The Space Between Impulse and Choice

Self-awareness does not necessarily change our first impulse. It gives us the space to decide what we do with it.

Someone on your team comes to you frustrated with a problem.

What is your first impulse?

To jump in and help solve it?

Or to help them work out how they could solve it themselves?

For years, my first instinct was to jump in and help. Quickly.

Someone brought me a problem and my mind immediately went to: How can we fix this?

I thought that was what I was supposed to do. It felt helpful. And sometimes it was.

But with experience, I began noticing something else.

Sometimes my urge to step in wasn't only about what the other person needed. It was also about my own discomfort with leaving the problem unresolved.

Because if my attention had been entirely on what they needed, I might have asked a different question.

Not:

How can I fix this?

But:

What does this person really need from me right now?

Sometimes the answer is help. Sometimes it's a question. Sometimes it's encouragement. And sometimes it's simply resisting the urge to step in — so they have the space to find their own way forward.

More often than not, when I resisted the urge to step in, they found something I wouldn't have.

That's one of the things self-awareness changed in my leadership. It gave me a little more space between my first impulse and my choice of action.

Self-awareness doesn't necessarily change the first impulse.

It changes what we do with it.

That small space matters in leadership.

Because the more clearly we can see what is happening within ourselves, the less likely we are to mistake our own impulse for what the situation — or the person in front of us — actually needs.

That is one of the capacities at the heart of The Leadership of Seeing™.