I have a cat. His name is Jack. Captain Jack Sparrow, if you want the full name.

Jack is the most annoying cat in the world.

If you go into a different room, he will sit outside the door and scream at you. “MerEYOWWWWWWwwwwwwwwww” or something like that. Over and over again until you return to the room in which he is sitting or you let him inside with you.

He beats up his sisters without mercy.

He went through a phase at 3 years old where he peed on the floor in front of our couch if my wife didn’t come home by a certain hour.

He scratches the paint off doors; eats expensive cables like they are spaghetti noodles; chews up the beater on my bass drum pedal; and just this morning, we discovered he had destroyed a set of blinds.

He also loves my wife unconditionally and makes her very happy.

For the first few years we had Jack, I would get visibly angry with him when he misbehaved. He knew it, too, and he never liked me as much as my wife.

However, since I started my deep dive into being a more effective and proactive individual, however, I have noticed a change.

I came to the conclusion that while what he did was very frustrating, I was choosing to react in a very negative manner which upset me and made him unappy with me. I was choosing to yell, to stamp my feet in anger, to curse the day we adopted him. What good did it do?

When I implemented “be proactive” into my life, I began with Jack. I lived by the idea that there is a space between stimulus and response where I could choose how I would react.

Now, when Jack misbehaves, I put him in time out – not with anger or scare tactics, but by simply picking him up and putting him into his room.

I feel better, Jack feels better. Now, he crawls up and falls asleep on my chest when I’m trying to take a nap on the couch, purring all the while.

Here’s my point:

You get to decide how a certain stimulus affects you. You cannot choose the consequence of the stimulus; I could not choose whether or not the blinds got broken when Jack climbed behind them. That was a natural consequence. But there are also natural consequences to my response:

• I did not begin my day with negative emotions and stress.
• My wife does not begin her day with negative emotions and stress, and our relationship is improved.
• Jack knows that he misbehaved, but he also won’t run away from me when I return later today. He will instead greet me at the door with screeching and purring.

Something else you should know – since I began reacting better to Jack’s antics, his behavior has changed. He is less destructive, less abusive to his sisters, and less whiny.

Or perhaps, I just don’t notice it as much because of how I choose to respond.

If being proactive works with cats, how well do you think it will work with your human relationships?