The Space Between

Viktor Frankl wrote that between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is the freedom to choose.

He arrived at this idea inside a concentration camp. I want to hold that for a moment, because the weight of where it came from is part of what gives it credibility. This was a man who had lost everything, and who found, inside that loss, that there was still something no external circumstance could take: the capacity to choose his response to it.

Most leaders I work with have gradually lost access to that space.

It does not happen dramatically. It happens over years of moving fast, of responding to the volume of demands that accompany a certain level of responsibility. At some point, the pause between stimulus and response gets shorter and shorter. The gap closes. What takes its place is pattern: the familiar reaction, the decision made from the same place as all the others, without much examination of whether that place is still accurate.

Amy Arnsten at Yale has documented what happens under even mild stress: the prefrontal cortex, responsible for complex reasoning, goes offline. What takes over runs on pattern and the logic of threat response.

Many of the decisions leaders are least proud of were not failures of character. They were the predictable result of a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, without the self-awareness to notice before it had already run.

The board presentation that goes sideways. The conversation with a co-founder that ends badly. From the outside, these look like strategic moments. From the inside, the brain is registering something closer to threat.

That space Frankl described is recoverable. What it requires is a quality of self-awareness that can recognise what is happening inside while it is happening, not hours later in the debrief. The kind that creates enough pause, however brief, to make a genuine choice possible.

Frankl built his framework from the hardest years of his life. The clearest seeing I have done in my own life came from the same direction. Loss slowed everything down in a way the building never had. What I found in that slowness changed how I work with everyone who comes to this practice.

The space is real. It can be developed. And the quality of a leader's decisions depends on how much access they have to it.