Habit 1: Be Proactive
A chapter summary from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.
“The space between stimulus and response is the space where freedom lives, and proactivity is the daily practice of using it.”
The most basic split Covey draws is between proactive people, who recognize they have the freedom to choose their response to any stimulus, and reactive people, who treat their behavior as caused by what's been done to them. The space between stimulus and response is the space where freedom lives, and proactivity is the daily practice of using it.
This is the easiest habit to misread as positive thinking. It's not. It's the recognition that your circle of concern — the things you care about — is larger than your circle of influence — the things you can do anything about — and that proactive people focus their energy on the circle of influence, which expands as a result. Reactive people focus on the circle of concern, which doesn't expand and which generates frustration.
Concretely: stop the language of I-have-to, they-made-me, I-can't. Replace with I-choose-to, I'm-going-to, I-will. The language matters because the language shapes the available actions.
Someone who says I-had-no-choice stops looking for choices; someone who says I-chose-this can choose differently next time.
Covey roots this freedom in Viktor Frankl, who discovered in the concentration camps that the last of the human freedoms can never be taken: the freedom to choose one's response to any condition. Between stimulus and response is a space, and in that space lies our power to choose. Reactive people deny that space exists; proactive people guard it.
The tell is language. Reactive speech disclaims responsibility: there is nothing I can do, that is just the way I am, he makes me so angry. Proactive speech reclaims it: let us look at our alternatives, I can choose a different approach, I control my own feelings. The shift from I have to to I choose to is not word games; it changes where you locate the cause of your life.
Covey's most practical tool here is the contrast between the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence. The Circle of Concern holds everything we care about but cannot control: the economy, the weather, what others do. The Circle of Influence holds what we can actually affect. Reactive people pour their energy into the Circle of Concern, blaming and waiting, and their Circle of Influence shrinks. Proactive people work on the Circle of Influence, and it expands to fill more of what they once only worried about. The applied test is small and exact: make a promise and keep it, set a goal and work to achieve it, and keep widening that circle one kept commitment at a time. You learn to carry your own weather rather than letting the climate of your day be set by whoever you happened to meet.
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