The cue

You get a message that just says "Can we talk later?" There is no subject and no warmth in it. Your stomach drops before you have read it twice. The message was the cue.

You have a really good week. Work goes well and the evenings are easy. On Friday you feel a strange urge to start an argument. The good week was the cue.

A coworker says "Great job" in front of everyone. Heat climbs your neck and you are already saying it was nothing. The praise was the cue.

Sometimes the thing that sets it off is the thing you wanted.

Cues are usually small. A tone of voice. A pause before a reply. A plan that changes. Someone being kind. A number going up. They are out of all proportion to what follows, which is part of what makes the pattern so confusing from inside.

Cues are often good things. Closeness, praise, success and calm set off several of the nine patterns. People expect a pattern to answer bad news. Many of them answer good news instead.

Cues change with the person and the room. The same remark from a manager and from a friend can land very differently. That is why a cue is something you learn from your own record, not from a list.

The cue is what your system read. It is not the reason the pattern exists. A light switch does not have to look like the lamp. A small remark can turn on a large response for the same reason.

That is not a reason to ignore what happened. If someone treated you badly, that matters in its own right. It just means the size of your reaction is not a measure of the size of the cue.

It is natural to try. Avoid the person. Skip the meeting. Turn off the phone. Sometimes a break is the right call, and if a place or a person is unsafe, distance is the right answer, full stop.

As a way of changing a pattern, though, avoiding cues does not travel. The world keeps supplying new ones, and a pattern that has only been avoided is still intact. The part that goes with you everywhere is the gap between the signal and the behavior.

Knowing your cues is how you get ready. When a cue shows up, expect the body signal. Feel for it: the chest, the throat, the stomach, the heat. Name what is starting.

Then say one short sentence out loud. Name the signal and decline the old move. Then take the different action you chose in advance, and count it as one rep, one repetition of the practice.