The Gap Between Stimulus and Response

Most of the time you’re not in control of what you say and do. It’s because your emotions are controlling your behaviour, whether you like it or not. They can also seriously cloud your judgment, and most people aren’t even aware of it.

What did you notice when you read the paragraph above? Did you think that’s rubbish, I can stay in control? Or that applies to other people I know, but not me? Or perhaps you agree with it and say sure, that makes perfect sense, so what? However you responded, it was triggered by an emotion, based on your perceptions, values and conditioning.

The response happened before the thought did.

Blaming Pam for the carrots

A few years ago, my wife Pam bought a bunch of freshly-picked baby carrots, the small slender ones with the green tops, from our local grocer. When it came to preparing them, I noticed I was feeling increasing levels of anger and frustration with the task.

It was taking me ages to carefully scrub all the earth off with a nail brush, and I was complaining that these stupid little carrots weren’t worth the trouble. Pam was surprised I was getting into such a strop about it and asked what on earth was going on, because surely it was only a minor task? I was about to launch into blaming her for buying them when, for a moment, I created a tiny gap and checked out what I was feeling.

There was an uncomfortable tension in my chest that made me tense my shoulders, making me feel dull, negative and drained. I was curious about this tension and, as I felt it fully, I remembered where and when I’d experienced it before.

I was vividly back at the Connaught Hotel, where as a Commis Chef I had to prepare crates and crates of baby carrots. We had to be meticulous about keeping a 1cm green shoot on each carrot with not a speck of earth on it. This was quite tricky, especially when working very quickly. One slip of the knife and you’d cut off the green shoot entirely, then get yelled at and have to suffer your intelligence and background being insulted. It was all just part of the culture in a One Michelin Star restaurant in the early 1980s.

It was suddenly very funny to see how I was getting so worked up about cleaning some carrots on a beautiful sunny Saturday evening. I mentioned it to Pam and we both burst out laughing at how, just moments before, I’d been blaming her for buying the carrots in the first place, making up a whole story that they weren’t worth the effort and it was all her fault for making me feel this way.

It happens to the best of us

It’s the human condition to have emotions, and for them to manifest as feelings we then interpret in any way we can in order to make sense of the world. But the sense we make is often nothing to do with the situation in front of us.

When we have negative feelings we usually blame others for making us angry, upset, jealous, frustrated or fearful.

Have you ever felt that so and so is driving you mad? Or that if only certain members of the management team or staff would change their behaviour or attitude, you’d feel so much better?

The script you didn’t know was running

What I was reacting to wasn’t Pam. It wasn’t even the carrots. It was a forty-year-old script my nervous system had quietly loaded the moment the sense memory triggered. The Connaught kitchen. The pressure. The humiliation. None of it was conscious. Yet all of it was driving the behaviour.

This is what unconscious bias actually feels like from the inside. It isn’t usually the dramatic version we read about in leadership training. Most of the time it’s small. A flicker of irritation at the way something was said, or a subtle warming towards the person who reminds you of someone you trust. Perhaps it’s a reluctance to give feedback to one team member that you wouldn’t have with another. The bias fires before the thinking starts; the thinking then constructs reasons for what the bias has already decided.

The science has moved on considerably since I first wrote about this. We now understand that the brain is doing prediction, not perception. It’s constantly forecasting what’s about to happen based on prior experience, and then experiencing the forecast as if it were the present moment. Most of the time, the prediction is invisible. We just think we’re seeing things as they are.

Reacting or responding: what’s the difference?

It’s interesting to note how people are behaving in the current geopolitical and economic volatility, and in the noise around AI as well. Why is it that some people keep it all in perspective, using their energy and emotions to adapt, weather the storm and look for new opportunities? They accept the facts, taking control by responding proactively and using their emotions to become energised by the situation.

Others are led by their negative emotions, their energy drained by fear, anxiety and the stories they construct about why things are going wrong. They’re being reactive. This usually involves blaming others for the situation. Once we blame others, we’re on a slippery slope to being a victim of circumstance and losing any sense of control or the power to do something about it.

Minding the gap

The key to all of this is to look at the facts and distinguish them from your emotional responses to them. This is nothing new. Two and a half thousand years ago Siddhartha Gautama realised this when he said “suffering is not in the fact but our perceptions of the fact”.

Our perceptions are seriously affected by our emotions. Just look at all the relentless commentary about possible recession or what AI is about to do to everyone’s job. But it’s a skill to feel emotions fully without letting them automatically trigger our behaviour. Dr. Stephen Covey referred to this in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He called it the gap between stimulus and response.

Minding the gap means taking a moment to let the feelings integrate and then responding to the facts. It means taking responsibility for the situation and how you feel about it, and being proactive rather than reactive.

This gap is barely noticeable to start with. However, with practice it can become a space for powerful reflection and consideration of what is really going on. A space to look at the facts, be responsible (or response-able) and make creative choices. It allows you to recognise what is really being said, and how you may be misinterpreting it, jumping to conclusions, or running an old script you didn’t know was loaded.

How is AI changing emotional reactions?

There is something specific to add about the gap in 2026. AI doesn’t give you a gap, it gives you an answer before you’ve had the feeling. This is also where AI sits in 2026. It triggers bias in two opposite directions, and most leaders are unaware of which one they’re running.

Some leaders trust AI outputs more than they should, because the polish of the language pattern-matches to competence. Others dismiss AI for reasons that have nothing to do with what it can do, because something about it triggers an older script. It’s perhaps about technology, perhaps about being replaced, perhaps about losing control. Both responses are unconscious. Both shape decisions. Neither feels like bias from the inside. They feel like judgement.

Ask a model a difficult question and a polished response arrives in seconds. It’s often well-reasoned and persuasive, but arrives before you’ve noticed what you actually think about it. The gap, which has always been hard to protect, is now under a new kind of pressure. It needs more deliberate defending than it used to.

Two questions to sit with

The gap doesn’t have to be dramatic. Sometimes it’s just long enough to realise you’re not actually angry about the carrots. So, two questions worth sitting with:

Who are you blaming for the way you feel right now? And what older script might be running underneath that blame, that you haven’t quite noticed yet?
When the next AI-generated answer arrives in front of you, will you have a gap before you accept it, or will you simply absorb it and move on?

Remember when it comes to noticing feelings… Stay curious.

David Klaasen

© Talent4Performance 2026