Over responding, versus overreacting

By over responding, instead of over reacting, you evolve...

Of course, you can’t evolve unless you change. And you can’t change unless you learn to respond to your environment.
Here’s a vital; distinction: overresponding versus overreacting. It’s a question of not being pushed around by things. Not flying off the handle and getting upset. What happens when immediate responses are stifled is that people lose track of the full measure of their feelings, along with many things they might have learned from the tendencies revealed by the responses? In order to appear competent and in control, some end up cultivating internal numbness, a widening distance between their minds and their bodies.
Your environment is full of clues. Learn to over respond, and you’ll become more responsible to the process of, and opportunities for, creating a more attractive and fulfilling life, and business.

Here are the distinctions between over responding and overreacting.

1. Every time you’re surprised, make a significant personal change. When you are surprised, you usually react. Often overreact. Then act to the intensity and consequences of your overreaction. This is the behavior that keeps you blindly tied to the past. When it comes to overresponding, you need to trust your intuition, which involves investing some trust in yourself, and some willingness to make mistakes and grow. Making significant changes in your life – instead of just reacting – is how you demonstrate that you’ve gotten life’s message and are ready to stop taking the test (which so many of us do over and over again). It shows you’re operating in the present.
2. Look for the five choices you have in every circumstance. When faced with a difficult situation, most of us look at two or three options. But there are at least five options in every situation. Let your thinking stretch to accommodate them; otherwise, you’re going to keep applying the same solutions and arriving at the same old results.
3. Stop  deciding. Instead of relying exclusively on your mind to make decisions and choices, start letting your body choose for you. This isn’t just a “gut” response. Your whole body, from midsection to the extremities, is naturally wired to take in information, and to respond rapidly. There are a lot more cells in your body than in your brain. They know more about you, as a totality, than your brain does. And they work in simpler, more direct ways. All you need is enough trust in your feelings, as expressed through your body, to let them guide you. It’s a very smart evolutionary step to start listening to physically felt messages.
4. Become curious about your reactions. Rather than trying to stop your reactions, let them play out. Then leverage them to get to know yourself a lot better. Of course, tact is key here; you don’t have to fly off the handle. We all react for great reasons; stop repressing your reactions long enough to find out what they mean. Feel your emotions; if you stop suppressing them, you’ll learn valuable lessons, and have a more richer relationship with your inner self. Overresponding means discovering choices in action that are available, even though they might not be apparent at the moment. Discovering several possible choices gets you past feeling threatened and lets you select the one with the most potential to spur your evolution.
5. Make overresponding a personal strategy. Become creative in how you overespond. Whenever something throws you off, or impresses you with is significance, ask “what’s a great way to overrespond?” You’ll start to develop a healthy admiration for your own creativity, which will lead you to profit from it more.
6. Stop spending time with reactors or nonresponders. Some people are an emotional meltdown waiting to happen. Others are numb and could hardly care less. People who strike you as falling into either of these categories are people who are stuck. And they’re likely to want you to join them. Instead, seek out the company of others who are on a similar path as you; people that are instinctively open to fresh approaches and new possibilities are the best people to be around. Their company will give you support as you learn the best ways for you to over respond.
7. Turn every problem into a nonrecurring event. Identify a problem in your life, then take steps to make sure that it, or nothing remotely like it, never happens to you again. One of the benefits of overresponding is that it can fix problems permanently. It’s a great skill to be a problem-solver. People will notice it and bring their problems to you to help them solve. 
8. Experiment as you overrespond. The chance discoveries you make about yourself and life will make the biggest difference. When you overrespond, you use whatever happened, and you evolve yourself significantly – even beyond the problem itself. You use it as an excuse to make vast improvements in your life, skill-set, lifestyle, standards, or priorities.
9. Evolve, don’t just improve. When you improve, you do something smarter or better. But when you evolve, you fundamentally and permanently change a part of who you are. The difference is in the degree you making and in the type of change. The next time you’re in a situation that calls for change or improvement, focus on how you might evolve instead. Ultimately, you’ll come up with a solution – a “mutation” – that’s more likely to thrive. That way, you’ll never become a dinosaur.
10. Overrespond immediately, not gradually. If you wait a long time before rewarding good behavior, your subconscious won’t remember the connection between the behavior and its consequences. If it’s too long a time before you respond, you’re missing a chance to strengthen the important body-to-mind connection. Experiment with overresponding radically. Bypass your normal process of decision making. Eventually, you’ll start overesponding without having to think about it, navigating your way to new levels of success, and barely even noticing how you’ve done it.