Speaker 1: Hi, everybody, It's Eric from the one you Feed with
Speaker 1: another mini episode. This week's mini episode is an excerpt
Speaker 1: from part one of a four part series on the
Speaker 1: seven Habits of Highly Effective People that I have been
Speaker 1: putting together. And if you're interested in getting all of it,
Speaker 1: you can sign up for it. It's free at when
Speaker 1: you feed dot net slash email, So just join our
Speaker 1: email list and you will get the episodes. And here
Speaker 1: is the excerpt, and I hope you like it. Covey
Speaker 1: then says, our most difficult experience has become the crucibles
Speaker 1: that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the
Speaker 1: freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and to
Speaker 1: inspire others to do so as well. We've talked on
Speaker 1: the show many times. The one that comes to mind
Speaker 1: is with Christa Tippett, where we talk about how people
Speaker 1: become great not in spite of their difficulties, but because
Speaker 1: of them. Now we begin to talk about Victor Frankel.
Speaker 1: And Victor Frankel was a psychiatrist and a Jew who
Speaker 1: was imprisoned in the death camps in Nazi Germany. His parents,
Speaker 1: his brother, his wife all died in the camps. He
Speaker 1: was tortured and lived in constant fear of death. Now
Speaker 1: I'm going to pick up what Covey says, one day,
Speaker 1: naked and alone in a small room, he began to
Speaker 1: become aware of what he later called the last of
Speaker 1: the human freedoms. The freedom is Nazi captors could not
Speaker 1: take away. They could control his entire environment, they could
Speaker 1: do what they wanted to his body. But Victor Frankel
Speaker 1: himself was a self aware being who could look as
Speaker 1: an observer at his very own involvement. His basic identity
Speaker 1: was intact. He could decide within himself how all this
Speaker 1: was going to affect him, Between what happened to him
Speaker 1: or the stimulus, and his response to it was the
Speaker 1: freedom or power to choose that response. Now, this is
Speaker 1: a very extreme example. However, Man Search for Meaning, the
Speaker 1: book written by Victor Frankel, is so powerful because it
Speaker 1: is such an extreme example. Here we've got a man
Speaker 1: who has every right to have given up on everything,
Speaker 1: and yet is made so much stronger by the circumstances.
Speaker 1: And he does that by realizing that he has final
Speaker 1: control over his behaviors, his actions, and his thoughts. And
Speaker 1: there's a key line in there where it says, between
Speaker 1: stimulus and response, there is a space, and Franco believed
Speaker 1: that within that space led all of our human freedoms.
Speaker 1: Within that space, we can apply self awareness, conscious imagination,
Speaker 1: and we can make decisions about what we want to
Speaker 1: do based on values versus mood or emotions. So how
Speaker 1: do we know when we're being proactive versus reactive? Covey
Speaker 1: suggests that we can take a look at our language
Speaker 1: and a lot of things become very clear there. And
Speaker 1: the language of reactive people tends to absolve us of responsibility.
Speaker 1: That's me, that's just the way I am. There's nothing
Speaker 1: I can do about it. He makes me so mad.
Speaker 1: I can't do that. I don't have the time. If
Speaker 1: only my wife were more patient. The language comes from
Speaker 1: this basic idea of determinism. Our life is controlled by
Speaker 1: outside of us, not by ourselves. However, if you look
Speaker 1: more at proactive language, there would be things like, instead
Speaker 1: of there's nothing I can do, it would be let's
Speaker 1: look at our alternatives. That's just the way I am.
Speaker 1: We could think I can choose a different approach. He
Speaker 1: makes me so mad. I control my own feelings.