WORKWORK18: Responding vs Reacting // Tydo’s Late Summer Reading List
Inner Work: Family, our greatest teacher and responding vs reacting Outer Work: Tydo’s Late Summer Reading List
Inner Work
“If you think you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents.” - Ram Dass
I am fresh off of what Nick and I call “the annual family tour” where we road trip to our parents’ homes to spend a week with each set. My parents were the last stop, which means they got week 3 of us being on the road. I’m sure being ready to come home had to do with it, but also time with your own parents can be difficult as you become an adult. Particularly, I am at the stage that Lorie Gottlieb’s therapist in her book, You Should Really Talk to Someone, calls “the changing of the guard” where our relationships with our parents evolve in midlife as we start to shift from blaming our parents to taking full responsibility for our lives. I’ve also thought about the reverse, where parents might have a tough time realizing that it’s time to shift from being our parents to being our friends. These shifts, require us to stop trying to understand why our parents won’t act in ways we wish and, instead, focus on surrendering to the way they are.
Surrendering to the way that someone is themselves is a challenge in any of our close relationships, so why does it feel particularly hard with family? I did some thinking. Being with family is a stark reminder of your past and how you grew up, but it also shines a spotlight on the intentions you have for your life today. It’s tough not to see yourself in your parents, it's like looking at a distorted mirror—you see all of the elements in which you are similar and all of the aspects that you are actively trying to adjust based on what you want for your life and experiences you’ve had on your own. This experience can be so challenging sometimes that you might actually want to run away or avoid it altogether. I’ve definitely had my fair share of avoiding but something deep down has always pulled me back and felt important to work through that tension.
“People who have the most to teach us are often the ones who reflect back to us the limits to our own capacity to love, those who consciously or unconsciously challenge our fearful positions.” — Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
It’s so important not to run away from people, especially those that expose your fears, your frustrations, your vulnerabilities. You need them. You need them to practice two things in particular:
Changing your defaults from reacting to responding
Extreme acceptance and surrendering to the way humans are
Today’s WORKWORK will focus on the first practice. We’ll dive into surrendering in the next WORKWORK.
There is a big difference between reacting and responding. Eckhart Tolle defines the two:
Reaction - something that comes from mental emotional conditioning. Mind patterns that force you to react to specific stimuli. You don’t have any choice because you are not aware. When you react, the reaction takes you over and you become it.
Response - arrives out of awareness or presence. You do the right thing or you say the right thing at the moment and it is not conditioned by your past. It comes from a deeper dimension within yourself (wisdom).
Boy, does it take practice to get to a place where you are responding and not reacting around certain people? Something that gives me solace is knowing that I am on the right path in the fact that I am at least aware at each point that I am reacting as opposed to responding.
“Between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl
Practicing this with growth relationships in my life, for instance, my relationship with my mom is what allows me to keep creating more and more space between the stimulus—the thing evoking an emotional condition in me and my reaction. The space allows you to recognize what’s happening in your body and your feelings, allowing enough capacity to choose something more aligned with love. I’ve experienced moments where I can recognize that I was able to respond to something that would previously ignite a reaction in me. Those moments truly allow me to marvel at the growth.
For a lot of us, our family is one of the deepest growth relationships we have. They challenge us and provoke us at times, but if we choose to, we can take responsibility for ourselves and view them as the greatest teachers on our path to freedom.
Outer Work
Tydo’s Late Summer Reading List is one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on. As you may (or may not) know, I am a big fan of books. In fact, I am currently reading roughly about a book a week. Books are my choice of medium for learning and growing, especially in the realms of Inner and Outer Work. So when Rachel, our content and brand lead, presented the idea, I couldn’t have been more about it.
From a marketing strategy perspective, it’s brilliant. It collaborates with important founders in the DTC space, it’s an engaging format that can be turned into micro content optimized for video through a process that was far easier (voice notes) and speaks to something people are always asking about: what books do you recommend. The execution from the team was even better, the design and listening experience is top notch and its goals of top of funnel awareness while adding value.
I hope you have a listen on the blog above, or if you’d like to listen to a podcast playlist, you can check it out on Spotify too. I’ve definitely added a few new books to my reading list.