The Contrarian Mindset: Replacing the Reactive Mindset.

This week, we’re tackling a mindset many of us fall into without realizing it—the reactive mindset.

Reactivity isn’t always bad. In life-or-death situations, reacting fast keeps us safe. But in daily work, relationships, and emotionally charged conversations, reacting without reflection can lead to poor decisions, conflict, and regret.

In this episode, I share Allison’s story. A seasoned project manager, she once believed fast responses meant strong leadership—until it cost her clarity, connection, and team trust. Her journey offers a powerful reminder that slowing down internally, even in high-pressure moments, can change the trajectory of how we lead, communicate, and relate to others.

Allison’s shift to a contrarian mindset included key strategies like:

• Separating emotion from reality – creating space to reflect before reacting
• Practicing equanimity – finding calm in the storm to lead with clarity
• Building social bridges – responding with curiosity and empathy, even during conflict
• Embracing obstacles as opportunities – reframing tension as a chance to grow
• Letting go of fixed outcomes – allowing solutions to unfold through thoughtful dialogue

Allison’s story reminds us that choosing how we respond—especially under pressure—is one of the most powerful forms of leadership. The contrarian mindset doesn’t reject emotion; it integrates it with intention.

Additional Resources:
Interested in building a contrarian mindset for resilience, fortitude, and psychological strength? Check out the other episodes in this series linked in the show notes, and subscribe to It’s an Inside Job for more insights on resilience, well-being, and personal growth.

Part 1 – Discover the Power of The Contrarian Mindset: A New Approach to Rewiring Your Brain for Resilience and Growth

Part 2 – Discover the Power of The Contrarian Mindset: A New Approach to Rewiring Your Brain for Resilience and Growth

This is Part 5 in a 15-part series where we confront the hidden fears and reactive patterns that hold us back—and build resilience by rewiring how we think.

🔹 Part 1 – Facing the Fear of Vulnerability
🔹 Part 2 – Breaking Free from Perfectionism
🔹 Part 3 – Moving Through Imposter Syndrome
🔹 Part 4 – Overcoming the Fear of Not Being Good Enough
🔹 Contrarian Skills Series (Season 7) – Begin in January 2025 in the episode feed for deeper dives into each mindset strategy.

