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

The lowest level of choice is not making a conscious choice at all, which happens when you don’t notice that you even could make a choice. In this case there is effectively no space between stimulus and response, so you just act out your habitual behavior unconsciously. If you ever find yourself skimming the news or looking in the fridge without having consciously chosen to do it, there is no space between stimulus and response.

It’s important to emphasize that it’s not just that you don’t make a choice, but that you literally can’t make a choice, which I talk about in detail in You can only respond to what you notice. This is why learning to create that space and to pause within it, even if just for a moment, is crucial to open the door to greater agency.

Our everyday language reflects this observation, for example when you say that you "catch yourself" doing, or about to do, something. This is the sudden entering-into-awareness of your own automatic behaviors while they’re happening, which gives you the chance to reflect on whether you want to continue them.

In many ways, this can be seen as the holy grail of habit formation, because you don’t want to have to think about every tiny decision as you go about your day. The problem is that this is only desirable when all your habits are good, or, put another way, that they all accord with what you would do if you had the space to reflect and choose. It also assumes that you live in a fixed, unchanging world, where your set of habits is always good, regardless of circumstance.

The space between stimulus and response gives you the power to respond non-habitually if you want or need to. Put another way, my habitual response to my manager’s comments that day could have been fully appropriate. Indeed, this becomes more likely with learning and experience, but I still want the capacity to interrupt even good habits in circumstances where they might not be appropriate.

The absence of space between stimulus and response is a kind of unconsciousness, the way out of which is to create a meta-habit to pause, even if very briefly, in response to stimuli, thereby creating a space. The thing is, though, that there are actually two ways to create and expand that space, which I'm going to call fixated and unfixated, and one is far more constructive than the other. Let’s look at the non-constructive one first, because that’s the one that will probably be more familiar.

Fixated choice is constrained and effortful