A Prisoner’s Story

Study the metamorphosis of this man whose life was shattered, yet while in prison lives triumphantly. Notice the immediate effect upon his mind as he becomes aware of the space that exists between what happens to us and our response to it. Then notice what happens when, instead of denying, blaming, and seeking revenge, he chooses to focus on only those things he can control.

I woke up in the hospital one day with my life in ruins. My wife told me there had been a car accident. I’d been drinking at a party with my friend Frank. He was with me when I wrecked the car after leaving the party. Frank was killed.

I was charged with manslaughter for killing my friend. While awaiting trial, I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I walked into the meeting on the first night feeling that I had nothing in common with the people there. I walked out feeling as though I’d never belonged somewhere so much in my life.

The twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous was a big help in turning my life around. I needed help with more than my guilt and my grief over the death of my friend. My marriage was in trouble. I was facing a murder trial. The motorcycle dealership I owned, one of the largest in the country, was deeply in debt. My drinking was really only a symptom of far more significant problems. I drank to dull both the highs and lows of my life. Personally and professionally, I was failing.

With the help of AA, I started looking for material to help change my life. I was thirty-fours years old when I read the Alcoholic Anonymous book. It was the first book I’d ever read cover to cover. The 7 Habits was the second. The part on being proactive versus reactive made a lot of sense to me, particularly because I was probably facing a prison sentence. Id never been in jail. I also ha no idea what would happen to my wife and daughter, my family, or my businesses if they put me a way for thirty years. That was the penalty I faced if found guilty. At times I felt like I wanted to die.

I realized that I had to focus on what I could control [Habit 1 Be Proactive]. At work, I started by focusing on preparing my store managers to handle the business if I went to prison for a long time. I shared with them the principles of the 7 Habits. I also worked with them to reduce the company’s debt.

I began to get the aspect of my life in order, but my relationship with my wife was still deteriorating. She was gone a lot during this period, taking care of a sick brother in Florida. I visited her, but it was clear we were growing further and further apart.

One day, I started suffering terrible cramps in my upper body and arms. It turned out that I had a bone spur in my neck from the accident when I had smashed my head on the roof of the car. The spur was cutting into my spinal cord and required eight hours of surgery. I dropped from 240 pounds to 195. But I got through it, in part because I discovered and read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. In fact I read it four times. I learned from that book that I had the power to control my responses to what was happening to me [Habits 1; Be Proactive]. My world was crumbling, but I did not have to fall apart with it. 

As I began to change from within, people around me noticed. I received a letter one day from my wife saying that she had come to realize that if she divorced me, she might be divorcing the wrong person. She wanted to come home and try to make our marriage work again.

In our visits during the time we weren’t together, I worked hard on seeking first to understand her. I had always tended to think that everything that goes on is about me. It’s false pride or ego. When I learned to not react, but to keep gathering information from her, we began to communicate better, and eventually she moved back in with me.

She had only been home three days when the prosecutors’ office offered me a plea bargain. Instead of the possible thirty year sentence I’d faced, they offered me ten years. I accepted it. When they took me off to prison, I went with Viktor Frankl’s book in mind. Thinking that I was going to make the most out of the experience no matter what happened. I was determined to control what I could control, and to not be affected by those things outside my influence. 

There were a couple of time in prison where I almost got into altercations, but I make myself stay proactive and not reactive. I’d focus on the end in mind, which was to stay out of trouble so I could earn time for good behavior and get home early [Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind]. 

I earned a job clearing the front offices inside the prison and I built trust with the administration to the point that when I mentioned a problem or concern to them, they’d listen. One of the things I saw was that when children were brought to visit their fathers, there wasn’t anything from them to do while the adults were talking. I put together a proposal to form a children’s library for the visit hall. They didn’t have the money, so I had my wife pick out books for different age groups and we paid for them. We had buys in the wood shop make cabinets and the library grew into a big thing. Other people donated books and we even got a Spanish language section.

Now you see hundreds of kids sitting with their fathers and reading books instead of just sitting there or falling asleep like they used to.

I also began sharing what I ‘d learned about changing my life with other inmates who were interested. I ordered more copies of the Frankl book and The 7 Habits and passed them around. I invited inmates to my cell to discuss the principles a couple of times a day and encouraged them to discuss these principles with others.

One day, a Muslim inmate come up to me and said, “Out of all of us in this prison, probably no one has lost more by coming here than you. Yet you are the happiest, most positive person in this room. Why is that?”

I told him: “While I have no control over the circumstances of my life right now, which are the consequence of actions I took years ago, the only thing I can change right now is my attitude and my behavior. And that’s what I focus on. I can walk around here pissed off, kicking furniture, crying the blues, whining, but that’s not going to get me anywhere. It’s certainly not going to get me home to my family any faster, and its not going to make things easier. So I just choose not to be that way, because I might get killed tomorrow, and if I get killed tomorrow, I am not going to waste this entire day, my last day on this earth, being miserable.”

