Off and on he tried to talk with me about his feelings. He’d say, “You know, Angie, what I’d like to do is start my own business. I don’t really want to work for somebody else.”
And I said, “You know what? I really don’t care. We’re in debt for school. We have no equity. You need to get a job and support us. I want to have more children. I want to settle down. I want to stay in one place for a while, and you’re not making that happen for me.” Finally, I had just had it with his not being able to decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. I got really frustrated and went out west to visit my parents.
While I was there, I decided to interview for a job. And I got it. I called Jeff and said, “You’re not getting a job, so guess what I did. I went out and got a job because I wanted to.” I worked at this job for about three months. During this time I was exposed to the 7 Habits.
Jeff finally decided to come out and talk things over. We were so at odds with each other. He was living in Pennsylvania, and I was living in Utah. We barely spoke to each other. We had no home. Everything we owned was in storage. We had a child. We had come to this crisis point: Were we going to be married or were we going to barrel through our lives separately?
We went to dinner the night he arrived, and I thought, I’m going to try this. I’m going to think win-win if it kills me. I’m going to try to synergize if it’s the last thing I do.
I explained some of these things to Jeff, and he agreed to try it. For the next four or five hours we sat in the restaurant talking things over. We started making a list of what we really wanted from our marriage. He was surprised to find that what I really wanted was stability, that I didn’t care so much if he had a normal job, but a normal job was the way that I perceived stability.
“If I can give you stability and open my own business, would that be acceptable to you?” he asked.
I said, “Sure.”
“If I were able to do this and you were able to find work that you enjoy and live in a part of the country that you enjoy, would that be good for you?”
Again I said, “Sure.”
Then he asked, “Do you not like working? Is that why you keep telling me to get a job?”
And I said, “No. I actually love working, but I don’t like feeling that it’s all my responsibility.”
We went back and forth, and we hammered all these things out. We walked out of the restaurant that night with a list of shared, clearly defined expectations. We wrote them down because we were afraid we wouldn’t commit to our plan if we didn’t have it in writing.
Last September, on the one-year anniversary of that dinner, Jeff pulled out the list, and we took inventory of what had happened.
He had opened his own business, which is flourishing. It’s still a huge struggle. He sometimes works twenty hours a day, and I’ve had to keep mum about the debt we’ve incurred to get it started. But the business has actually paid for itself, and we’re already making significant progress in getting out of debt.
I came to consider my own job more seriously—in part because of the risk involved in Jeffs setting up his own business. But I also came to enjoy my work. I was promoted several times and finally found exactly what I like to do.
We bought a home. In fact, we discovered we’d done everything on the list. For the first time in our lives, I feel that we’re stable. And I’m happy. It all began on that night when we sat down determined to practice Habits 4, 5, and 6.
Did you notice how this woman made the proactive choice (Habit 1: Be proactive) to face the challenge in her marriage? Even though it was difficult, she decided to practice Habits 4, 5, and 6 (Think win-win; Seek first to understand, then to be understood; Synergize). She explained the process to her husband, and together they created a list of what they really wanted from their marriage (Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind).
Notice how they started to think in terms of mutual benefit (Habit 4: Think win-win) and moved toward mutual understanding (Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood). As they talked back and forth and each became more open, they made more and more discoveries about how the other felt inside. They hammered out the issues and finally left the restaurant with a list of shared expectations (Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind). Later, they reconnected with that list and evaluated their progress (Habit 7: Sharpen the saw).
Can you see how this couple used the 7 Habits framework to create positive change in their marriage and in their lives?
Let’s look at another example. A single mother shared this experience of going through the disability and death of her husband.
Five years ago my husband, Tom, was in an accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. At that point any future planning stopped for us. We had no focus on the future. We weren’t sure there would even be a future. The only focus we had was on Tom’s survival from day to day.
Just when we would begin to feel secure in his progress, he would go back into the hospital again. This happened about every six months. And these weren’t short hospital stays. He would be there for four to eight weeks at a time. During those stays, any progress he’d made would generally fade, and he’d have to start developing what little skills he had all over again.
It was like being on a roller coaster every minute. You knew you were going over the edge, but you never knew when. There was nothing to hold on to. We knew that the accident meant a shorter life expectancy for Tom, but no one could tell us what that meant. It could be an hour, a day, a year, ten years. We lived in a timeless world waiting for the next shoe to drop.
It was during this time that I changed jobs. The environment I had come out of was one where if you weren’t working sixty hours a week and your work wasn’t first, you weren’t working hard enough or smart enough or fast enough. And suddenly I found myself in an environment where Habit 3 (Put first things first) was the rule of thumb. In this environment, I was told, “You decide what’s first. Not only can you decide what’s first, but you can make it first in your life.”
It was very clear that Tom’s life had a very limited time frame, and I realized that his quality of life was a real priority for me. And suddenly I had been given permission to put him first.
So after work I would go home and spend time with Tom. Sometimes I’d take him places. Sometimes we’d just sit and hold hands or watch TV. But I didn’t have to worry about whether I was working hard enough or smart enough or fast enough. Before, I would run home, feed him, and hurry to get everything done before I had to get back to work the next day. My time with him had been very, very limited. But now that I found I could make him the priority he was in my life, I actually spent the most incredible quality time with him. We talked about his death. We planned his funeral. We talked about our life. Mostly we talked about the things we shared and how much we had enriched each other’s lives. We developed a bond in our relationship during those last six months that went far beyond anything we had ever gained in our lifetime before.
The mission statement I wrote during that time contained this phrase: “I will serve the world one person at a time.” And for six glorious months Tom was the person I served. Tom was very clear what his mission was: to make sure that whatever hardships he had to face he faced with dignity and that he was to find the best learning from his experience and share it with others. He felt that part of his purpose in life was to be a role model for his sons, to make sure they knew that whatever life deals you is something to learn from.
Tom’s death gave us, as a family, a sense of freedom. And my mission statement continued to give me a sense of direction. It was hard. After dedicating every moment of my life to my husband, I was left with a terrible void. But suddenly there was time that needed to be spent with children who were also facing a critical time in their lives. And that mission statement gave me permission to spend time in the healing process that all of us needed. During the next few months that “one person” I had determined to serve sometimes became the children; at other times it was myself.