How many times have you acted rashly without thinking? Sometimes that’s necessary, such as in instances of safety like pulling a toddler out of the road. But most of the time we can afford to think before acting, especially when acting from an emotional trigger. The mental model of Feel-Think-Act can help us learn how to slow down and use our emotions to propel into purposeful response rather than an urgent one.
Feel-Act-Think
This is the default mode of action. Think of your emotions like an alarm clock. They alert you to the fact that one of your values has been compromised and you need to act. But they do not tell you what the actions needs to be.
We often get caught up in the urgency of the moment and spring straight into action. Then we think on the situation later and may regret the text we sent, the purchase we made, or the words we said in haste.
How can we avoid the cycle of urgency and stop to think before we act?
Feel-Think-Act
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman came up with what he calls System One and System Two, which are two ways that we make decisions and act based on stimuli. System One is the routine or automatic decision, like operating on auto pilot. This is what happens in Feel-Act-Think. The automatic decision may work in many situations, but not in all of them.
System Two calls for slowing down and thinking before we act. This allows you to be more in tune with what your Here actually is instead of acting based on assumption.
Use the acronym LIDD when slowing down to think first: listen, investigate, decide, dismiss.
First, listen to the emotion and what it’s trying to tell you. Don’t push the emotion down, it’s been triggered for a reason. Then, investigate why you’re feeling this way. Is it because a value has been compromised? Has something gone wrong? This is where you look at the facts of the situation. After you’ve considered both the facts and your feelings about them, then you can decide what to do. Finally, you can thank your emotions for alerting you to action and dismiss them. There’s no need to continue to linger on emotions trying to convince you that something is urgent when you’ve already taken action.
The goal with Feel-Think-Act isn’t to put your emotions to the side and operate on a more rational basis. Rather, you want to be aware of your emotions and what they are trying to alert you to without being controlled by them.
