Root & Rise reflection
How to Pause Before You React Emotionally, and the Ten Seconds That Set You Free
Viktor Frankl lost everything the Nazis could take from him, except one thing. That same freedom is available to you in the gap between what happens and what you do next.
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist before the Nazis sent him to the concentration camps. He lost his wife, his parents, his work, everything he owned. He watched people around him lose their sense of who they were faster than they lost their bodies. But even there, he noticed something. No matter what the guards did, no matter how much he lost, there was one thing they could never take from him. The freedom to choose his own response to what was happening to him.
He wrote about it later in Man's Search for Meaning. His point was this: every circumstance, every possession, every relationship can be stripped away. But there is one thing that stays under your own control no matter what is done to you, how you decide to meet it.
The gap you never noticed
Most of us will never know loss like that, and I am not trying to compare an inconvenient Tuesday to what he survived. But he insisted on something that holds true far outside the camps too. The same gap he found there, the space between what happens and what you do next, exists in your life as well, just at a much smaller scale.
A comment lands wrong. A diagnosis comes in. A plan falls apart. Your phone buzzes with bad news. You did not choose any of it. But there is still a gap between what happened and what you do next. That gap is a pause. It might only last a few seconds. You may never have noticed it was there. But it is real, and it is yours.
The trouble is most of us never feel that pause. Something happens and we already react before we notice there was a choice at all. That is your reactive brain doing its job. It reacts first and thinks later. It decides before your responsive brain even gets a say. It does not want you to pause. Pausing is exactly what it is trying to avoid. I wrote about this in The Two Brains Inside You. Your reactive brain is fast because it was built to keep you alive, not to help you choose well.
Your inner villain lives in that same gap. It is the part of you that slams the door shut before you even get the chance to pause, because slamming it shut once felt like the only way to stay safe. If you have read Meet Your Inner Villain, you already know it is not trying to hurt you. It just moves faster than you do, unless you practice noticing it.
What Frankl actually gave us
This is what Frankl actually gave us. Not a way to control what happens. A way to find the pause that was always there, and stand inside it long enough to choose.
The Root & Rise Method works the same way. Root is understanding why your reactive brain learned to skip the pause so fast in the first place. Rise is practicing the pause anyway, on purpose, until it becomes familiar instead of unbearable.
The ten second version
Here is the ten second version.
The next time something happens that you did not choose and do not like, before you speak, before you react, before you decide what it means, pause for ten seconds. Ask yourself one question. What can I still choose here.
You will not always find an easy answer. Sometimes the honest answer is just your next breath, or the tone of your own voice, or whether you say the sentence now or in an hour. That is enough. The point was never to control the event. The point was to notice you still had a say in what happened next.
The freedom that never left
Frankl put it simply. He said the people who survived were rarely the strongest or the smartest. They were the ones who had found a reason, a why, that made the how bearable. Remember this. No matter what life hands you, you still get to choose your response. That will not always change what happened to you. But it changes what you do next, how you treat the people around you, and how you carry it afterward. That choice is where your freedom lives, even when everything else is out of your hands. The part of you that gets to choose never left. It is still there, waiting in the pause.
If you want help finding that pause for yourself, and learning to stand inside it instead of reacting the same way every time, that is exactly the work we do together. Book a free call. No pitch, no pressure, just an honest conversation about what is really running the show.
Marjan