Park Yi-cheol on the Pause Between Feeling and Reacting

“Happiness is always a choice.” Park Yi-cheol likes to write those words when he gives someone a book. I met him once and received a copy. Park also wrote The Little Prince Who Became a Cleaner and has given talks about positive psychology.

It’s Your Brain, Not You

The Korean title suggests a book about the brain. Park’s subject is closer to positive psychology: how the thoughts we return to shape the way we respond to everyday life.

He believes that noticing a habitual response can give you room to choose a different one. That idea runs through the book.

Park describes five ways a person might relate to the brain. He uses the last two as an invitation to think more deliberately about how we respond.

1. Having a brain
2. Studying the brain
3. Using the brain
4. Shaping the way it works
5. Helping others shape the way theirs works

He treats the brain as a kind of control room. His question is how much say you can have in what happens there.

Take anger. He breaks a brief exchange down into steps that normally pass too quickly to notice.

1. You expected to be treated as someone who mattered.
2. The other person brushed you off.
3. Something felt wrong.
4. You grew angry.
5. You acted on the anger.
6. Both of you felt worse.

The sequence makes an ordinary slight slow enough to examine. You can ask what you had expected from the exchange and why it hit you the way it did.

Park is particularly interested in the third step. You already feel unsettled, but there is still a moment in which you can decide what to say or do.

Questions that bring gratitude into view

Park also brings up a KBS documentary about gratitude. He uses it to introduce questions that direct attention toward experiences you might otherwise overlook.

One example asks students to talk to a parent about a happy moment in the parent’s life, then share what they heard. The exercise gives them a reason to ask a question they might rarely think to ask.

The thought behind the inscription

By the end, I understood the inscription better. Park was asking readers to look for a choice they could still make in the middle of a difficult situation.

When I am busy or tired, it is easy to go from one demand to the next without noticing how I am responding. The book gave me a reason to pay attention to those small intervals.

The glass is half full or half empty, depending on what you notice first. Either reading tells you something. Park’s book asks what follows from the one you keep returning to.

Book details

It’s Your Brain, Not You

Author

Park Yi-cheol

Published

December 8, 2021

ISBN-13

9791189521097

View on YES24

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