this – she responded to the situation. Sure, there was a little bit of emotional reaction in the beginning, but after it was said and done, she had a new confidence about her.
In the next video, we will be discussing how to take pause in those moments of high emotions.
After all, when emotions go up, intelligence goes down. Funny how that works, huh?
Anywho, I’m Jana Hennemann. Thank you for tuning in. Remember to like, follow, subscribe, leave us a comment, tell us your thoughts and lastly, be sure to sign up for our weekly newsletter!
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