There is a simple reality to engagement – whether its community engagement, employee engagement, civic engagement, or student engagement – that a lot of people haven’t acknowledged.

Using the word like a gate, they treat engagement like its a special state, a particular circumstance and a certain way of being. They make it into a phenomenon that can only be facilitated by trained professionals, instead of being something common among the masses.

The simple fact of the matter is that engagement is simply choosing the same thing over and over, whether or not we’re aware of it. There’s no “true engagement” that relies on responses to stimulus. Engagement is not an emotional state, an intellectual connection, an interpersonal status, or an enlightened way.

Engagement itself simply happens.

After 25 years of research and practice, working with a million people in 250 communities across dozens of provinces and states and countries, I have found that its just that plain. In every small moment of your day, you are voting on your thoughts, words, actions, beliefs, and knowledge. You are engaging constantly in countless seen and unseen ways.

That means here is no time in place where anyone can be entirely disengaged. Even the couch potato staring at the TV and drinking coffee for eight hours a day is engaged—in TV and coffee. Same with the kids cheating in the hallways at school, the employees sneaking cigarette breaks in the bathroom, and the voters who always skip the polls because the lines are too long. They are engaged because they are choosing something over and over, whether or not they’re aware of it.

Engagement – that act of choosing – does not require effort beyond the choice itself. And even that choice can be done unconsciously, because awareness is what requires effort, not choice.

Between the time when you’re unaware of what you’re choosing repeatedly and when you become conscious of what you’re choosing, there is an invisible place within you that is flaring, one that relies on emotional and intellectual energy. I call that place Heartspace, the engine of personal engagement. My research has shown that Heartspace can be deliberately activated in meaningful ways to foster social and interdependent engagement in a lot of ways.

So the next time you’re thinking about engaging someone else, remember that they’re already engaged. If you want them to engage in your thing (activity, issue, outcome, or knowledge) remember you’re asking them to disengaged from something else. You better have a better way.