Habit 1
BE PROACTIVE
Influencing Your Family from the Inside Out
Many of the questions I am asked when speaking to audiences on the topic of family can be summed up with this one question: “How do I get more control of my life?”
Sometimes the question comes from individuals who are so busy with their careers that they feel they have no control over their private family lives. Sometimes the question comes from parents who feel their children are “out of control” with their cell phone use and they want to regain control over them. Other times the question comes from parents who struggle to control their own tempers. Whomever the source and whatever the reason, getting control over one’s life and family is a common quest.
Listen to this single mom describe her efforts to gain more control:
For years, I fought with my children and they fought back. I constantly criticized and scolded them. Our family was filled with contention, and I knew my constant nagging wasn’t helping.
Again and again I resolved to change, but each time I would fall back into negative habit patterns. The situation caused me to hate myself, and I felt helpless to do anything about it.
I gradually identified two sources for my negative behavior. First, I came to see the impact my childhood experiences had on my attitude and actions. My childhood home was broken. I can’t remember my parents ever talking through their problems. They would either argue and fight or give each other the silent treatment. So when I faced similar issues with my own spouse and children, I had no proper example to follow and found myself divorced and dealing with my children the same way that my parents had dealt with me.
Second, I saw that I was trying to win social approval for myself through my children’s behavior. I constantly feared that my children’s behavior would embarrass me. Because of that, I threatened and manipulated my kids into behaving the way I wanted them to behave. I was trying to control their behavior so I would appear to be in control.
I am doing much better these days, yet I still remember those horrible feelings of being out of control and unable to do anything about it.
In this mother’s initial attempts to gain control over herself and her children, she was instead becoming more and more out of control. To her credit, she was self-aware enough to recognize that her behavior was an important part of the solution, and to then take steps to regain some control over her anger and manipulative threats. Without knowing it, she was applying the principles of Habit 1: Be Proactive. The habit begins with the understanding that we as humans have the freedom to choose.
THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE
For sure, we as humans cannot control everything that happens to us in life. Some of us are born into or fall into difficult circumstances that are beyond our control. So what can we control?
Years ago, I was doing research in a college library when a particular book caught my interest. I flipped through its pages and my eyes fell upon a paragraph that has profoundly influenced the rest of my life. It read in essence, “Between what happens to us in life (a stimulus) and our reaction (our response) is a space. In that space lies our power and freedom to choose our responses. In our responses lie our growth and happiness.”
That single paragraph gave me the exhilarating feeling that, even in the midst of challenging circumstances, there are things I can choose to do that will allow me to be more in control of my growth and happiness. Within that concept is the essence of what it means to be proactive.
The Proactive Model
I later discovered that the paragraph I came across was based on the work of Viktor Frankl and his book Man’s Search for Meaning.1 Dr. Frankl was imprisoned in a Nazi camp during World War II. There, most of his freedoms were stripped away from him, and he and the other prisoners were forced to live under atrocious conditions. His captors performed horrible experiments on his body against his will. Family members were killed. While some of the prisoners gave up under those conditions, Frankl noticed that other prisoners went about doing noble acts of kindness, even offering their last morsels of food to fellow prisoners. He concluded that “Everything can be taken from a man [or woman] but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
The concept of being free to choose one’s attitudes and actions was once again brought forcibly to my mind one evening when I received a call from Sandra. “What are you doing?” she asked with fire in her tone. “You know we are having guests for dinner tonight! Where are you?”
I could tell she was upset at me but I had been involved all day in making a client video in a mountain setting. We got to the final scene and the director insisted that it be filmed with the sun setting in the background. To get this special effect forced us to delay for nearly an hour, and it put me behind in my schedule.
Out of frustration, my reply to Sandra was very blunt: “Look, Sandra, I can’t help it that you scheduled the dinner or that things are running behind here. You’ll have to figure out how to handle things at home. I can’t leave. I’ll come when I can!”
As I hung up from the call, I immediately recognized that my response to Sandra was entirely reactive. I was blaming everything on her and the director—on my circumstances. Expectations had been created and I wasn’t there to help her fulfill them. It had put Sandra in a tough situation. But instead of being understanding, I was so filled with my own situation that I had chosen to respond very abruptly to her. I knew that if I had acted calmly—out of my deep love for her—instead of reacting rudely to the pressures of the moment, the results would have been completely different.
Fortunately, we completed the filming sooner than anticipated. As I drove home, my irritation was gone. Feelings of love for Sandra filled my heart as I prepared to apologize. She ended up apologizing to me as well, and the warmth of our relationship was restored. It all started the moment I began to exercise my freedom to choose.
UNIQUE HUMAN GIFTS
Not everyone’s freedom to choose is the same. Some people have more freedom to choose than others, due to the effects of racism, poverty, hunger, opportunity gaps, etc. All circumstances are not equal, and numerous factors influence our ability to be proactive.
Newborn babies are fully dependent on others for the basics of survival. Someone other than the babies chooses their food, where they sleep, and the clothes they wear. So their gap between stimulus and response is quite narrow, which means their freedom to choose is limited. As they mature, however, their gap widens, their freedom to choose expands, and they gradually become more and more independent, developing what I refer to as the “four unique human gifts.” Let me explain.
A favorite mountain location where Sandra and I often took our children over the years is covered with tall aspen trees. We were surprised to learn one day that that particular grove of aspens is the world’s largest known living organism. Above ground, it appears to be a bunch of separate trees, but scientists have discovered through genetic testing that the trees are all connected by acres and acres of an underground root system.
As amazing and beautiful as those aspens are, however, they are the mere products of their genetics and environment. Their genes and environment “determine” their appearance, health, and longevity. The trees do not have the freedom to choose how they will respond to what happens to them on any day, or to influence what will happen to them in the future. In contrast, we humans are influenced by our genetics and our environment, but our growth and happiness is not solely determined by them. Why? Because of our freedom to choose.
A large part of what gives us our freedom to choose and separates us humans from other living organisms is what I have labeled the four unique human gifts. They are the gifts of self-awareness, conscience, imagination, and independent will.
Four Unique Human Gifts
Self-awareness is our ability to stand apart from ourselves and examine our behaviors. We can step away from situations and evaluate our lives, our thoughts, and our actions. We can think about our habits and our families, and about how we might want to change ourselves. Aspen trees—impressive as they are—cannot do this.
Conscience is our ethical or moral sense, and is often referred to as our “inner voice.” It houses our personal standards of right and wrong. It matures with time and helps us to make wise choices. Trees do not think, “My falling branch just harmed that other tree. I feel badly about that and won’t do it again.” But we humans can have such thoughts.
Imagination is our ability as humans to envision a future entirely different from our past experiences. Trees don’t imagine, “This is the type of tree I am today but this is the type of tree I want to become tomorrow.” Humans, on the other hand, do have the ability to imagine and reimagine the type of person or family they want to grow into. They can be resourceful and innovative, and dream of a better tomorrow.
Independent will is what enables us to respond to our genetics and environment. Trees do not have the ability to say, “I think I will choose to move to another mountain today,” or “This is how I will attempt to change my environment this year.” But humans not only can think such things, they can choose to do such things.
Copyright © 1997 by FranklinCovey Company
