Character is an unchanging foundation that supports everything else.
It’s much more important to be a person of character than it is to be successful.
(And the latter is more likely if you are the former…)
Almost everything that’s ever happened in your life has been the result of a choice.
A lot of it has happened because of your own personal choices.
But even those things that have happened to you completely and totally outside of your control have usually resulted from a choice…
Someone else’s choice in that case. And it created circumstances, good or bad, that affected you.
Interesting, and quite sad, to think about.
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Time for a math lesson! Bear with me—it matters.
The Transitive Property of Mathematics says this: for all real numbers x, y, and z, if x=y and y=z, then x=z also.
That makes sense, right?
Why am I telling you this? Because this same mathematical property affects all outcomes you experience in life.
Think about it: how you see an aspect of reality affects how you behave. How you behave affects the results you get. Therefore, how you see things affects the results you get. X=Y and Y=Z, so X=Z as well.
Dr. Stephen R. Covey called this the “See-Do-Get Continuum.” How we see the world affects what we do, which affects what we get in life. (You can learn all about it in his monumental work The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.)
Covey likes to say, “How we see the problem is the problem.” In this case, “seeing” could also translate into “believing.”
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you’re a manager and you’ve recently had a few millennials added to your team. If you believe all millennials are lazy and entitled, you’re going to treat them as such. This will so alienate them and undermine your relationship that pretty soon, they’ll start acting out.
Most likely they’ll rebel against you by doing the bare minimum, scraping by because in their minds nothing they do will be good enough to please you anyway. Why should they put out more effort than necessary?
How you saw them affected your behavior towards them, which affected how they behaved (your results). It’s the Pygmalion Effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Can you see how this continuum affects us when it come to things like race, gender, or religion? Our beliefs shape our actions; our actions shape our outcomes.
So what’s the bottom line?
If you want to change the world—or maybe just your situation in it—start first by changing your beliefs. Work first on how you see things.
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Until we can believe that there is enough to go around, that each of us has the possibility to win alongside others, we cannot live effectively in an interdependent world.
Instead, we will see the world through the paradigm of scarcity. Everything becomes a competition rather than a chance for cooperation and mutual benefit.
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“You have not lived a perfect day, even though you have earned your money, unless you have done something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”
—Ruth Smeltzer
Help someone today in whatever small or grand way you can.
Don’t do it as part of your job—do it because it (and you) are good and decent.
Give the gift of service—true service—where reciprocation is not possible.
A little old lady can never put a price on being helped across the street.
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I am in the second week of a leadership course created by FranklinCovey based on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.*
This week’s topic is Habit 1: Be Proactive. For those of you unfamiliar with the 7 Habits, the first habit is about personal responsibility. It posits that we are the creative force in our own lives. We can choose how we respond to stimuli in the world, and these choices drastically alter our results.
One statement this morning stood out more than others:
“Holding people to the responsible course is not demeaning; it is affirming.”
—Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
We show respect when we refuse to let others blame circumstances for their situations. Holding others responsible tells them “you are where you are because of the choices you’ve made.”
At the same time, we are communicating another message:
“You can make choices now that can lead you to a better situation.”
Of course, our environmental factors must be taken into account. Outside, uncontrollable forces definitely influence our lives. Our upbringing, sex, gender, or socioeconomic status can make things easier or harder. But they do not determine our lives!
Each of us has within us what Viktor Frankl calls “the last of the human freedoms.” We can choose our response to any stimulus. It may not seem like much to you, but this idea was incredibly liberating to me.
“Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.”
Show another person respect. Let them know they have the power to choose.
When you choose, you change things.
*If you want to level up your leadership skills, and earn an industry-recognized certification in the process, check out FranklinCovey’s LeaderU courses at leaderu.us.
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Dr. Covey taught me perhaps the most important and fundamental life lesson of all. It’s the idea of paradigms and the See-Do-Get formula.
Paradigms are our ways of seeing the world. As Dr. Covey describes it, they are maps of the territory we are navigating. As we know, maps are a representation of the world but not the world itself. These “maps” affect every aspect of our daily lives.
Our paradigms put us into a cycle known as “See-Do-Get”. How we see something (our paradigm) affects our behavior (what we do). Our behavior affects the results we get. These results then reinforce our viewpoint. They become a never-ending cycle that can only be short-circuited by changing how we “see”. We must examine the map.
I once knew a teacher whose students approached him about putting on a short play for the school. They saw this as a way to put the English literature they were studying into a fun and creative context. But this teacher saw his students as an uncreative bunch of hooligans with no talent. He did not believe them capable of staging anything worthwhile.
Grudgingly, he let the students “try” to put something together. Because of his mindset, he failed to encourage them, coach them, or help them in any way. His only offering was scathing criticism because he saw no possible positive outcome. The students became increasingly frustrated and unhappy with their efforts. They began to believe their teacher correct in his views and quit the project after a few weeks. Their “failure” further reinforced the teacher’s own paradigm.
I felt devastated when I found out about the situation from the students. Why did it happen that way? Because he saw them as uncreative, incapable, and without talent, he treated them as such. He failed to help or encourage his students and did nothing but criticize and condemn. This behavior led to the results he expected all along.
How we see a problem (or person, political party, or random happenstance) is a problem itself. It affects our behavior and the results we get, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Design thinking teaches us to reframe problems in ways that allow us to take positive action on them. Only by changing how we see something can we get to the root of the issue. If you want to make positive change in any area of your life, first examine how you see the problem.
What would have happened had this teacher been aware of the way he saw his students? What if he had taken a step back and seen them as young, curious, and full of potential? Maybe he would have treated them as budding thespians and offered encouragement. This change in behavior might have led to a fun, engaging, and successful student project. And who knows? It might have had lasting effects on all the students, even the ones who came to watch.
Instead, his negative mindset destroyed all hope of having any success at all.
I’ll leave the final word on this subject to Dr. Covey himself:
“If you want to make minor improvements, change your behavior. But if you want to make quantum improvements, change your paradigm.”
—Dr. Stephen R. Covey
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“He who every morning plans the transactions of the day and follows out that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life…. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.”
—Victor Hugo
What are you doing to ensure you are getting the most important things done rather than merely the most things?
Spend 10 minutes each morning laying out a plan for the day.
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The 5th habit Dr. Covey writes about in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is all about empathic listening: “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Empathic listening is putting aside our own narratives, judgements, assumptions, and listening from the other person’s point of reference. When we do this, we become students learning something new from another point of view.
For some reason this morning, I was thinking about my time in college studying my favorite subjects in history, subjects I had been studying since I was a small child. Sad to say, I remember listening to lectures and discussions with my professors from my own frame of reference: “I already learned all about that. Let me tell you what I already know about this subject to impress you.”
I was the guy who would ask “deep, insightful questions,” when in reality, I was simply asking questions that showed my knowledge of the subject.
How vain, immature, and dumb I was! Had I only been listening––not from my own frame of reference, from the mindset of what I already knew––and instead adopted that wide-eyed curiosity of a child, I could have learned and retained so much more than I did. I would have been able to see the same ideas and subjects in a new light or with new perspectives.
Instead, I listened to validate what I already thought I knew.
Empathic listening doesn’t just apply to difficult or emotional conversations with relationships in your life. It also must be employed in any learning environment to get as much out of it as possible.
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