Chapters

• 0:16 Introduction to the Podcast
• 1:42 Practical Tips for Everyday Challenges

Transcript

Speaker: 0:08

Music. Well, welcome to It's an Inside Job Bite Size Fridays, your weekly dose of resilience, optimism, and well-being to get you ready for the weekend. Now, each week, I'll bring you insightful tips and uplifting stories to help you navigate life's challenges and embrace a more positive mindset. And so with that said, let's slip into the stream. Music. In our last series, we explored the 12 skills of the contrarian mindset. Skills that challenge conventional thinking and help us build true resilience. But resilience isn't just about what we cultivate. It's about what we confront. That's what this series is all about. Over the next 15 Bite Size Friday episodes, we'll take a hard look at the fears and unhelpful mindsets that hold us back, the ones we all face but rarely talk about. For example, the fear of failure, the fear of vulnerability, fear of change or uncertainty, the fear of conflict, the imposter syndrome, or the weight of perfectionism. These fears don't just slow us down, they quietly shape our decisions, limit our potential, and keep us stuck in patterns that no longer serve us. Most self-help advice teaches you how to work around these fears. This series challenges you to face them head on. Because if we want real growth, deep, lasting change, we can't afford to ignore what makes us uncomfortable. Contrarian thinking isn't about being difficult for the sake of it. It's about questioning default reactions, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and seeing challenges from an angle most people overlook. So let's cut through the noise, break the patterns, and reshape the way we think, one fear at a time. One unhelpful mindset at a time. Music. This week, we are going to tackle and deconstruct the reactive mindset. Now, being reactive, that's not always a bad thing. In a lot of aspects of life, it's a good thing to react to a stimulus, to react immediately to a danger or some sort of threat. Well, this is a survival mechanism that we, as human beings, that was evolved as part of our wetware, as part of our survival mechanism. And this is great. For example, if we step off a sidewalk into the street and we see a bicycle is barreling down on us, well, we can react without thinking. We just step back onto the sidewalk and avoid an accident. But in a lot of times in sort of the day-to-day when we are in psychosocial pressures, it's some sort of argument or difficult conversation we may have at work or at home. Well, we don't always want to react. We want to take the time to stop, reflect, and then choose our reactions. We may want to stop and react and think about, okay, what are the emotions boiling up with me? We want to be the master of our emotions and not the other way around. You know, Kofi Annan once said, to live is to choose, but to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go, and why you want to get there. So to move from the reactive mindset to contrarian mindset, Well, this week we're going to be talking about choosing to pause, reflect, and respond with intention in the face of challenge, change, and complexity. As usual, I want to kick off with a client story. Again, I've changed the name in industry. But I'd like you to meet Allison. Now, she's a seasoned project manager who, like many professionals, once struggled with the instinct to react immediately to stressful situations. Now, her story is an example of the value of thoughtful responses in a world that often demands speed over clarity. Early in her career, Allison equated fast reactions with strong leadership. But over time, she realized that speed without reflection, well, that often led to confusion, unnecessary conflict, and poor decisions. Now, during a particular critical project, well, tensions among Allison's team were high and emotions were running strong. The pressure came to a head in a team meeting where differing opinions threat to spiral into open conflict. And at that moment, Alison faced a choice to react impulsively to the heated discussion or to pause and respond deliberately. Well, she chose the latter, opting for a timeout to allow everyone, including herself, to cool off and gather their thoughts. Now, this decision became a turning point. It became a pivotal point in her career. Allison demonstrated the contrarian mindset in action by resisting the urge to speak from emotion. Her pulse was not passive, it was intentional. It gave her the space to observe, to regulate her emotions, and to assess the situation with a clearer mind. And as a result, she responded in a way that aligned with her values and long-term goals. Now, Allison's growth centered on increasing self-awareness. She learned to recognize her emotional triggers without letting them control her behavior. Now, this shift toward mindful leadership enabled her to lead with clarity, presence, and empathy. And by embracing deliberate responses, by taking time to reflect, then act, well, Allison made wiser decisions and to foster a more empathetic and psychologically safe environment. She listened more actively and considered others' perspectives before offering her own. And the result was stronger team cohesion, collaboration, communication, and effective problem solving. In her relationships, the shift towards intentional, responsive, nurtured, healthier communication and her commitment to more meaningful dialogue over impulsive reactions, well, this led to more constructive conflict resolution and a deeper connection to those people at work and at home. Ultimately, Alison's development reminds us that true resilience is found in our ability to pause, reflect, and respond with more deliberation. This capacity helps us through complexity, through change, through uncertainty, with more steadiness and skill. So the question is, how did Allison make this shift from reacting on impulse to responding with clarity and intention? Well, in our coaching sessions, we focus on developing specific cognitive skills that supported this transformation. Now, these skills helped her slow down internally, even when everything around her was speeding up. And so what follows are some of the contrarian strategy Allison practiced, tools that allowed her to respond more deliberately, build stronger relationships, and lead with more confidence in the face of pressure and stress. Separating emotion from reality. Relating Allison's story to you, it shows the importance of pausing, to distinguish between emotional turbulence and the facts by stepping back, by slowing down, by pushing the pause button. And this might be a little counterintuitive, but by slowing down, we actually speed things up. If we take a moment to pause and to reflect on the emotions that are sort of percolating up in us, and that moment of reflection might only be a count of five seconds. But within that five seconds, it allows our ability to have self-awareness and to choose the direction and not just go by the default direction that our emotions want to push us in. That allows us to open up space to be