reborn

I know I am such a big fan of complaining. I am highly reactive to the behavior of the people around me, the circumstances and even the weather. M had been an avid listener to my woes and sometimes if he is not available, I ram my friends inbox with tons of email or chat endlessly that they choose to be invisible when I am online (sigh!!). And oh, I sometimes talk to myself too. Pathetic, I know.

After the Dubai move and after hubby had been staying at home to be the ‘houseband’, he had been reading lots and lots of books and I can see a big transformation in his behavior and outlook in life. Suddenly he has become more approacheable, with lots of energy and carries sunshine around him everyday. He is reading lots of Stephen R. Covey books and talked about it every single night before we sleep. I had to grab a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

I have listened to the audio CD of this book last year but it was a short summary only. I am reading just 1/4 of the whole book and I am already moved. Excerpts of the parts that made me think a lot:

“PROACTIVITY” defined (explaining the 1st Habit of being Proactive)

While the word proactivity is now fairly common in management literature, it is a word you won’t find in many dictionaries. It means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.

Look at the word responsibility — “response-ability” — the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feelings.

Because we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are a function of conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by concious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us.

In making such a choice, we become reactive. Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and their performance. Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their value is to  produce good quality work, it isn’t a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not.

Reactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the “social weather”. When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values — carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.

Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, concious or unconcious, is a value-based  choice or response.

As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, “No one can hurt you without your consent.” In the words of Gandhi, “They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.” It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place.

I admit this is very hard to accept emotionally, especially if we have had years and years of explaining our misery in the name of circumstance or someone else’s behavior. But until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say “I choose otherwise.”

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