Action Bias

Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?

I tend to have an action bias towards a lot of things and situations, especially when it comes to interpersonal interactions on any level.

There are many times in my career growth when people expected a certain action from me. Some of those situations looked like a dare, and there’s usually the temptation to take an action to validate my personality or beliefs.

One of those situations was during my housemanship (internship) training. It was a really pushful situation, and everyone on my level and above were of the opinion that they would have employed their powers to deal with the offender. It was a really stressful situation, and I could have been justified if I took an axe to a fork fight. I had everything within my disposal to have made a show of the situation. But I’d chosen not to, and I still chose inaction whenever I’m met with such situations for a few reasons.

1. Sometimes, taking a counter action when faced with a stressful situation is an effort to restore comfort. I prefer growth over comfort.

2. Without challenging situations, we don’t get to learn important life lessons. Challenging situations don’t only teach us about ourselves, but they also teach us about people. It’s a tragedy to have to read manipulative books in order to be able to understand the human nature.

3. Challenging situations teach emotional maturity; not emotional numbing. I am better able to come to terms and full acceptance of the fact that as a human being, I feel, and every range of emotions that I feel are valid, congruent with the situation, and protective of my wellbeing. This allows me to learn compassion for myself and express empathy towards others.

4. In some situations, taking action means relegating your frontal lobe functions to someone else; you lose what you don’t grow! For example, reporting people or complaining about uncomfortable situations is a way of infantilizing yourself. You are admitting that you don’t have the resources to take care of the situation, but most importantly, that you’re unwilling to learn about how to handle such situations at later recurrences.

Are there times when inaction has costed me something? Oh many times! But I’d still err on the side of inaction because those situations help me to understand “the other person factors” that mostly always runs it’s course.

Inaction is how you escalate the time to establishing intent. If someone is determined to cause you harm insidiously, their go to action is to try to get an action out of you that will justify their harmful intentions. When you hold back your responses on all levels, you significantly expose intentional harm!