“Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.” — Stephen R. Covey
The first habit is the foundation of all the others. Being proactive means taking responsibility for your life. It means recognizing that your behavior is a function of your decisions, not your conditions. Proactive people choose their responses based on deeply held values rather than reacting to external circumstances, moods, or feelings.
Covey draws a crucial distinction between two types of people. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. When the weather is good, they feel good. When people treat them well, they feel well. They build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.
Proactive people, by contrast, carry their own weather. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value-driven. If their value is to produce good-quality work, it is not a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not.
Most people’s self-image comes from the “social mirror” – the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around them. But this mirror is often distorted. Covey argues that what makes us uniquely human is our capacity for self-awareness – the ability to think about our own thought processes. This is the foundation of proactivity.
Between what happens to us (stimulus) and our response to it, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
Covey identifies four uniquely human endowments that give us the power to be proactive:
The language we use is a powerful indicator of how proactive or reactive we are. Reactive language absolves us of responsibility. Proactive language puts us in the driver’s seat.
The shift from “I have to” to “I choose to” is not mere semantics – it represents a fundamental paradigm shift in how we experience our own agency.
One of Covey’s most powerful models is the distinction between your Circle of Concern and your Circle of Influence.
Your Circle of Concern includes everything you care about: health, children, problems at work, the national debt, global warming. Within that larger circle is a smaller Circle of Influence – the things you can actually do something about.
Proactive people focus their efforts on the Circle of Influence. They work on things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging, and magnifying – causing their Circle of Influence to grow.
Reactive people, on the other hand, focus on the Circle of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. This results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increased feelings of victimization. Their negative energy causes their Circle of Influence to shrink.
Even in terrible circumstances – Covey cites the example of Viktor Frankl in a Nazi concentration camp – we can choose how we respond. Frankl discovered that in the space between stimulus and response, he had the freedom to choose. And in that power to choose lay his growth and happiness.
The problems we face fall into three areas:
At the very heart of our Circle of Influence is our ability to make and keep commitments and promises. The commitments we make to ourselves and to others, and our integrity to those commitments, is the essence and clearest manifestation of our proactivity.
Covey recommends a practical exercise to build your proactivity muscle:
Think of a situation in your life where you tend to be reactive – where you blame circumstances or other people. What would it look like to respond proactively? What is one specific commitment you could make today that falls within your Circle of Influence?