The Space You Need

[gentle music] Our word for today is space.

Space.

So every week we choose a word, and then we take a deep dive from a psychological, um, sort of the, the intersection between contemporary psychology and contemporary, um, contemplative practice, and we always throw around words- Yeah ... sort of over the weekend.

Yeah.

And, uh, space was the one we landed on.

Um, so most of my, um, musings around these words happen around six AM on a run on Tuesday mornings.

So here's my 6 AM run, uh, thoughts about space.

Uh, many of you have heard this line, "There's a space between stimulus and response, and in that space lies our freedom." It's in pretty much every podcast you've ever heard, every leadership retreat, they give you this line, and it's often attributed to Victor Frankl, wrongly so.

Victor Frankl never said it.

It's not in any book that he wrote.

It's actually, kind of traces back to Stephen Covey wrote it at some point in time.

So to shift, um, this line into it's not just a space between stimulus and response, it's the space around and within and under and over that we're interested in here around stimulus and response.

So on this board, these little...

You could, you could-- If you look at them, they kind of look like cells, you know, within a, within an organism.

But really, what they are is there's, there's people.

This little blue dotted line is you.

And, um, and the space within you is made up of all sorts of things.

Um, it's made up of content, so the content of what you're thinking right now.

You're having all sorts of thoughts.

It's made up of your attention.

It's made up of your motivation.

It's made up of your sense of me, self, and it's made up of your behavior.

And for a long time, psychology was really interested in those things, like which came first, your thought or your feeling? And people would have debates.

Like, did the feeling come-- Does, do feelings cause thoughts, or do thoughts cause feelings? It's like chicken or egg.

Both.