Kicking things off with the summary of this post.
TL;DR
Modern culture rewards reactive certainty. Fast decisions, impulsive emails, & knee-jerk reactions are celebrated.
These reactions often feel authentic but are actually automatic patterns of the past.
Each unconscious reaction widens your identity debt. That's the gap between who you are and who you want to become.
RePAAR is a 5-step framework to break the pattern and choose your intentional self:
Recognize the emotional trigger.
Pause using a physical or a mental totem.
Acknowledge the emotion & label it to create distance.
Align with your values and ideal self.
Respond intentionally.
Frameworks like RePAAR are essential, but only as scaffolds. Real change comes from aligned action through consistent awareness.
The more we pause, the more we choose. The more we choose, the more we make space for wisdom to emerge.
Let’s dive into the article.
After two weeks, the back-and-forth of that ongoing email chain felt like a slow-burn of frustration. I wasn't making any headway with the person on the other end of those emails. As I drafted the reply, I could feel my patience evaporating. Every fiber of my body wanted me to escalate. Each word I chose was meant to maximize the damage.
The mouse hovered over the cc field on the screen, as I contemplated pulling the pin on the professional equivalent of throwing the grenade by adding the "head of his department" in my email response.
But something made me pause. I couldn't quite place my finger on what it was. Maybe it was the memory of the last time I had fired one of those sorts of emails and burnt a bridge.
We don't get many do-overs in life, do we? And that's the beauty of it. But acting in ways that kick down the ladder behind you will quickly make you realize it's also a curse.
Modern culture has played a cruel joke on us.
It has led us to believe our first responses are the most authentic ones.
It has taught us that hesitation means weakness.
It has rewarded us for "reactive certainty."
A Culture of Reactive Certainty
What is reactive certainty? Imagine yourself triggered — emotionally triggered. A sense of clarity and justification floods your mind. This is a deceptive feeling of absolute rightness that accompanies your fast, instinctive, System 1 reaction. It compels you to act immediately and without a second thought spared on nuance. Sometimes you might be right. But more often than not, you're horribly wrong.
The temples of this culture of reactive certainty are everywhere you look.
You can find it on social media, where nuance repeatedly dies under the sheer weight of character limits and the dopamine hit that follows instant validation. This is where the "hottest takes" get the most engagement. You comment first and think later, because being fastest to respond somehow equates to being right.
You can also find instances of reactive certainty in the hustle culture that has invaded every small business. There, "decisive leadership" means making quick decisions without even attempting to gather further information. Reflection is often branded as procrastination. "Bias towards actions" masquerades as a surface excuse for not thinking too hard about what you're actually doing.
Corporate life hasn't escaped reactive certainty either. Here, the strategy sessions are measured in seconds, and admitting you need slightly more time to consider is equated to admitting you're willfully incompetent. The meetings reward the person who is the first and the loudest, not the one who listens and responds thoughtfully.
Authenticity, power, and quick wins are what this culture of reactive certainty promises. But what does it deliver? A slow accumulation of Identity Debt.
Every time you react instinctively instead of responding intentionally, you widen an already existing gap between who you are and who you want to become.
You become the person who sends that stinging email instead of the calm professional you claim to be on Linkedin. You become the snappy parent after a difficult day at work instead of the loving protector of your family you swear you really are.
You have declared a war on your “ideal self.” But what’s the antidote?
Responding, Not Reacting, Using RePAAR
RePAAR (pronounced as Re-Par) is your instrument for those crucial moments, where unconsciously reacting could inadvertently lead to lasting damage. Including and especially the moments when reacting automatically could push your relationships beyond repair.
RePAAR lets you return to your intentional, deliberate self before your reactive self gets the chance to do that damage.
So what does RePAAR stand for?
R - RECOGNIZE (The Flash of Awareness)
This first R stands for recognition. It's that instance of time when your brain goes, "Oh! It's one of those moments. I know how this is going to unfold and how I'm probably going to react."
This might sound too easy or simplistic. But it's the very foundation of emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman, who's credited for popularizing the concept, insisted that being aware of your patterns is a crucial first step in managing any emotional response. Because you can't change what you don't recognize.
Recognition feels like catching yourself in the middle of the act. It's becoming aware of the blood rushing to your face, turning you red. It's that split second when you realize you are about to say something you'll regret.
I've written about recognizing the patterns in the article, "You Can't Change What You Don't See."
The thing about recognition is that it doesn't need to be perfect or complete; it simply needs to be. You don't need to understand why you're being triggered in the very moment that triggers you. That is something you could and should explore when you're far removed from the triggering situation, through reflection or, if needed, even through the FoRC analysis framework.
But when you’re in the middle of that moment, you just need to notice that "One of your automatic patterns is about to unfold."
P - PAUSE (The Physical Interruption)
The P is for pause. It's taking that one conscious breath that acts as the circuit breaker.
Deep, conscious breath functions as a biological break on your fight-or-flight response. It's akin to pressing the reset button on your nervous system. It shifts you from reacting to responding.
You can even use physical totems for this moment. It could be twisting the ring on your finger or reaching for the locket. The specific technique doesn't matter. What matters is consistency. You're teaching your body to switch from being on autopilot to being intentional.
