Hi, everybody, It's Eric from the one you Feed with another mini episode. This week's mini episode is an excerpt from part one of a four part series on the seven Habits of Highly Effective People that I have been putting together. And if you're interested in getting all of it, you can sign up for it. It's free at when you feed dot net slash email, So just join our email list and you will get the episodes. And here
is the excerpt, and I hope you like it. Covey then says, our most difficult experience has become the crucibles that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and to inspire others to do so as well. We've talked on the show many times. The one that comes to mind is with Christa Tippett, where we talk about how people become great not in spite of their difficulties, but because
of them. Now we begin to talk about Victor Frankel. And Victor Frankel was a psychiatrist and a Jew who was imprisoned in the death camps in Nazi Germany. His parents, his brother, his wife all died in the camps. He was tortured and lived in constant fear of death. Now I'm going to pick up what Covey says, one day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called the last of the human freedoms. The freedom is Nazi captors could not
take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body. But Victor Frankel himself was a self aware being who could look as an observer at his very own involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all this was going to affect him, Between what happened to him or the stimulus, and his response to it was the freedom or power to choose that response. Now, this is
a very extreme example. However, Man Search for Meaning, the book written by Victor Frankel, is so powerful because it is such an extreme example. Here we've got a man who has every right to have given up on everything, and yet is made so much stronger by the circumstances. And he does that by realizing that he has final
control over his behaviors, his actions, and his thoughts. And there's a key line in there where it says, between stimulus and response, there is a space, and Franco believed that within that space led all of our human freedoms. Within that space, we can apply self awareness, conscious imagination, and we can make decisions about what we want to do based on values versus mood or emotions. So how
do we know when we're being proactive versus reactive? Covey suggests that we can take a look at our language and a lot of things become very clear there. And the language of reactive people tends to absolve us of responsibility. That's me, that's just the way I am. There's nothing I can do about it. He makes me so mad. I can't do that. I don't have the time. If only my wife were more patient. The language comes from this basic idea of determinism. Our life is controlled by
outside of us, not by ourselves. However, if you look more at proactive language, there would be things like, instead of there's nothing I can do, it would be let's look at our alternatives. That's just the way I am. We could think I can choose a different approach. He makes me so mad. I control my own feelings.