Tag Archives: Habit 1

I would have killed him, but …….

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in Discipline

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“Test the principle of proactivity for 30 days and see what happens. Make small commitments and keep them.” Stephen R Covey

And that, ladies and gentlemen, ain’t easy.

For those unfamiliar with The 7 Habits, proactivity is where we exercise our self-awareness, creative imagination, independent will and conscience in the gap between something happening to us, and our responding to that stimulus. Note – response, not react. Reacting is instinctive and occasionally results in snapping, retorting, or arguing instead of contemplating, cogitating and considering the appropriate response.

T’other day I was driving along, minding my own business when a lunatic turned across my path, nearly wiping us both out. My instinctive response was to start chasing him/her, which is an example of reacting without consideration. But after about 500 yards or so I exercised the aforementioned endowments and decided that I hadn’t actually been hit, that there was nothing I could do if I caught him and I was more likely to have another bump if I kept up. I took the next roundabout and turned off. (I later called the police, it was that bad. And if he’d actually collided…… who knows.) Despite the adrenalin rush, I chose wisely.

But it wasn’t always so. In a similar incident I pursued and offending driver for about 3 miles, nearly losing control of my car at one stage. That incident taught me the lesson I applied more recently.

Proactivity works.

In terms of the second half of the quote, one of the commitments you could make to yourself for 30 days is to exercise proactivity whenever something happens that would cause you to bite, pause in the gap between that stimulus and your response, and decide instead to do something ‘better’. For example, when your partner says something you would like to correct or even attack, use the gap to decide whether any response is even necessary, or if it is, what response would not make the situation worse while still allowing you to retain your self-esteem.

Like I say – not easy, but really worth it.

Opinions – influenced by falsity?

27 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in Rants

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On a theme of ‘being lived’, another question arises. Is the media to be believed?

In the UK, there is a lot of press attention being given to one particular party at the moment, one which is pro-British and which some take to be racist in intent. I am not considering whether it is or is not. Parties, like any other organisation, are made up of people and if they all thought the same they wouldn’t need committees, so the occasional nutcase will always come out and say something stupid, or contrary to a popular ‘ism’. Again, I do not want to get into that – it’s too dangerous.

What I DO intend to get into is this – can we trust the media, and if so, to what extent?

The Press have done some wonderful things – but.

They expose corruption that we should know about, but they sensationalise misconduct that we really shouldn’t give a toss about. They keep us informed about the facts, but they also twist and exaggerate using adverbs and adjectives which are theirs, and are not necessarily designed to support the facts as much as they are intended to sell newspapers. They expose the ‘surveillance society’ and then take pictures of holidaying ‘celebs’ and focus on their cellulite, or camp outside people’s houses harassing them into submission. (All the time demanding private investigators be licenced for doing far less, but that’s my focus group and I’ll say no more!)

I am amazed by how often, at 6am in the morning, I buy a newspaper that tells me that I (aka ‘the public’) am outraged by something that I don’t know about, yet. So – is that true? Is the public ‘outraged’, or do they just want us to be so we’ll buy their rag?

The BBC is now in the habit of having one journalist report a headline, only to turn to another reporter to interview them – giving us the impression that the latter is an authority on the matter, as opposed to another journalists who has a bit more information than us but is otherwise just as uninformed as us. That air of authority warps our opinions because like it or not, it comes across as authoritative opinion – which it patently is not.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the papers reported “just the facts, ma’am”? No emotive language, no sensationalist descriptive terminology – just tell what is true and leave us to decide whether we care or not. Perhaps then we’d start living in a world where the opinion of the press was no longer relevant, or that there was at least a clear distinction between the facts and the fluff?

I say all this because whether we like it or not, if we are not properly proactive about deciding whether what we hear is accurate, or not, we will allow ourselves to be influenced by things which are INTENDED BY OTHERS to influence us, not things that SHOULD influence us.

Which will really annoy the advertisers!

(Have you noticed how, despite the media’s insistence that their channels are about entertainment and information – all the adverts seem to come on at the same time so you can’t avoid them by channel hopping? )