React or Respond — The Choice Is Yours

The inspiration for this therapy tip comes from the late personal development speaker, Bob Proctor, who taught the idea of responding to life's problems rather than reacting to them.

One of the children I work with — a primary-school-aged boy on the autism spectrum — was having a particularly tough day. He didn't want to talk to me at first. Head on the table, tears in his eyes. After a while, he opened up. “I'm not making friends. They're all mean.” Some days a group of kids at school would let him join in, other days they wouldn't. Mean words were exchanged, things kept getting harder.

After he told me this, I asked him to grab some tape, a pen, and paper. He looked at me curiously but went and got them. When he returned, I showed him a 20 cent and a 50 cent coin and asked which one he wanted. The 50 cent coin, of course. I told him he could have it — if he promised to do one thing.

I had him cut out two small pieces of paper, write “react” on one and “respond” on the other, and tape them to either side of the coin. I told him to carry it with him. Whenever something bad or negative happened, he was to look at the coin and decide: react, or respond? I explained that he couldn't stop negative things from happening, but he could decide how he met them. Learning to respond, rather than react, would help him regulate himself and stop letting other kids get to him. I asked him to try it for two weeks and see what happened.

He followed through. He carried that coin for fourteen days, and it helped — he started learning to respond instead of react, and to stop letting other people's behaviour control his.

This therapy tip won't work for every child, but it may work for some. The goal is always to find out what genuinely connects with the individual in front of you, and use that as the starting point for real change. That's the approach at the heart of everything we do at Dayna's Place — connect with the person, built trust, and success follows.

Bob Proctor, the inspiration behind this idea, taught a version of this coin trick himself — pause for ten seconds before responding to a negative situation. Look at the coin. Then choose: react, or respond.