How we react/respond to a situation not to our liking really tells us which part of the personality we need to work on…

How we react/respond to a situation not to our liking really tells us which part of the personality we need to work on…

When things go exactly our way, just the way we thought they should we are ecstatic. In fact we are completely satisfied, and our mind lets us know that nothing further needs to be done…mission accomplished. In this situation, we are happy with ourselves, and others are happy with us. This may not point to anything in our personality that we could possibly enhance…

When things go somewhat our way, with just a little compromise here and there, we are happy. We give a sigh of relief and tell ourselves, “Phew! It’s done!!” Do you ever wonder, how many in fact try to progress beyond that? In this situation, we are still happy and we may not have come in the way of others happiness, and so this may still not point to anything in our personality that we could possibly enhance…

Now let’s look at the situation where things are not going our way, the way we had planned, the way we had thought, in fact it is not at all to our liking…What happens? We may be distressed, we may become overly anxious, we may be frustrated, we may lose patience, our expressions may have taken a complete down-turn…in fact we may become angry and even start yelling, complaining and finding fault with everything and everyone else… This is the time to really take stock of which part of ourselves we need to work on, and question ourselves:

- Why did I react the way I did?

- Was it a life/death experience that jolted us so much that we became so distressed and worse lost our cool completely?

- Is my reaction beacuse of the "event" / stimulus or is my reaction due to my inability to handle the "event"?

- What can I do to calm myself and analyze the situation so that I prevent such reaction in the future? Better still what can I do so that I make “calm” such a big part of my personality that it becomes second nature to me to be cool at all times, no matter what the situation/stimulus is?

The answer is that we need to cultivate being proactive and not reactive, to respond to a situation and not react to a situation. We need to conciously work on creating a gap of awareness between the stimulus (the event) and our response to the stimulus. When there is no gap, that is there is no awareness, it is pure reaction on our part. As we gradually prolong the gap, conciousness, awareness sets in and our reaction gets a chance to transform into response!

How do we cultivate "responsiveness"?

This is where counting backwards and taking deep breaths in the face of a stimuli comes in very handy, for that will allow the "gap" between the stimuli and the response to be created, and enough time for the mind/body to have a thoughtful, conscious response. This is where meditation/awareness/self introspection play a critical role in the deliopment of our personality.

We all are humans and we all need to make this 'working on our personalities," a work in progress, with awareness. :)