diplomatic, to be cordial, to be civil in our response. It doesn't mean we have to be soft, but it means we can be still direct, but take a more diplomatic approach. And in Allison's case, by stepping back, she avoided letting momentary emotion distort her judgment and made decisions grounded in reality. Practicing equanimity. Amid teen tensions, Allison cultivated an inner calm. This emotional steadiness helped her meet challenges without being pulled into a reactive behavior. Equanimity is the ability to find calm and stay collected in the chaos. And we've all been in arguments. We've seen a room kind of explode with emotions and people finger-pointing and blaming each other. If we can over time develop the habit of retracting into the eye of the emotional storm well we can set precedent we can set an example for those around us to try to, find a much more diplomatic and civil way of settling whatever dispute or disagreement there is and again it's not about dismissing or ignoring our emotions far from it it's about listening to those emotions. It's about understanding what the message is, but then taking the time to choose and to deliberate on how we want to respond. And I've seen this many times when teams practice equanimity. You know, the emotions are there, they're boiling and percolating. But what happens is the emotions die down after a while because now people are having a much more deliberate and civil conversations and that allows them to find a way forward. Building social bridges. Allison deepened trust with her team by listening and responding with empathy. You know, her ability to stay curious and collaborative helped turn conflict into connection. Now, in a lot of conflict situations, our brains will automatically think that the other person on the other side of the table who disagrees with us, they have nefarious intent. they have bad intention. They're doing it in spite of us. It's all about them. Well, in a lot of cases, if like Allison, if we can stop and think, okay, more than likely this person has good intent and wants to move things forward. And so if I can shift from anger or frustration or attention, whatever it is, to more curiosity, trying to understand their direction, to understand their drivers. Well, just that fact of saying, I need to be curious, I want to understand where they're coming from, that puts the brakes on my immediate reaction. Just that question stops me up, allows me to reflect and ask much more constructive questions to explore their site, to hopefully find some sort of amiable agreement or solution. Embracing obstacles as opportunities. Rather than resisting team conflict, Alison viewed it as a proving ground for her leadership growth. The tension became an opportunity to test and reinforce the mindset she was developing. And a lot of the times in coaching sessions, it's about looking at conflict in a different way. Because if there is conflict, if people are emotionally engaged, that means they're invested. They want to see change. They want to see some sort of development or movement forward. When we get emotionally engaged, it doesn't always happen the way we want to. And everyone's reacting to what everyone else is saying. But if we can stop and listen and truly empathize and understand their perspective, and if we ask that of them, well, that might be the olive branch that allows us to get through a very emotionally turbulent conversation that is needed. But by giving the olive branch saying, okay, please explain to me your reasoning. Please explain to me the motivations and the needs you're trying to meet. And in many cases, when people feel they've been listened to and heard and respected and that their contributions or what they've said are valued, they may not always float their ideas, but that at least that they're heard and listened and they're respected, that calms them down. And that in itself is the olive branch because now they will, in most cases, do the same to you. Letting go of fixed outcomes. Earlier in Alice's career, she claimed a lot to this need, this drive for immediate resolution. Over time and over mistakes and over different conflicts and over different tensions and stresses that she created for herself and her team, she learned that by releasing control over how and when problems were solved, this allowed for much more space for thoughtful reflection. And what happened over time is that effective solutions did emerge because there were much more constructive conversations sometimes if we see conflict is getting out of control it's just that it's to put a pause a timeout a break and when everyone comes back into the room, there's a level of calmness you know the emotions are still kind of percolating in the background but they're not the intensity. People have taken time to cool down and to think through things. And this is even when we are sitting with ourselves and we are feeling stress and concern and worry. Instead of just immediately reacting, if we can just be self-aware, just for a few moments, to put a space between stimulus and reaction. We have space, we stop, we think, we deliberate, then we act. In a lot of cases, this can get us out of a lot of hot water and it can prevent a lot of future problems that we have to tackle because of the fallout that we created by blowing up or making rash and reactive decisions that could cost us time, it could cost us effort, and it could cost us money, our reputation. Sometimes taking a few seconds pause can be a huge investment with a lot of dividends. So let me share some of my reflections working with Allison. You know, Allison's story, it highlights the significance of choosing deliberate responses in a world that often values speed over thoughtfulness. I mean, have you ever got yourself thinking, gosh, I wish I had more thinking time and you're just kind of executing one decision after the next, after the next, after the next. You know, her experience teaches us that taking a moment to reflect, observe, and respond, well, it can lead to more effective decision-making, building stronger relationships, and definitely more resilience, greater resilience. Alice navigated a challenge situation with wisdom and with grace and with civility and with diplomacy by implementing strategies from the contrarian playbook, such as focusing on reality, practicing equanimity, and embracing obstacles as opportunities. By choosing to respond deliberately rather than to react impulsively, Allison was able to foster a more collaborative and harmonious work environment, demonstrating that thoughtful, intentional actions are key to achieving long-term success and resilience. If you're curious to know how to build a contrarian mindset for greater resilience, fortitude, tenacity, psychological strength, and a sense of well-being, well, you'll find links to the other episodes in this series in the show notes. So make sure you hit that subscribe button, and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational episodes on Monday and the latest Bite Sites episode on Friday. And have yourself a relaxing and rejuvenating weekend. Music.