“The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.” – Samuel Johnson

Taking responsibility for our lives, our attitudes, our happiness and the outcomes in our lives is true freedom. Knowing that our future is completely up to us is freeing and terrifying at the same time.

Be Proactive is the first habit listed by Stephen Covey in his book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” Be Proactive is the first of three habits aimed at improving our “internal game.”

Covey outlined three great concepts under this habit that I want to highlight for you (and for me). The concepts are The Gap, Our Language and the Circle of Influence.

The Gap

The first time I learned about the gap between stimulus and response was from the writings of Victor Frankl. Frankl was a prisoner in the death camps of Nazi Germany. Frankl lost his parents, his brother and his wife in the death camps. Only his sister survived.

Frankl writes that it was while enduring torture and the death of loved ones he learned what he calls “the last of human freedoms.” That freedom was his ability to decide how what others were doing to him would affect him. Frankl defined this freedom as the gap between stimulus and response.

That gap is what separates humans from animals. While being brutalized, Frankl chose to visualize himself lecturing to his students after his release from the death camps. He imagined teaching the students the lessons he learned from his torture. In doing so, he brought purpose to his situation and a reason to live.

We all have this freedom. The freedom to create a gap between a stimulus (something that happens to us) and our response. During that gap, we have an opportunity to choose the best response.

We can choose our response to disparaging remarks from others. We can choose how we respond to our children when they are not acting the way we would like them to. We can choose if we eat the junk food when the craving hits.

Making the best choice is not always easy but if we keep trying, we will make the right choice more often. The more we make the right choice, the better our outcomes will be.

Our Language

“For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” Luke 6:45 (NKJV)

My language was the first area that my good friend started working on when I was coming back to the church and renewing my relationship with God. My friend would bring it to my attention whenever my words did not line up with the truths of the Bible.

Slowly but surely, I began to change what was in my heart which changed what I spoke.

We can know if we are being proactive or reactive by the words we speak. Do we “have” to go to work or “get” to go to work? Does someone’s actions “make” me mad or did I “choose” to be mad.

Covey recommends we look for “haves” and “bes” in our speech as a great way to recognize if we are being proactive or reactive. Here are some examples of reactive thinking using haves:

I’ll be happy when I have …

If I had …

Or we could take responsibility for the problem and say things like:

I can be more …

I will be more

When we recognize more “bes” in our speech we’ll know that we are taking ownership. We are taking back the power to change our lives and the lives of those around us.

Changing our hearts can be a frustratingly slow process, but we can all do it. We can start the process by choosing the right words even when the words don’t match our feelings. Eventually, our feelings will catch up with the words we speak and the visions we focus our minds on.

Circle of Influence

I had not seen this concept in years and as soon as I read it numerous examples of me goofing it up shot into my mind! How much time do we spend worrying or talking about things that are out of our control? If you are anything like me, way too much!

The Circle of Influence reminds me of a health talk by CrossFit founder Greg Glassman. In it, Glassman states that 75% of our health outcomes are completely up to us. Those outcomes are based on what we eat and how much we move. The other 25% of outcomes are generated by genetics or bad luck. The 25% are outside our circle of influence and we get no benefit from thinking about them.

The same rules apply to the rest of life. We need to focus on our “circles of influence” – the things we can control – and ignore the things that are outside of our control.

Covey states that the problems we encounter fall into three categories. Direct Control – problems involving our behavior. Indirect Control – problems involving other’s behavior. No Control – problems we can do nothing about. No Control problems include the past or situational realities.

We can work on ourselves to fix direct control problems. We can work to increase our influence to solve indirect control problems and we can stop worrying about no control problems!