Habit One: Be Proactive

The Seven Habits of Highly Effec­tive Peo­ple has been my text­book for the last month. I’ve blogged about the intro­duc­tory chap­ters, but haven’t delved into the indi­vid­ual habits them­selves. Since it’s due back at the library this Fri­day, I won’t have it as a ready ref­er­ence until I actu­ally buy it for myself.  Read­ing it and exam­in­ing my own life, I find I prac­tice most of the habits in cer­tain sce­nar­ios, and not at all in oth­ers. Since those tend to be the areas I truly shine and feel great con­fi­dence in, I can see the value of con­sciously apply­ing the habits in all aspects of my daily life.

Each habit builds on the last, so the first habit, Be Proac­tive, is the most basic foun­da­tion of all effec­tive people. Covey talks of Vik­tor Frankl, who lost almost all of his fam­ily in the con­cen­tra­tion camps of Nazi Ger­many, as the embod­i­ment of this term.  Frankl found mean­ing, despite every­thing that he lost, by think­ing on how this would shape him years from now.  He man­aged to turn his very response to the time in the con­cen­tra­tion camps into a time to develop a stel­lar char­ac­ter.  Even­tu­ally he influ­enced thou­sands of lives for the bet­ter by teach­ing this very les­son to others.

Humans have a unique capac­ity to choose the response to stim­uli.  Proac­tive peo­ple take charge of their own con­scious­ness.  Reac­tive peo­ple forego that abil­ity, so if life is good, so are they, but if life is bad, they can’t help it. They allow them­selves to become vic­tims or mar­tyrs to cir­cum­stance.  Cer­tainly, know­ing that my feel­ings are hurt because I allow it doesn’t take away dis­ap­point­ment or heart­break.   But I can decide how it affects me.  Do I learn from it, or do I allow myself to become bro­ken and jaded?  Do I allow my suc­cesses to make me com­pla­cent and spoiled, or am I grate­ful and hard­work­ing as a result?  I have the choice.

When my kids were born, I felt for a long time that other peo­ple were run­ning my life, and I felt a great resent­ment.   The less I stood up for myself, the more peo­ple used me as a door­mat.  The fore­clo­sure on my house snapped me out of that funk. It was huge — here I was doing every­thing every­one wanted me to, even though I saw a thou­sand ways things could be done bet­ter.  Did I do those things?  No, because I wanted to make every­one else happy.  Instead, I ended up mis­er­able with­out a home.  In 7 days, I had to find a new place to live, with no credit and no money. Thank God for anger, because that was the fuel I ran on for a while. I also had friends for moral sup­port, and I am very grate­ful to them.  There were even offers to bail us out, on the con­di­tion that the peo­ple bail­ing us out truly could run our finan­cial lives. I had a chance to turn my life over again, and con­tinue to blame other peo­ple for their active roles in crash­ing my finances and my fam­ily life.  Sadly, it was tempt­ing at first, but that offer really sealed the les­son for me.

Against the wishes of extended fam­ily and friends, we chose to start tak­ing con­trol again. The peo­ple who had tried to take over our finances truly meant well, I think.  Hon­estly, fol­low­ing their plan would only have weak­ened our char­ac­ters fur­ther.  Sure, we’d have learned humil­ity, but at the cost of our own dig­nity and power.  The tran­si­tion back to mar­i­tal and fis­cal health was painful and dif­fi­cult, and I still strug­gle daily with my atti­tude.  But I will not allow myself to turn over my life to any­one else again, nor will I allow neg­a­tiv­ity to rule my life.  I do not blame any­one, not even my hus­band, for any of that mess today, because I could have stopped it.

After this habit, all the oth­ers seem fairly sim­ple, actually.