"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness."
— Victor E. Frankl, as quoted by Stephen Covey
When we are conversing with someone, it is possible to describe what is happening to us in three steps: I see and hear what the other person is saying or doing, I will think and feel something based on that, and then I say and/or do something in response.
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This model can be described as a stimulus-response model. Whilst there is much more complexity in the way our brain and our body processes information1 , this simple model can help us consider what happens in a conversation. The state model we considered in the previous section forms the middle step of this stimulus-response model.
Next, we will use this model to understand what happens in each step so we can improve our conversational skills.
Typically, we use sight and sound to have a conversation. We can think of this as data into our system. Someone observing the situation might notice the same sights and sounds, if they are noticing and paying attention to the same things that we are. Misunderstandings and conflict can arise when each person is noticing or paying attention to different things, or one person has information the other person doesn’t have. Of course, we are not restricted to sight and sound — any of our senses (including taste, smell and touch) can provide us with evidence about the outside world. Sight and sound are the usual senses we use in a conversation with someone else.
One way to understand what you are paying attention to is to reflect on this question:
- What am I seeing or hearing here?
We can process what is going on around us rapidly and respond instinctively before we even realise what has happened. This is a skill we have evolved to support our survival as individuals and as a species. We aren’t fully aware of how our thoughts and feelings drive our responses – much of this processing occurs outside of consciousness. Sometimes the instinctive or habitual reaction is not the most helpful response – for us or for the other person.
What we think and feel is constantly updated in the mental models we hold to survive and interact with the world. We automatically use past experience to work out what the next action should be. However, we have also evolved the ability to check our actions and override those automatic reactions. It is possible to retrain ourselves to learn new skills and ways of responding2 .
% Maybe add footnotes to indiviual bullet points Our thoughts and feelings are influenced by34:
- What we notice and pay attention to – what ‘data’ we select from our senses about the external world and internally, from our bodies;
- Our way of making meaning of things including how we perceive the situation, the language we use, and how we rephrase what others say into our own words;
- The assumptions we make about ourselves, others, or the situation based on the meaning we have given to what we are noticing; and
- Our reasoning, including how we perceive cause and effect, the stories we construct, how make judgements and how we decide on action.
Our brain processes the data that our five senses pick up. It is also constantly receiving data from our bodies that tells us our physiological state. For example, feeling hungry or tired, or in pain can affect how we think and feel about things. We are only conscious of our feelings when we put our attention on them. We perceive things in a way that makes sense to us, given our past experiences, what we think is important. These assumptions and beliefs can be difficult to let go of.
The physiological data from your body takes time to reach your brain. This why our emotions can persist and still be strongly felt, even though the situation may have changed. It can take time for emotions to ‘settle’.
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When we are in conversation, you might find you experience a change in your state during and/or after the after the conversation. A new thought or feeling can emerge and you find you switch from green to red, say. Sometimes the impact is to change the intensity of your state – you might feel more or less happy, for example.
We can understand more about what is happening in this internal step by asking ourselves:
- What am I feeling right now? What impact is this having on me?
- What am I assuming here? What do I think is true?
- What is the meaning I am making here?
- What reasoning follows from this?
We will cover some more ways of understanding what’s happening in the next section, when we look at context. We advise you not to ask your conversational partner questions like these, as it may come across as critical or aggressive, depending on the context. Remember, the skill here is understanding what’s going on for you.
The last step in this sequence is behavioural. After rapid internal processing, we decide to say and/or do (or not say/do) something. This is our external reaction or response and can be observed by someone else.