A fashionable actress refuses a young man who begs for her favors, on the grounds that he is Jewish, and laughs at his offer of one hundred thousand francs. She tells him that to show him how little she cares for his money he can make love to her for as long as it takes the hundred thousand francs to burn.
He comes back the next day with the money, lays ten bills out in a line with the ends just overlapping, lights the first one and leaps into bed with her. As the last bill burns away, she pushes him off her.
“Well, I have had you,” he says triumphantly.
“Yes,” she smiles, “and your hundred thousand francs are burnt to ashes.”
“What does it matter?” he says, lighting a cigarette. “They were counterfeit.”
The Reactive Response
The reactive response is closely related to the fight or flight response, which is an integral part of our nervous system that protects us.
In a similar manner, the reactive response serves as a protective mechanism. It’s triggered when our ego’s boundaries are crossed, when something that we didn’t want entered our environment, or something we thought was removed from our domain came back into play. Either way, the boundary has been breached, and this causes an emotional reaction designed to defend the ego. As the name implies, we become reactive, (as opposed to reflective) and engage in automatic and habitual behaviors in an attempt to control, manipulate, and coerce others into giving us what we want.
The activation of this response is an insidious process that usually happens beneath the level of our conscious awareness. A casual comment at work, a debate between friends, a mild disagreement, or a passive aggressive comment to a Facebook post can all spark the reactive response. “What did you say to me?” “Did you see the look she gave me?” “How dare you … I’ve never felt so disrespected in my life!” This is the internal dialogue of the reactive response.
In a nutshell, it’s looking for a fight at the slightest ego provocation. It’s a lit match to a powder keg, ready to go. Countless street fights have their roots in the reactive response. The ego constantly wants to be right, to be the best; and any insult, any threat to its authority will be dealt with severely, and physically if necessary.
When change happens, you have a choice for how you are going to respond. You can either lose your composure and react impetuously or use the event or situation as a learning opportunity to shift your mindset and respond appropriately. Begin to notice your responses when changes occur and do your best to choose a breakthrough over a breakdown.
Learning from the story Counterfeit: Learn to Respond
Experience Learning
You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it.
There are many times when we take the wrong decisions. We make wrong Impressions on people by reacting to a particular situation. How to react at some situations might be not in our hand but controlling reactions are. Our reactions to the situations can be both harmful and helpful for us, but it only depends on the type of reaction given by us. Every day you might meet many people, and you are not going to love the thoughts of every single person. So, you need to make sure that you have control over your reaction and how to react so that you don’t create problems in your own life.
Most of Your Life Depends Upon How to React to the Situations:
Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it.
Some people might think that you can control everything with your thoughts, but that is not true at various points of your life. You might be wishing for many things in your life, but you don’t know that you are the one who decide what you will get in your life. All these times you must take care of how to react at which situations.
Instead of Reacting to Everything You Need to Learn the Art of Responding:
Do not learn how to react. Learn how to respond.
It is not a difficult task to learn how to react, but it is definitely difficult to remove the reaction and to add a response to a particular situation. Yes, it would definitely take a lot of time for you to learn the art of responding and how to react because it would become your habit gradually and not instantly.
Only You are Going to Face the Consequences of Your Reactions:
How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.
It is not necessary that you treat every bad person same as they treat you because they are definitely going to face the consequences of their reactions. You need to make sure that you don’t get affected by other people and that’s why you need to have control over your responses and how you react.
You Can Become More Strong when You Learn to Observe:
When you observe rather than react, you reclaim your power.
Whenever you text to a particular situation, you are not going to learn anything, but if you observe that problem or situation, then you can be able to gain more strength and power cope up with all the situations in your life based on how you react. Soon becomes necessary that you keep reclaiming your power by observing the actions.
Now that you have known that reactions can be responsible for changing many situations of your life and it also decides your mood. So it is not necessary for you to react to every action, but instead, you can observe and respond to it. With passing time, you can learn the art of how to react during unfavorable times.
