Habit 1 Be Proactive

This section focused on being proactive. The one point that Covey made that stuck out most to me was when he talked about responsibility. I liked how he pointed out that responsibility "response-ability" is the ability to choose your response. I had never thought about the word in such a way, it makes sense though. Proactive people are responsible and they realize their behavior is based upon their own choices.

One other thing that Covey touched upon was the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies. He says that "a serious problem with reactive language is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy." I think this stuck out to me because earlier today I read a study William Chambliss did about self-fulfilling prophecies called The Saints and the Roughnecks. It was about two different groups of students, one was perceived highly by the community and the other was not, and at the end of the article it showed how the students reacted to the labels they had been given. The group who was perceived highly succeeded in life, but the others for the most part did not. Neither group of students were proactive, rather they were just reacting to their situations and this ended up hurting the roughneck group.

Here is the link for the article. If you have an extra 5 or 10 minutes it's worth reading. http://alpha.fdu.edu/~peabody/Lexicon/Chambliss,_The_Saints_and_the_Roughnecks.html