The gap between stimulus and response - Mindfulness Monday Episode One.

Well for those of you who don't know me, my name's Dave. I am a coach, a mentor, and a speaker.

I have a background in healthcare being a nurse many, many years ago and now being a podiatrist.

I've been working in healthcare for a quarter of a century, which is probably why I look so old.

That has influenced my approach to people and my approach to learning and development.

During the last four years since I sold my practice, but mostly during the last 12 months, I've had a bigger focus on mindfulness.

I wanted to do for this first episode was tell you the kind of the story as to how I ended up going into that place.

How did I end up with that kind of mindfulness thing?

I want to tell you the story about how I found the gap between stimulus and response.

Now throughout my life, for as long as I can remember, anger has been quite a powerful emotion.

I remember how it started around my teenage years. There was a big flip from me being a child and an adult. I was six foot two and as a teenager, I was quite a tall lad anyway.

There were things which happened during my teenage years that led me to be a person who used anger in order to communicate with the world, and that anger followed me right the way through until about 2015.

Something would happen, I would react to it, I would get angry, something would get broken and invariably, the person who ended up getting physically hurt was me and the people who got emotionally hurt was everyone around me and I would go through this pattern of anger, withdrawal, fear and then it would go on and on and on again.

This went on for many years. I had some CBT 2006 & 2007 which I found really useful, and it helped me to pick up on certain triggers and got me to look at certain patterns as to why I would respond in a particular way.

That helped me for a long while, but the anger still continued.

I got to 2015 where my wife turned around to me and said, "I've had enough of this, just get out" and threw me out of the house, which was October of 2015.

I'd already been diving into personal development and I'd been reading, I'd been working out more about me and where the troubles were and where the issues were and that incident of being thrown out, that challenge of being thrown out, for me, made a huge difference.

I'm really grateful I have my friend Daniel Hill who is just an amazing coach who I reached out to and he helped me out massively at that time.

There was a real challenge for me to actually improve who I was.

During all that work on me, and the conversations I was having, I found that most of the time I was reacting, not responding and I was insistent that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it at all.

Imagine what that feels like, that you feel you have no control over your emotions, you feel to have no control of everything going on around you. That stimulus to reaction thing became quite powerful.

What I realised when I did the work is that actually there is this gap between stimulus and response and even someone of six foot two could squeeze into that space and that I had a choice. I didn't have to go down this route of something happened and I growled at it and broke something.

I could actually go, hold on a minute, what's going on here?

I tried it and I used it and I played with it and it became a really, really useful tool for me. And like all things, you don't have the language to describe it. But what I did have was I had evidence from my kids that they would say things to me like, "We prefer this version of daddy". "We like this version of you". "He's better than the old version of daddy" and that was nice.

So for me, it was a real win all around. But back then, you can only describe, you can only describe the things which you're experiencing with the language which you have.

And at the time, I didn't realise that this thing had had a name. And doing the kind of the mindfulness stuff and I did an eight week mindfulness for stress course last year when I started to look more at how I could use it in my practice as a coach and I found that it had a name and this name was response flexibility.

Now for me it's a beautiful phrase showing flexibility in your response and everyone has that opportunity to do it. And I love that.

I got very excited when I found that out and went, oh, this thing which I've been playing with, this thing which I've been experiencing actually does have a name and it is a thing.

There's a psychologist called Daniel Goleman who talks about cognitive control. And for me when I think about cognitive control, what I'm thinking about is this same kind of situation and it's a form of emotional intelligence. It's being aware of your emotions, what they mean, how you respond to them, how you react to them and looking at ways in which you can intelligently play with that.

I love that - response flexibility, cognitive control, whatever you want to call it, for me has been transformational and it's made a huge difference to me and how I interface with the world and interact with people around me.

Do I get this right all the time? No, anger still sits there, anger still pops up. How I deal with that is very, very different.

I now have the ability to kind of go, okay, this is what I see going on. Where do I want this to go? I can steer my direction much, much easier.

You might be reading this now and thinking, well, okay, that's brilliant, good for you, excellent, you have that going on and you've got better at it, wonderful, what can I do with this information?

So what can you do with that information?

Well my invitation to you is to think about where is the gap in your world which you can squeeze into?

Where is the gap and what can you do with that gap?

Because you will have something going on in your life, you will have something going on in your world - it might be personal, it might be a relationship, it might be a work thing - and what happens is that you're in a position where you've maybe reacted to it.

Where in your world is the gap? Where in your world is the space that you can squeeze into and change absolutely everything?

And that's my invitation to you is to look at that gap and I'd love to know where that gap is for you and I'd love to know what difference being able to squeeze into that gap and change the outcome would mean for you, and what would be possible for you?

For me, it's been transformational - it's changed everything.

I'm not the same person that I was seven years ago when I started with this stuff and I imagine I won't be the same person in seven years time.