The 7 Habits are based on universal, timeless, and self-evident principles that are just as true in the world of human relations as the law of gravity is in the physical world. These principles ultimately govern in all of life. They have been part of successful individuals, families, organizations, and civilizations throughout time. These habits are not tricks or techniques. They’re not quick fixes. They’re not a bunch of practices or “to do” lists. They are habits—established patterns of thinking and doing things—that all successful families have in common.
The violation of these principles virtually guarantees failure in family or other interdependent situations. As Leo Tolstoy observed in his epic novel Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”1 Whether we’re talking about a two-parent or a single-parent family, whether there are ten children or none, whether there has been a history of neglect and abuse or a legacy of love and faith, the fact is that happy families have certain constant characteristics. And these characteristics are contained in the 7 Habits.
One of the other significant principles my friend learned in this situation concerns the very nature of change itself—the reality that all true and lasting change occurs from the inside out. In other words, instead of trying to change the situation or his son, he went to work on himself. And it was his own deep interior work that eventually created change in the circumstance and in his son.
This inside-out approach is at the very heart of the 7 Habits. By consistently applying the principles contained in these habits, you can bring about positive changes in any relationship or situation. You can become an agent of change. In addition, focusing on principles will have a far greater effect on behavior than focusing on behavior alone. This is because these principles are already intuitively known or deeply embodied in people, and seeking to understand them will help people understand more of their own true nature and possibilities, and unleash their potential.
One of the reasons this inside-out approach is so vital today is that times have changed dramatically. In the past, it was easier to successfully raise a family “outside-in,” because society was an ally, a resource. People were surrounded by role models, examples, media reinforcement, and family-friendly laws and support systems that sustained marriage and helped create strong families. Even when there were problems within the family, there was still this powerful reinforcement of the whole idea of successful marriage and family life. Because of this you could essentially raise your family “outside-in.” Success was much more a matter of “going with the flow.”
But the jet stream has changed—dramatically. And to “go with the flow” today is family-fatal!
Even though we can be encouraged by efforts to return to “family values,” the reality is that the trends in the wider society over the last thirty to fifty years have basically shifted from pro-family to anti-family. We’re trying to navigate through what has become a turbulent, family-unfriendly environment, and there are powerful headwinds that easily throw many families off track.
At a recent conference on families, one state governor shared this sobering experience:
I had a conversation recently with a man whom I consider a very good father. He told me this story:
His seven-year-old son recently seemed to have some things on his mind. He said, “Dad, I just can’t quit thinking about it.” And this father assumed that it was a nightmare or some kind of scary movie he had seen.
But after a lot of persuasion and some coaxing, he told of horrible, ugly hard-core pornography that he’d been exposed to. The father said, “Where did this come from?” The boy gave him the name of a nine-year-old neighbor, a trusted neighbor. He had seen it on the computer. “How many times did you see it?” the father asked. “Lots of times” was the reply.
Well, the father went to the parents of the nine-year-old. They were shocked. They were dismayed. They were sickened to think that the minds of these two little boys had been polluted at their tender age. The parents of the nine-year-old confronted him. He collapsed in tears. He said, “I know it’s wrong, but I just keep looking at it.”
They were concerned, of course, that there might be an adult involved. But no. It was introduced to the nine-year-old by a sixth grader who gave him the Internet address at school and said, “Look at this. It’s really cool.” And it spread around that neighborhood like a plague.
The father told me that they had encouraged their children, as they felt they should, to learn to use the computer. And the nine-year-old was good at it. But they kept the computer downstairs, behind a closed door. Unwittingly, they had turned that room into a porn shop.2
How could this happen? How could it be that we live in a society where technology makes it possible for children—who have no wisdom or experience or judgment on these matters—to become victims of such sick, deeply addictive mental poisoning as pornography?
Over the past thirty years the situation for families has changed powerfully and dramatically. Consider the following:
Illegitimate birth rates have increased more than 400 percent.3
The percentage of families headed by a single parent has more than tripled.4
The divorce rate has more than doubled.5 Many project that about half of all new marriages will end in divorce.
Teenage suicide has increased almost 300 percent.6
Scholastic Aptitude Test scores among all students have dropped 73 points.7
The number one health problem for American women today is domestic violence. Four million women are beaten each year by their partners.8
One-fourth of all adolescents contract a sexually transmitted disease before they graduate from high school.9
Since 1940 the top disciplinary problems in public school have changed from chewing gum and running in the halls to teen pregnancy, rape, and assault.10
In the midst of all this, the percentage of families with one parent at home with the children during the day has dropped from 66.7 to 16.9 percent.11 And the average child spends seven hours a day watching television—and five minutes a day with Dad!12
The great historian Arnold Toynbee taught that we can summarize all of history in one simple idea: Nothing fails like success. In other words, when the response is equal to the challenge, that is success; but when the challenge changes, the old response no longer works.
The challenge has changed, so we must develop a response that is equal to the challenge. The desire to create a strong family is not enough. Even good ideas are not enough. We need a new mind-set and a new skill-set. The challenge has taken a quantum leap, and if we are to respond effectively, so must we.
The 7 Habits framework represents such a mind-set and skill-set. Throughout this book I will show you how—even in the midst of the turbulent environment—many families are using the principles in the 7 Habits framework to get and stay on track.
Specifically, I’m going to encourage you to set aside a special “family time” each week that, barring emergencies or unexpected interruptions, you hold inviolate. This family time will be a time for planning, communicating, teaching values, and having fun together. It will be a powerful factor in helping you and your family stay on course. I’m also going to suggest that you have regular one-on-one bonding times with each member of your family—times when the agenda is usually written by the other person. If you do these two things, I can almost guarantee that the quality of your family life will improve dramatically.
But why mission statements? Why special family times? Why one-on-one bonding experiences? Simply because the world has changed in profound ways, and the speed of change itself is changing, is increasing. Without new basic patterns or structures in place, families will be blown off course.
As Alfred North Whitehead once said, “The habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of wisdom.”13 You don’t have to learn a hundred new practices. You don’t have to be constantly searching for newer, better techniques. All you need is a basic framework of fundamental principles that you can apply in any situation.
The 7 Habits create such a framework. The greatest power of the 7 Habits does not lie in the individual habits but in all the habits together and in the relationship between them. With this framework you can diagnose or figure out just about anything that happens in any conceivable family situation. And you can sense what the first steps are in fixing it or improving it. Millions of people who got into the original 7 Habits material can so testify. It’s not that the habits tell you what to do but that they give you a way of thinking and of being so that you will come to know what to do—and when to do it. How to do it will take skill, and that involves practice.