Driving and Restraining Forces
As you move from survival toward significance, you’ll find that there are forces that energize you and help move you forward. Knowledge and hope will push you toward stability. Excitement and confidence drive you toward success. A sense of stewardship and a contribution vision will impel you toward significance. These things are like the tailwinds that help an airplane move more quickly toward its destination—sometimes arriving before the scheduled time.
But you’ll also find there are strong headwinds—forces that tend to restrain you, to slow or even reverse your progress, to push you back, to keep you from moving ahead. Victimism and fear tend to drive you back into the fundamental struggle for survival. Lack of knowledge and a sense of futility tend to keep you from becoming stable. Feelings of boredom and escapism thwart the effort to be successful. Self-focused vision and a sense of ownership—rather than stewardship—tend to keep you from significance.
You’ll notice that the restraining forces are generally more emotional, psychological, and illogical; driving forces are more logical, structural, and proactive.
Of course, we need to do what we can to power up the driving forces. This is the traditional approach. But in a force field, the restraining forces will eventually restore the old equilibrium.
Most important, we need to remove restraining forces. To ignore them is like trying to move toward your destination with your thrusters in reverse. You can put forth all kinds of effort, but unless you do something to remove the restraining forces, you’ll be going nowhere fast, and the effort will exhaust you. You do need to work on driving and restraining forces at the same time, but give the primary effort to working on the restraining forces.
Habits 1, 2, 3, and 7 fire up the driving forces. They build proactivity. They give you a clear, motivating sense of destination that is greater than self. In fact, without some kind of vision or mission of significance, the course of least resistance is to stay in your comfort zone, to use only those talents and gifts that are already developed and perhaps recognized by others. But when you share this vision of true significance, of stewardship, of contribution, then the course of least resistance will be to develop those capacities and fulfill that vision because fulfilling the vision becomes more compelling than the pain of leaving your comfort zone. This is what family leadership is about—the creating of this kind of compelling vision, the securing of consensual commitment toward it and toward doing whatever it takes to fulfill it. This is what taps into people’s deepest motivations and urges them to become their very best. Then Habits 4, 5, and 6 give you the process for working together to accomplish all those things. And Habit 7 gives you the renewing power to keep doing it.
But Habits 4, 5, and 6 also enable you to understand and unfreeze the restraining cultural, emotional, social, and illogical forces so that even the smallest amount of proactive energy on the positive side can make tremendous gains. In fact, a deep understanding of the fears and anxieties that hold you back changes their nature, content, and direction, enabling you to actually convert restraining forces into driving ones. We see this all the time when a so-called problem person feels listened to and understood and then becomes part of the solution.
Consider the analogy of a car. If you had one foot on the gas pedal and the other foot on the brake, which would be the better approach to go faster—flooring the gas pedal or releasing the brake? Obviously, the key is to release the brake. You could even lighten up on the gas pedal and still go faster as long as you got that other foot off the brake.
Similarly, Habits 4, 5, and 6 release the emotional brake (or give air) in the family so that even the slightest increase in driving forces will take the culture to a new level. In fact, there is extensive research to show that by involving people in the problems and working out the solution together, restraining forces are transformed into driving forces.1
So these habits enable you to work on driving and restraining forces at the same time and free you to move from survival to significance. You may find it helpful to go over the chart on the previous page with your family to get a sense of perspective, to see where you feel you are as a family, and to identify driving and restraining forces, and decide what to do about them. You may also want to use it as a tool to help your family move from a problem-solving to a creative orientation.
Where Do I Begin?
Most of us have an innate desire to improve our families. Subconsciously we want to move from survival toward success or significance. But we often have a tough time. We may try as hard as we possibly can and do everything we can think of, and yet the results may be the exact opposite of the ones we want.
This is especially true when we’re dealing with a spouse or a teenager. But even when we’re dealing with young children, who are generally more open to influence, we wonder how to influence them in the best possible way. Do we punish? Do we spank? Do we send them to a room by themselves? Is it right to use our superior size or strength or mental development to force them to do what we want them to do? Or are there principles that can help us understand and know how to influence in a better way?
Any parent (or son, daughter, brother, sister, grandparent, aunt, uncle, nephew, niece, or other person) who really wants to become a transition person—an agent of change—and help a family move higher on the destination chart can do it, particularly if the person understands and lives the principles behind the four basic family leadership roles. Because family is a natural, living, growing thing, we’d like to describe these roles in terms of what we call the Principle-Centered Family Leadership Tree. This tree serves as a reminder that we’re dealing with nature and with natural laws or principles. It will help you understand these four basic leadership roles and also help you diagnose and think through strategies to resolve family problems. (You might want to take a look at the tree.)
With the image of this tree in mind, let’s take a look at the four family leadership roles and how cultivating the 7 Habits in each role can help you move your family along the path from survival to significance.
Modeling
I know of one man who loved to go hunting with his father when he was a young boy. The father would plan weeks ahead with his sons, preparing and creating anticipation for the event.
As an adult, this son told us:
I will never forget one Saturday opening of the pheasant hunt. Dad, my older brother, and I were up at 4:00 A.M. We ate Mom’s big, hearty breakfast, packed the car, and drove to our designated field by 6:00 A.M. We arrived early to stake out our spot before any others, anticipating the 8:00 A.M. opening hour.
As that hour drew near, other hunters were frantically driving around us, trying to find spots in which to hunt. As 7:40 arrived, we saw hunters driving into the fields. By 7:45 the firing had started—fifteen minutes before the official start. We looked at Dad. He made no move except to look at his watch, still waiting for 8:00 A.M. Soon the birds were flying. By 7:50 all hunters had moved into the fields, and shots were everywhere.
Dad looked at his watch and said, “The hunt starts at eight o’clock, boys.” About three minutes before eight, four hunters drove into our spot and walked past us into our field. We looked at Dad. He said, “The hunt starts for us at eight.” At eight the birds were gone, but we started our drive into the field.
We didn’t get any birds that day. We did get an unforgettable memory of a man I fervently wanted to be like—my father, my ideal, who taught me absolute integrity.
Now what was at the center of this father’s life—the pleasure and recognition of being a successful hunter or the quiet soul satisfaction of being a man of integrity, a father, and a model of integrity to his boys?
On the other hand, I also know of another man who set quite a different example for his son. His wife recently said to us:
My husband, Jerry, leaves the guidance of our fourteen-year-old son Sam to me. It’s been that way ever since Sam was born. Jerry has always been sort of an uninvolved observer. He never tries to help.
Whenever I get after him and tell him he should get involved, he just shrugs. He tells me he has nothing to offer, and I am the one who should teach and lead our son.