Tracking Triggers
Tracking Triggers: From Reactivity to Responsiveness is a forthcoming book by John Ford exploring how people learn to recognize emotional triggers and choose conscious response over reactivity. Launching in 2026.
The Fifth Way: a map for recognizing emotional triggers and choosing conscious response over automatic reaction.
A small circle reading the manuscript as it takes shape.
Inner Trackers receive chapters of Tracking Triggers as they’re written and take part—quietly or actively—in shaping how this book enters the world.
It’s an invitation to track alongside the work before it’s finished.
Join the Inner Trackers
Why Tracking Triggers?
We live in a time when stress, disconnection, and unprocessed emotion ripple through our relationships. Left unexamined, triggers hijack our nervous systems, close down curiosity, and keep us trapped in patterns of hurt.
Your triggers aren't signs of weakness—they're sacred signals pointing you back to wholeness. This book teaches you to track them like a wilderness tracker follows faint signs in the dust, learning to meet reactivity with responsiveness.
Who This Book Is For:
This book is for you if you find yourself overreacting and regretting it later, getting stuck in the same relational conflicts despite your best intentions, or wanting to transform your relationship with emotions rather than just manage them.
It's for anyone ready to meet discomfort without collapse, attack, or avoidance—and willing to follow the track of their own reactivity back to steadiness.
How This Book Is Being Written
Tracking Triggers is being written the way it’s meant to be used: slowly, reflectively, and in relationship.
Chapters are drafted, tested, revised, and refined over time—shaped not only by years of mediation and teaching, but by a small group of early readers tracking alongside the process. Some offer reflections. Others simply read. Both matter.
This approach allows the book to remain grounded in lived experience rather than polished theory—so what emerges is something you can actually use when it counts..
About John Ford
From the creator of The Empathy Set®
For over thirty years, John Ford has taught mediators and practitioners how to track emotional patterns much like wilderness trackers read signs in the landscape—attending closely to what is present rather than forcing premature solutions.
He is a workplace mediator, a negotiation and mediation instructor, and the author of Peace at Work: The HR Manager’s Guide to Workplace Mediation. His work draws on decades of practice in organizational conflict, emotional literacy, and relational decision-making.
The approach developed through this work has been distilled into a practical framework for recognizing the body’s signals, regulating the nervous system, naming feelings and needs, integrating insight, and choosing conscious response over protective reaction.
This is not theory. It is field-tested practice, shaped by hundreds of mediations, trainings, and real-world conflicts—offered to help people meet moments of reactivity with greater clarity, courage, and care.
