Help others realize they are ALWAYS free to choose how they respond.

Starting with this truth leads to an understanding of even greater truths and achieving deep happiness.

It’s neither nature or nurture that ultimately make people into who they are; it is their choices. Nature and nurture just happen to be some of the very powerful stimuli that exist. People ultimately choose how they will respond to their “nature”, their environment and the way they were raised. There is a space of time between every stimulus (impulse, drive, force, passion, incentives, accidents, offense, good news, bad news, etc.) and response. Some times that space of time is so short that it feels as if there was no time to make a choice, but there is always a length of time, even if it’s tenths of a second.

I have habits that are so powerful, that I don’t even think twice about the response - like the habit of eating. Maybe you can relate. When I get hungry, I have this habit of getting something to eat. It’s a powerful thought that people could overcome a strong survival impulse by choosing to starve themselves to death by ignoring the drive to survive. This power to make choices that are contrary to an impulse or drive is in all of us. I’m not advocating extremism by any means, but rather behavior that may “feel” extreme because of the extreme difficulty to behave contrary to how you feel. Perhaps the famous marshmallow experiement may shed some light:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/10/stanford_marshm.html

In one of the most amazing developmental studies ever conducted, Walter Michel of Stanford created a simple test of the ability of four year old children to control impulses and delay gratification. Children were taken one at a time into a room with a one-way mirror. They were shown a marshmallow. The experimenter told them he had to leave and that they could have the marshmallow right then, but if they waited for the experimenter to return from an errand, they could have two marshmallows. One marshmallow was left on a table in front of them. Some children grabbed the available marshmallow within seconds of the experimenter leaving. Others waited up to twenty minutes for the experimenter to return. In a follow-up study (Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990), children were tested at 18 years of age and comparisons were made between the third of the children who grabbed the marshmallow (the “impulsive”) and the third who delayed gratification in order to receive the enhanced reward (”impulse controlled”).

The third of the children who were most impulsive at four years of age scored an average of 524 verbal and 528 math. The impulse controlled students who scored 610 verbal and 652 math! This astounding 210 point total score difference on the SAT was predicted on the basis of a single observation at four years of age! The 210 point difference is as large as the average differences between that of economically advantaged versus disadvantaged children and is larger than the difference between children from families with graduate degrees versus children whose parents did not finish high school! At four years of age gobbling a marshmallow now v. waiting for two later is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores than is IQ.

This example invites a lot of questions. i.e. Whether or not the impulsive children had a choice to not be impulsive or were they victims of “who they are”?, Were they victims of bad parenting? Was their drive stronger?, etc. Whatever the questions - there is one answer that is certain - in spite of each child’s dna and 4 to 5 year background, they had the power to choose to wait the full 20 minutes. So it is with all of us, in anything we want to achieve. The starting point for maximizing social impact is realizing we always have the power to choose our response.