Habit 1 is all about your power to be the master of your own destiny. As you better understand the concept of paradigms, you can begin to recognize your own paradigms, or “scripting,” and how they’re shaping your life. Once you realize you have a choice in rewriting these scripts, you can determine what principles and values you want your paradigms to reflect, which we’ll work on in Habit 2.
As humans, we have the power of self-awareness, which means we can think about our own thought processes. Unlike animals, humans are not driven purely by instinct and training — we can examine our behavior and our thoughts, and that ability gives us the power to change our behavior and thoughts by making or breaking habits.
We can rise above our moods, thoughts, and feelings, and make deliberate choices about our views, actions, and attitudes. Most importantly, we can create our self-paradigm, which dictates how we see ourselves.
When you become aware of how you see yourself, you can also recognize that the way others see themselves and the world around them greatly impacts their words and actions. This understanding allows you to relate to people on a deeper level. If you don’t have this awareness about yourself — and, thus, about others — you will misinterpret other people’s behaviors and project your own intentions and motivations onto them.
Your self-paradigm is the most critical paradigm in impacting your effectiveness. If you don’t create your own self-paradigm, you’re left to piece together a self-image that’s based on the opinions and feedback you get from others. Unless the people around you have cultivated their own self-paradigms, their reactions toward you are more likely to be projections of their own thoughts and fears than a true reflection of who you are; this can leave you with an inaccurate and disjointed image of yourself, which can cause you to behave in dysfunctional and ineffective ways.
If you don’t choose your self-paradigm and the people around you — or society or systems — are telling you that you’re not talented, have no value, and can’t possibly escape your circumstances, then why even try? You’re likely to submit to that self-fulfilling prophecy and resign to the lifestyle and level of success they say you can achieve. But if you make a conscious choice to reject their opinions and decide for yourself what’s possible for you, then your efforts and actions will reflect that.
Society and popular culture often tells us that we are the products of our conditions and conditioning — our upbringing, environment, era, culture, and other external influences. However, this popular deterministic view robs us of our personal power to create our own results.
Determinism is based on the stimulus/response theory, the idea that you’re conditioned to respond in a certain way to a given stimulus — just like the dog in Ivan Pavlov’s experiment was conditioned to salivate when he heard the whistle that indicated food was coming. There are three theories of determinism, each of which credits your conditioning to a different source.
But in contrast to Pavlov’s dog, humans have four endowments that give you the option to choose your response to a stimulus.
Breaking Free of Determinism
Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychologist who came of age in the Freudian school of thought, which subscribed to psychic determinism — that your childhood and upbringing shapes who you are.
Frankl was a prisoner of Nazi death camps during the Holocaust for several months (his brother, parents, and wife ultimately died in the camps). Amid the suffering, Frankl had the realization one day that he had a freedom the Nazis could never take: He had the freedom to choose his response to this — and any — situation.
Frankl imagined himself in the classroom, lecturing his students about the lessons he was learning there in the camp. The more he practiced this, the stronger this ability became and his mental freedom grew along with it.
Frankl’s practice inspired other prisoners and even some of the guards. After his liberation from the camp, Frankl wrote a book titled “Man’s Search for Meaning” that became renowned worldwide.
(Shortform note: For more on Frankl, see our Shortform summary of Man’s Search for Meaning. Some scholars have criticized Frankl’s accounts for being deceptive and exaggerating the time he spent in the Nazi camps and the hardships he faced while there. Others have criticized logotherapy — his ideology that says people can solve their mental and emotional issues by finding the meaning in their lives — as arrogant and also potentially applicable to justify Nazi actions, if they defined their life’s meaning by ridding the world of Jews.)
In every situation, you have the choice of being reactive or proactive. If you’re reactive, you let your conditioning dictate how you respond to the people and circumstances around you; if you’re proactive, you decide how you’ll respond to create the results you want.
Being proactive requires you to take responsibility for your actions and their consequences. You can’t blame anything on other people or the cards you were dealt because you recognize that you always have a choice of how you act and how you respond to something.
Reactive people allow their physical environment (e.g. the weather) and their social environment (e.g. how people treat them) to determine how they feel and act. This is the outside-in approach; they let things on the outside affect how they feel inside.
Proactive people experience these external forces too, but they take the inside-out approach, choosing how to respond to those outside conditions. Proactive people exercise the ability to suppress a reactive emotional impulse in order to act in accordance with the values they’ve mindfully chosen, cultivated, and internalized.
Being proactive means that you choose to act, rather than be acted upon; you create your circumstances, rather than being subject to them.
To act instead of react, you must take initiative. People who take initiative become the solutions to their problems — they don’t wait for solutions to present themselves. It takes initiative to maintain a P/PC Balance, and to cultivate effectiveness in your life through the 7 Habits.
Frankl names three central values in life.
The attitudinal is the highest value in life, in terms of creating your own paradigm and being proactive. Put another way, the most important factor is how you choose to respond to the experiences and circumstances you encounter in life.
