How to Make Unfixated Choices

Several years ago I somewhat lost my composure during a meeting at work. My manager had called me out for something in front of the team, but without talking to me about it first. I had no idea it was coming and felt attacked, triggered even, and had to navigate wanting to address it in a direct, but professional way.

This is not an easy thing to do, because strong emotions tend to carry us away into habitual responses that might not be suitable for the context. If I had let my emotions take over completely in that meeting, I probably would have got myself in trouble. At the same time, those emotions were telling me that I was being treated badly, and I don’t want to suppress such valuable information.

In the end I responded to my manager in a just-about-contained way, but not as skillfully as I would have liked. In this essay I want to talk about how you can handle these things better than I did. The trick is to be totally open to what’s happening, while being perfectly free to choose any response. 

The way to do this is made clear in that well-known quote that’s usually, but incorrectly, attributed to Viktor Frankl:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Not Viktor Frankl

Regardless of their provenance, these words contain a lot of wisdom. That space is what gives us the capacity to choose, but what Not Viktor Frankl doesn’t elaborate on is how to create that space and that the different qualities of space affect the kinds of choices we can make.

That’s what I’m going to explore here by stepping through the three kinds of choices I had when I got angry at my manager’s comments, which are the same kinds of choices you have in response to anything that happens inside or outside you: no choice, fixated choice and unfixated choice.

If you don’t notice you have a choice, you have no choice