Action
Decide to meet weekly as a family and talk about your family flight plan. Discuss what you can do to help one another, support one other, have fun together, and stay close all your lives.
During the week, post little reminders here and there about the next family meeting.
Plan fun bonding activities such as a visit to family member not living in your home, a trip to the ice cream store, a sports day, or sharing a great lesson or story that clearly shows how much you value the family and how committed you are as a parent to making it a priority.
HABIT 1
BE PROACTIVE
As I mentioned in the original 7 Habits book, many years ago when I was in Hawaii on a sabbatical, I was wandering through some stacks of books in the back of a college library. A particular book drew my interest, and as I flipped through the pages, my eyes fell on a single paragraph that was so compelling, so memorable, so staggering that it has profoundly influenced the rest of my life.
In that paragraph were three sentences that contained a single powerful idea:
Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
I cannot begin to describe the effect that idea had on me. I was overwhelmed by it. I reflected on it again and again. I reveled in the freedom of it. I personalized it. Between whatever happened to me and my response to it was a space. In that space was my freedom and power to choose my response. And in my response lay my growth and happiness.
The more I pondered it, the more I realized that I could choose responses that would affect the stimulus itself. I could become a force of nature in my own right.
This experience was forcibly brought to my mind again when I was in the middle of a taping session one evening and received a note saying that Sandra was on the phone and needed to speak to me.
“What are you doing?” she asked with impatience in her tone. “You knew we were having guests for dinner tonight. Where are you?”
I could tell she was upset, but as it happened, I had been involved all day in taping a video in a mountain setting. When we got to the final scene, the director insisted that it be done with the sun setting in the West, so we had to wait for nearly an hour to achieve this special effect.
In the midst of my own pent-up frustration over all these delays, I replied curtly, “Look, Sandra, it’s not my fault that you scheduled the dinner. And I can’t help it that things are running behind here. You’ll have to figure out how to handle things at home, but I can’t leave. And the longer we talk now, the later I’ll be. I have work to do. I’ll come when I can.”
As I hung up the phone and started walking back to the shoot, I suddenly realized that my response to Sandra had been completely reactive. Her question had been reasonable. She was in a tough social situation. Expectations had been created, and I wasn’t there to help fulfill them. But instead of understanding, I had been so filled with my own situation that I had responded abruptly—and that response had undoubtedly made things even worse.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my actions had really been off track. This was not the way I wanted to behave toward my wife. These were not the feelings I wanted in our relationship. If I had only acted differently, if I had been more patient, more understanding, more considerate—if I had acted out of my love for her instead of reacting to the pressures of the moment, the results would have been completely different.
But the problem was that I didn’t think about it at the time. Instead of acting based on the principles I knew would bring positive results, I reacted based on the feeling of the moment. I got sucked into the emotion of the situation, which seemed so overpowering, so consuming at the time that it completely blinded me to what I really felt deep inside and what I really wanted to do.
Fortunately, we were able to complete the taping quickly. As I drove home, it was Sandra—and not the taping—that was on my mind. My irritation was gone. Feelings of understanding and love for her filled my heart. I prepared to apologize. She ended up apologizing to me as well. Things worked out, and the warmth and closeness of our relationship were restored.
Creating a “Pause Button”
It is so easy to be reactive! Don’t you find this to be the case in your own life? You get caught up in the moment. You say things you don’t mean. You do things you later regret. And you think, “Oh, if only I had stopped to think about it, I never would have reacted that way!”
Obviously, family life would be a whole lot better if people acted based on their deepest values instead of reacting to the emotion or circumstance of the moment. What we all need is a “pause button”—something that enables us to stop between what happens to us and our response to it, and to choose our own response.
It’s possible for us as individuals to develop this capacity to pause. And it’s also possible to develop a habit right at the center of a family culture of learning to pause and give wiser responses. How to create that pause button in the family—how to cultivate the spirit of acting based on principle-centered values instead of reacting based on feelings or circumstance—is the focus of Habits 1, 2, and 3.
Your Four Unique Human Gifts
Habit 1—Be proactive—is the ability to act based on principles and values rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance. The ability to do that comes from the development and use of four unique human gifts that animals do not have.
To help you understand what those gifts are, let me share with you how a single mother used them to become an agent of change in her family. She said:
For years I fought with my children and they fought with each other. I constantly judged, criticized, and scolded. Our home was filled with contention, and I knew my constant nagging was hurting my children’s self-esteem.
Again and again I resolved to try to change, but each time I would fall back into negative habit patterns. The whole situation caused me to hate myself and take my anger out on my children, and that made me feel even more guilty. I felt that I was caught in a downward spiral which started in my childhood and which I was helpless to do anything about it. I knew something had to be done, but I didn’t know what.
Eventually, I decided to make my problems a matter of sustained thought, meditation, and specific and earnest prayer. I gradually came to two insights about the real motives for my negative, critical behavior.
First, I came to see more clearly the impact my own childhood experiences had on my attitude and behavior. I began to see the psychological scarring of my own upbringing. My childhood home was broken in almost every way. I can’t remember ever seeing my parents talk through their problems and differences. They would either argue and fight, or they’d angrily go their separate ways and use the silent treatment. Sometimes that would last for days. My parents’ marriage eventually ended in divorce.
So when I had to deal with these same issues and problems with my own family, I didn’t know what to do. I had no model, no example to follow. Instead of finding a model or working it through within myself, I would take out my frustration and my confusion on the kids. And as much as I didn’t like it, I found myself dealing with my children exactly as my parents had dealt with me.
The second insight I gained was that I was trying to win social approval for myself through my children’s behavior. I wanted to get other people to like me because of their good behavior. I constantly feared that instead of winning approval, my children’s behavior would embarrass me. Because of that lack of faith in them, I instructed, threatened, bribed, and manipulated my kids into behaving the way I wanted them to behave. I began to see that my own hunger for approval was keeping my children from growth and responsibility. My actions were actually helping to create the very thing I feared: irresponsible behavior.
Those two insights helped me realize that I needed to conquer my own problems instead of trying to find solutions by getting others to change. My unhappy, confused childhood inclined me to be negative, but it didn’t force me to be that way. I could choose to respond differently. It was futile to blame my parents or my circumstances for my painful situation.