When faced with a difficult reality, being proactive means accepting the hard facts but deciding how to create the most positive situation you can out of them.
If you have a boss who’s very smart but a total micromanager, being proactive doesn’t mean living in denial and resigning by saying, “that’s just the way it is.” A proactive response entails working to buffer his weaknesses and focusing on his strengths; go above and beyond to provide him extra information and do tasks before he asks. When you show him you have the basics covered — the things that he usually hyper focuses on — then you can discuss bigger picture strategy with him and take advantage of his incredible intelligence.
Being proactive and taking initiative are actually natural human actions, but if you develop the habit of being reactive you get accustomed to not using that muscle. If your life thus far has been determined by your conditions and conditioning, it’s because you made the choice (consciously or unconsciously) to allow that. But you always have the choice to take a different course.
It can be difficult to adopt a proactive approach, especially if you’ve spent years blaming your circumstances and conditioning. Additionally, it means you have to own up to the fact that you’ve chosen and allowed everything that’s happened in your life — including the negative.
One simple way to start shifting your paradigm is to watch your words: The language we use both reveals and reinforces our attitudes of proactivity or reactivity. Reactive people tend to find evidence to confirm their belief that external forces are determining their life circumstances, and saying “that’s just the way I am” or “that’s just my luck” shows that you have resigned to your circumstances or conditioning. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy because you’re not motivated or empowered to do anything about it.
Hollywood and popular culture tend to use language that reinforces reactive attitudes. For example, we’ve been taught that love is a feeling — you can fall in or out of love, and it’s beyond your control. It was love at first sight. You were struck with love. Or, suddenly, the love was gone and there was nothing you could do about it and no way to get it back.
Instead, you can be proactive about love and view love as a verb, something you can choose to exercise and cultivate. If your relationship feels like it’s lacking love, take the actions to support, encourage, accept, and love your partner. Develop and strengthen love like it’s a muscle.
Where do you focus your time and energy? There are a million things that may concern you — your children, your work, politics, climate change. That is your Circle of Concern.
How many of those things can you impact? Carefully determine what you have the power to control or influence. That is your Circle of Influence.
Proactive people focus their time and energy on their Circle of Influence. Why waste your efforts spinning your wheels about concerns you can’t impact?
On the other hand, if you are reactive, you focus on your Circle of Concern. You worry about the housing market, or the fate of your sick aunt, or your irritating coworker. Spending your mental and emotional energy on things that are outside of your Circle of Influence reinforces feelings of victimization — you are allowing things that are out of your control to determine your actions and emotions.
Sometimes a person’s status, wealth, job title, or relationships grant her more power and influence than the average person, expanding her Circle of Influence to be larger than her Circle of Concern. Having the broad ability to make a difference but not having concern enough to do so is selfish and another form of being reactive; you’re not taking responsibility for using your influence productively.
Every problem we encounter falls into one of three categories:
Proactive people recognize they can choose their response to each type of problem, and place them all in their Circle of Influence.
While your actions lie within your Circle of Influence, the consequences to your actions are beyond your control. You can’t choose your consequences; at best, you can anticipate them.
Think of an action and its consequence as opposite ends of the same stick: When you pick up one end, the other comes with it. You can’t carry out the action without the consequence following.
By and large, when you act according to your principles, you’ll experience positive consequences. And when you break with these principles, you’ll face the negative consequences.
When you regret the actions you’ve made — and the consequences they brought — these are mistakes. Mistakes lie in the Circle of Concern: You can’t change or undo them. But you can choose whether you accept and learn from them, or dwell on them.
Proactive people acknowledge their mistakes and learn from them. It’s best to do this as quickly as possible, because the longer you go without learning from a mistake, the more likely you are to repeat it.
In contrast, reactive people try to justify, rationalize, or minimize their mistakes. Doing any of these is an additional mistake; when you try to cover up a mistake, you’re empowering it by putting even more energy toward it. Think of it this way: If a poisonous snake bites you, chasing the snake will only cause the poison to course through your system more quickly. The best response for your own well-being is to expel the poison as quickly as possible.
The power to make and commitments to yourself and others is always within your Circle of Influence. Your ability to make and keep those commitments reveals how proactive you are.
When you recognize something within yourself that could be changed or improved, you have the power to determine how to achieve that change by making a commitment or setting a goal. Every time you set a goal — no matter how small — and take the steps to achieve it, you empower yourself to make bigger and more substantial changes in your life. By doing this, you put yourself in charge of your life.
Challenge yourself to 30 days of proactivity: For one month, focus deliberately on your Circle of Influence. Make small commitments and goals — whether they are personal, at work, in your family, or in your marriage or relationships — and work to achieve them. When you make a mistake, acknowledge it, correct it if you can, and learn from it.
Remember the foundations of proactivity and approach things from the inside-out. Resist blaming circumstances or other people. Pay attention to the language you use whether it’s reinforcing a reactive or proactive mindset.