In Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the author shows us a quick and easy path to success by improving our everyday habits. These habits are divided into habits that generate our personal victory, and others that generate our group victory.
The first habit the author mentions that enhances our personal victory is the habit of proactivity.
We are in a certain way or have a certain personality for several reasons:
The first is genetics, just as we inherit eye color from our father and face shape from our mother, there are also certain traits in our personality that we inherit from one of them. The shy, the angry, the distrustful, etc.
On the other hand, our environment also deeply influences our personality and our habits, this environment begins when we are little and the labels that are put on us as much as our parents, as our teachers or as anyone who has authority for us. These labels many times, and by being repeated frequently, manage to reduce our security to propel us to resounding success.
Examples of these tags are:
"You are very bad at mathematics" "You already spoiled this, you better not help me anymore, I do it better by myself" "You have very small hands, you can hardly be a good pianist" "With that character you will never be able to nowhere in life "
There are other types of labels that are somewhat positive:
"You are a very intelligent child, I am sure you will achieve what you set out to do in life" "I know that the decisions you make will be the right ones, you have a lot of common sense" "You are a champion" "You have a super character "
Many times these opinions do not have much to do with reality, but rather with the opinion of who is issuing them. However, many of these opinions, however subjective they may be, manage to condition our lives in one way or another.
Other situations that affect our character are the environment in which we have lived as children, for example, a life full of punishments, a life full of fear, living with parents who fought all the time and humiliated their children, or whatever. On the contrary, parents who motivated their children with love, a harmonious family environment. School also greatly influences our personality, whether it was a very rigid and inflexible or flexible and condescending education, even the personalities of our friends or the way our teachers treated us.
Regardless of what happened in the past, in our daily lives there are also situations that affect our way of being, for example, a job dismissal, an accident, a national crisis, a lottery prize.
In summary here what we see as the author says is that we condition ourselves to respond in a certain way to a certain stimulus, that means that something in our environment is responsible for our situation, personality, character or mood of the moment.
Now, what makes us proactive is what Victor Frankl calls "the last of human freedoms." What does this refer to? To the discovery that others can totally control our environment, whether they are people or situations, that we can be full of problems, that we can be out of work, that we may be going through a very strong economic crisis, that we can be very delicate about Health.
Many things can happen in our environment, but we are total and absolute owners of how we want to feel or react to these stimuli. That is, between the stimulus and the response, each of us has the freedom to decide how we want to react.
The word proactivity makes us responsible for our own lives and our attitude towards it. Here it is no longer a question of blaming anything or anyone for our happiness or behavior, it depends on our decision to be so and take away the power of everything else in our attitude towards life.
The author speaks of the opposite of proactivity and it is the fact of being reactive, reactive because we react and feel affected and in a bad mood by the weather, by our children's grades, by inflation. If our environment is good, we are good, if our environment is bad, we react automatically as a consequence of what happens, because a car closed on us in traffic, because we forgot to put gas in the car and now that we are in a hurry there is We had to go first to load the tank, because the one behind us honked the horn, because the pesero went over the top and we had to stop on our way, because they raised our rent, because it is month of payment of tenures, because the ashes from the poop littered my car again.
This all sounds like a joke, but if we sit down to reflect further, we will discover with disappointment the amount of things that we allow to affect us during the day, during the weeks and in the course of our lives.
Now, a very important point that must be clarified, the fact of not feeling affected by what happens to us does not mean that we become conformists who do not lift a finger to get what we want, it does not mean losing the initiative to do things or to solve the problems. This is not sitting placidly and watching life go by without us being more than spectators in it. We have both goals and problems.
The common denominator in both is that both goals and problems are situations to be solved. Here the idea is this, take control of your life, decide what you want to do and how you are going to do it, just do not allow the small or big stumbles you come across to embitter your existence.
We will always have stumbling blocks and difficulties, and these are only indicative that the path you are taking is not the right one, that it must be changed.
But if we wait to be happy the moment we have our problems solved or our goals achieved, we are going to see ourselves all our lives chasing a happiness that will never come.
Publication authorized by its Author.