One day, I learned that a fire had destroyed our motorcycle store. My parents watched it burn for twenty hours. When my wife arrived on the scene and saw it had burned to the ground, she collapsed. She had been told there was just a small electrical problem. I was so devastated when I heard about the fire that I went to a friend in the prison. He sat me down and threw back at me everything I’d taught him. He told me that there is something good and a lesson to be learned in everything that happens to you. He got me to see that this would be an opportunity for my parents to build the store on their own. I built it the first time, and this would allow them to present it to me as gift when I got out.  I’ve always been bad at taking things from other people, so this fire will allow me to accept something more gracefully. He said it would also give my parents something to focus on other than the fact that their son is still in prison. I felt a lot better after talking it through with my friend. I moved right through the whole experience. 

I’ve tried to give something back here by sharing with inmates what I have learned about how to keep commitments to themselves. Nearly everyone here is reactive. I would have them post commitments to exercise or read a book, or write a letter. They found that when they fulfilled a commitment, they felt better about themselves. 

Now I am in a halfway house. They’ve formed an honors group of about thirty guys and we have our own area to create a more positive environment. It’s calmer. The guys are older. A lot of people want to move back here with us. In some ways it’s harder than prison because you have to stay focused. You are allowed to leave and go out and work during the day but you have to come back and live within the rules at night or you’ll be sent back to prison. You are caught between two worlds here. 

Since arriving here I’ve developed a seminar I call “Think Before You Drink.” I go to schools and talk to kids that range from ages eight to eighteen. I share my entered experience with them. It is always very emotional. When I finish, their questions for me often last up to forty-five minutes. In this past year I have spoken to nearly ten thousand kids. My message is always the same: choices, actions, and consequences. It helps me deal with killing my friend in my car. From their letters I sense that I’m reaching them.

I keep getting promised that I will be on the next list for release. My wife and daughter have stopped asking when I am going to get out. It hurt too much to be continually told I hadn’t make the list. Again, these are circumstances that I have to live with which are the result of decisions I made and actions I took in the past. I feel bad that other people have to suffer, too, but again, it’s been a growing experience for all of us. My wife is a totally different person than she was four years ago. She’s so much healthier now,  in all ways: spiritually, mentally, physically. She plans to enter a fitness contest for the first time at thirty-two years old. When I first went to prison, she used to say that there could not be a God because of all that had happened to us. But a year and a half a go, she wrote me a letter. She enclosed the “Serenity Prayer” and wrote me a poem. She closed by saying that she would be honored to walk into eternity with me. 

It has been a growing experience for all of us. No doubt about. 

Isn’t it fascinating that despite the complications of your past life and present circumstances, by simply becoming proactive in your Circle of Influence, you’ve put on a totally different road of healing, of recovery, of contribution, of courage, and of peace. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all the psychic scars of the past are healed, for those scars may reassert themselves in other ways in the future. But it does mean that if you take responsibility for your response in the present moment, and if that response is based upon a value system of working within your Circle of Influence, that action may mitigate or, through faith, may even erase those psychic scars. 

Those who work around prisoners commonly acknowledge that their fundamental problem is that they deny responsibility for their situation. So the concept of taking responsibility being proactive and working within your Circle of Influence hits the issue at its very heart. In other words, if there is any space between stimulus and response, no matter what the circumstance genetics, present pressures, or past emotional or psychological scarring the most liberating, ennobling, exalting, and freeing thing of all is the awareness of the ability to choose one’s response.

This is the essence of the work of Nazi death comp survivor Viktor Frankl.

I phoned Mr. Frankl several months prior to his passing to express my tremendous appreciation for his life’s work. He said, “Don’t write me off yet. I still have two more projects to finish.” Meaningful projects were what his life’s work was about. He represented a new force in psychotherapy called logotherapy “logo” standing for the search for meaning, the search to find a purpose, a reason, a goal, a task which carries personal meaning. He said that even though he was blind, his wife was reading to him several hours a day and helping him with these projects. He died the same week that Mother Teresa and Princess Diana died. 

Story from: Living The 7 Habits

My Living Nightmare

The following story is profoundly sobering. Sense the depth of this man’s sorrow, and also the exhilarating power of a single idea-that there is space between stimulus and response.

After graduating from college, I become a successful engineer. Then in my late twenties, I felt my inner voice telling me that I could teach single adults. 

So I quite my career and enrolled in a seminary. 

I poured myself into my studies and graduated with the highest honor the seminary faculty and administration awards each year. Just before graduation, my wife and I, together with our newborn son, Seth, moved so I could be involved with a single adults program at a large church. Again, I become successful, and enjoyed a thriving ministry that was making a difference in the lives of people. 

Our family flourished in our new situation We were expecting our second child in two months. Life was good. One night, as my wife lay resting on the couch, I decided to clean my shotgun. As I was cleaning the gun, it discharged and shot my wife. The doctors were unable to save here or our unborn child.

I was devastated. It was living nightmare. My emotions alternated from denial to anguish to despair and complete emptiness. At age thirty-three, my life came to a screeching halt. I moved in with my parents for a few months after the accident. I couldn’t live alone. I continued to minister to my congregation for almost two years. Actually, they ministered to me. But I had to stop because the situation was a painful reminder of my life with Julia. You know, when you’re a religious leader, your wife and family are such an integral part of your work. I could hardly walk into the church without feeling a rush of pain and remorse. So I quit this job that had given me so much joy. 

