An Exercise to Prevent You From Exploding During Stressful Situations
It’s about navigating those critical first seconds.
I’ve written frequently about the importance of responding and not reacting during tense, confrontational situations.
It’s the difference between possibly resolving a dispute in a constructive manner that benefits you or dooming yourself to outcomes that cause you great harm. That harm can be as minor as an hour of giving the cold shoulder to your “opponent,” or as serious as ending up in divorce court.
Bottom line: It’s worth putting in the work to avoid those explosions.
But what is that work? What can we do to save ourselves from ourselves?
I try to approach these challenges from a practical, logical standpoint. Here’s what I’ve come up with on the explosion thing.
Those critical first seconds
First, so many of the fractious scenes we encounter come down to how we respond in those first few seconds after our inner lava has been stirred. Most of us don’t make it past those first moments. We explode.
I’ve gotten comments from many readers attesting to how difficult it is to make it past the ‘reaction’ phase to the ‘respond’ phase.
Fine. The key question then becomes: What can we do to strengthen our ability to get through those first few seconds without exploding?
