Photo Credit: nosha

As I’ve recently mentioned in a couple posts, I’ve been reading the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. I was struck the other day (like I am most days when I read Covey’s stuff) by one of the ideas he presented. He was talking about what he calls our “greatest power”. It is, in fact, pretty remarkable, and 100% applicable to our everyday lives as engineers. That’s what I want to tell you about today.

Stimulus and response

As engineers, we all get the whole idea that why you apply a stimulus to a system, the system responds. Input leads to output. We see this all the time in our work and in our lives. So, what’s so special about that? Well, what’s special is how people behave with respect to stimulus, and how it differs from technical systems.

Stimulus and response – the human fleshy version

Technical systems react to stimulus the same way every time. The same input, or sequence of inputs, should lead to the same outputs. Now people aren’t quite as consistent, are they? That’s because people can actually choose how they react to stimulus. This is a fundamental difference, and a key component to this great power that Covey describes.

Interface Between Stimulus and response

So, people can actually decide how they react to stimulus. Our great power, then, is to exercise that ability in the tiny gap between stimulus and response. If you can harness the ability to pause, ever so slightly, after some kind of stimulus to decide how you could or should react, your next actions will reflect that.

This is a big deal! At every junction in life when something happens to you, big or small, you can chose what you’d like to do. Think of the alternative – you just react… Think of the last time this happened to you. How did that go for you? Probably not so well. Same for me. I fall into this regularly, and the results are never great.

How do I actually do this?

This exercise of pausing to reflect is much easier said than done. It takes a heck of a lot of practice. I’m still not there yet, to be sure. The first step is just to be aware of the fact that you have this opportunity between stimulus and response to think. Once you’re aware of the fact that you have this opportunity, it becomes easier and easier to take advantage of it. I find it also helps to take a minute at the end of the day just to go back through the day in my mind to reflect on any opportunities I may have missed.

Your Challenge

Your challenge today is to put this strategy into practice today – even if just once. When you do, this of how things turned out versus how they could have turned out if you had just reacted without taking advantage of this great power. Give it a shot, and let us know how things went in the comment section below.