You can check out more about the pause in my article, "The Art of Pause."
The pause doesn't need to be long. Even a couple of seconds could transform the quality of your response that follows.
A - ACKNOWLEDGE (The Mental Labeling)
The first A stands for Acknowledging. It's creating a distance between yourself and your emotions by giving them names.
Instead of just being angry, acknowledge it by saying, "The feeling of anger is here." Or instead of feeling attacked, acknowledge it by saying, "There is an intense urge to defend myself." This subtle admission is what's called psychological flexibility.
Neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman has shown that "putting feeling into words" disrupts activity in the brain's alarm center, also known as the amygdala. He calls it "affect labeling." When you name your emotions, you literally calm the neurological storm brewing in your mind. You establish a separation between your emotion and your self. You become aware of your thoughts and feelings by observing them rather than being consumed by them.
A - ALIGN (The Directional Cue)
This second A is alignment. It's about consciously bringing your intentional identity or values into focus.
In moments when we are unconsciously reacting, we default to our automatic selves. Alignment here means making a conscious choice to respond via our intentional selves.
But there is something else crucial at play. This isn't an identity you are inventing as you roll with the moment. For career and relationship-defining high-stakes moments, you do this work offline, far removed from the heat of the trigger. This is the kind of work we do in FoRC analysis of a pattern.
You're not supposed to improvise your values under pressure;
you're supposed to remember them.
R - RESPOND (The Intentional Action)
This final R is response. This is where you speak or act in line with your alignment cue, keeping your values in focus.
You actively choose a new interpretation of the unfolding situation and respond from that perspective. Instead of interpreting as "My boss is attacking me as usual," you reframe it as "My boss is sharing a perspective. What can I learn from this?"
Again, you don't have to improvise a better response under pressure. You can do the deep work, far away from the trigger, through FoRC analysis framework to strategize a more aligned response.
In the heat of the moment, you're just responding with what you have already strategized and practiced.
A Real-World Walkthrough
Now, let me show you what it could look like in practice. Remember that email scenario from earlier. Let's use that.
The Unconscious Autopilot Path:
I shoot that devastating email I drafted. I feel vindicated for about thirty seconds. And then what? I would spend the next few days, or maybe even weeks, dealing with the fallout. It doesn't look promising. Does it?
The Intentional Path with RePAAR:
Now, let's see what if I respond to that email using RePAAR.
What could that look like?
Recognize: "Hmm. Alright. This is one of those moments. I can feel the rush of blood," I say.
Pause: I take a deep breath. Feel my feet on the floor. I give myself the permission to step back and let the temperature cool down.
Acknowledge: "The urge to feel vindicated is here. I want to put the other person in his place."
Align: "Align with curiosity, not that feeling of vindication. Choose to be the collaborator I'd love to collaborate with."
Respond: Instead of a bombshell email that includes his "head of the department," without ccing anyone else, I just email him, "Can we grab a coffee to talk about how we can accelerate the process?"
Conclusion And A Caution
Here's the thing about a framework like RePAAR. It's necessary, but at the same time, it's dangerous. Necessary because we often need the scaffolding to support new ways of thinking, acting, and responding. RePAAR is a concrete practice to interrupt our automatic patterns. Dangerous because it could become the substitute for the very awareness it's meant to cultivate.
RePAAR offers something valuable — genuinely valuable. It's a way to break the circuit between a trigger and our reaction. It creates the very space where an intentional choice becomes possible. And in a culture that worships and rewards reactive certainty, any such practice that can slow us down is potentially revolutionary.
But, and this is where I want to be really careful, there is a difference between using RePAAR as training wheels and mistaking those training wheels for the bicycle.
RePAAR is just a provisional structure. It's meant to support the development of something that can never be fully systematized: the capacity to rise and meet a difficult, testing moment with conscious presence rather than unconscious programming.
Frameworks can help, but this capacity emerges from the patient, often boring work of catching ourselves in the act of reacting, again and again and again, long enough for wisdom to emerge.
The framework works until it doesn't. The system works until it just becomes yet another cage. The practice matters until we start mistaking the practice for the transformation.
What remains, what persists beyond any framework or system or technique, is the fundamental human capacity to choose how we meet difficulty when it arrives.
Epilogue
I still don't remember exactly what made me pause that day. But I never did send that devastating email. All I remember was a deep urge to get up and walk. To cool my head. So, I stepped away from my desk, walked down the stairs, and out of that building.
By pure coincidence, I ran into the very same person. Face-to-face, he looked nothing like the monster I had painted in my mind. He just seemed... well, human.
We spoke. Briefly. Respectfully. And I realized something I consider sacred today. Most conflicts shrink the moment we stop reacting and start relating.
Back then, I didn’t have RePAAR. But I did have enough space to pause instead of reacting automatically . Today, that choice is no longer luck. It’s a practice.
If you're interested in understanding the formation and reinforcement loops that created your automatic patterns and how FoRC analysis and RePAAR framework scan transform those same, persistent patterns in your personal and professional life, reach out to me.
I'd love to discuss how these frameworks might work for your specific situation.
That’s all for this week. See you in the next one.
Stay genuine! Stay authentic!
Nik Pathran
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