The 8th Habit Challenge - Stephen R. Covey

I just recently started reading the 8th Habit -From Effectiveness to Greatness by Stephen R. Covey. Since the release of Harry Potter's lastest book it has been challenging finding anyone who is reading anything else. I also read the 7 habits but so far I am really enjoying this book better.

Stephen asked readers to take a challenge while reading his book. He wants readers to read a chapter and then take a month before reading the next one. He also encourages people to teach what they've learned and digest the material slowly by incorporating the lessons into their everyday life. Well this manner of book reading and interaction really intrigued me so I decided to give it a shot.

Chapter four deals with discovering your voice. I haven't gotten through the whole chapter yet but I wanted to share with you an excerpt that I found interesting. Read this passage a few times and really think about it.

Between stimulus and response there is a space.

In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.

In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.

It made me think of situations where people are given a stimulus and then react to it. Most of the time negatively. Like waiting in line or dealing with traffic. Maybe even dealing with difficult people. There are stimuli around us all the time and we choose how we are going to react to them.

I guess what really made me say ah, ha, was that the fact that we choose our response. We don't have to react in a negative way, we can choose a positive response. We can choose to make ourselves feel better any time we want. Now some of us have been conditioned to react very fast and in a negative fashion. It may take more time and effort to re-program these responses. However, knowing that we can choose is very empowering don't you think? Rather then have things just happen to us, we can control how it affects us.

Even in situations where we don't feel like we have much control we can still choose the outcome of our responses. Wow!

Next time you find yourself in a situation where their is a less then ideal stimulus remember you choose your response so why not choose one that makes you feel better rather than worse. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

I look forward to sharing other teachings with you as I go along. Feel free to comment if you have read the book or are taking the same challenge.