Habit 1 - Be Proactive

Habit one, proactivity, is the foundation of all other habits. It is a habit of personal vision – the paradigm you have of yourself.

One way to understand proactivity is to contrast it with reactivity. Do you feel better when the weather is great? Become friendlier and more productive? This is being reactive to the weather. A proactive person on the other hand is driven by their values, and chooses to be friendly and productive no matter what the weather.

There is also the social environment. Do you feel better when people treat you better? Become defensive or protective when you’re not? This is being reactive to ones social environment. A proactive person responds based on their values, not their feelings.

Most people are driven by circumstances and their environment. It’s an uncommon ability, but highly effective people, at their very foundation, are not driven by those things. They choose how to react based on their values - their vision for themselves.

Man’s Search For Meaning

Covey recommends reading Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. (I have just ordered it.) Frankl was a jewish psychiatrist who was in the Nazi concentration camps, who wrote of his experiences and insights. Over time he came to realize that he was proactive, though he didn’t call it that. He realized that he had the power to choose his response to his situation. Over time he became to have more freedom than his captors (though less liberty, as this is a property of circumstance)

Covey made one comment that I though was very profound, though he not expand on it : Our responses to our circumstances SHAPE our circumstances. Slowly, imperceptibly. But profoundly none the less.

It is our power to choose how we act, regardless of our circumstances, that is really our ONLY point of power that we possess. Otherwise we are like a cork in a river, being tossed this way and that by circumstance, being reactive to the current. It's is hard to choose a different reaction, especially if we have had years and years of explaining our miseries and failures by our circumstances, but it a choice available to us.

We must choose. Are we proactive? Are we fundamentally responsible for how we behave and act in life?