I didn’t really move on to much either. A friend of mine gave me a job selling large construction equipment. I’d never sold large equipment in my life-didn’t when know the name of some of the pieces at first. Although my job wasn’t really brain surgery, it was a godsend. All I needed to do was show up, sell some compressors of a few backhoes in the course of a month, and go home, I wasn’t intellectually stimulated, I wasn’t challenged. I couldn’t have been at the point. I was still numb. My brain and mind and heart were still trying to process what had happened. So that kind of job was just what I needed. 

For a while my life was on autopilot. I woke up, fed Seth, took him to day care, when to work, picked him up, made dinner, cleaned up, and went to bed.

Before the accident, I was a very driven person. I would set goals and accomplish them. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of one thing that I wanted to accomplish after the accident. I could do all the little, everyday things that needed to be done, like shopping for milk. But I couldn’t bring myself to start doing the important things. I couldn’t, for example, start to plan a new future for Seth and myself. I just didn’t have it in me to think that far ahead or with that much interest in the future. 

I started taking the book First Things First to the park and began to read just little bits at a time. When I came to the section about stimulus and response, I recognized myself. I know that I was standing at the edge of the space between stimulus and response. I’d been standing in that space for three years actually. For three years, I had slowly, inch by incremental inch, been moving toward the time that I could respond. Now, finally, three years later, I felt I could respond to my wife’s death.

This feeling wasn’t an instantaneous kind of experience. Slowly, gradually, I felt capable of more control, more initiative, more action. I can remember taking to one of my best friends, a pastor. I said, “I’m having all these weird sensations again. Something isn’t right.”

He replied, “Phil, I think what’s happening is that you’re waking up.”

“What do you mean I’m waking up?”

“Well, you’re finally ready to leave your cocoon. Your body, your mind, your heart are ready to live again. So, I think you’re waking up.”

One of the first goals I set was to finish the book. I used to be a voracious reader before my wife’s death, but I hadn’t read a book all the way through in three years. I probably hadn’t even read a magazine either. As I read I became more and more alive. I also felt more equipped to tackle the future and more ready to shape it rather than let it just happen to me.

My second goal was to leave a legacy for my son. I didn’t want my legacy to be that my life never got going again. I decided to concentrate on building something he could be proud of. You mustn’t think I was gung ho from the beginning. I slowly began to sit up and take notice. I thought long and hard about what was important to me and to Seth. I took as my motto to live each day as if it were my last, so that I would always do the important things first. I examined how I could incorporate this mind-set into my future plans. Then I formulated a mission statement that would help me recover, make a contribution to this world, and develop strong relationships with my loved ones. Slowly, surely, our lives became brighter, livelier, and livable. Ecclesiastes in the Bible talks about a time for everything. When the time was right, I was able to pick myself up and set on with life. 

Today I am happily remarried. Seth loves his new mother. I have two beautiful stepdaughters. And my wheels are turning-somewhat slowly, somewhat methodically, but still turning. I began publishing a newsletter for remarried families, I’ve purchased my own business, and I’ve accepted many speaking engagements for the upcoming year. 

Without a doubt, the most difficult thing I have ever done was forgive myself for the accident. The second was to live through the grieving process. The third was to have the courage to dream again and then begin the process of making those dreams come true.

Please understand, I still have what I call “my blue funks.” As John Claypool, an Episopalian minister, once said after his eight-year-old daughter died of leukemia, “I will walk again, but it will always be with a limp.” I might be limping, but I am moving along. 

I would like to share a personal exhilarating moment that I recounted previously in my other books. It occurred when I was on sabbatical in Hawaii. I was wandering through some stacks of books in the back of a college library. A particular book drew my interest, and as I flipped through the pages, my eyes fell on a single paragraph that was so compelling, so memorable, so staggering that it has profoundly influenced my thinking and my life.

In that paragraph were three sentences that contained a single powerful idea:

Between stimulus and response, there is a space.

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

In our response lies our growth and our happiness.

I cannot begin to describe the effect that idea had on me. I was overwhelmed by it. I reflected on it again and again. I reveled in the freedom of it. I personalized it. Between whatever happened to me and my response to it was a space. In that space was my freedom and power to choose my response. And in my response lay my growth and happiness.

The more I pondered it. I could become a force of nature in my own right. 

You ‘re Successful.. but Are You Happy?

I’ve often told the story about the person who was climbing the ladder of success and got to the top rung only to find it was learning against the wrong wall. This story illustrates how Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind essentially defines the wall you want to put your ladder against.

I was sitting at a restaurant with a young guy who had been with our agency for about five years. He had a large home, a parking place close to the front door, and a brass nameplate on his door. Over lunch, we started talking about the definition of success. I mentioned a Personal Mission Statement. He said he hadn’t heard about the concept. To demonstrate to him how to go about creating one, I asked him what was important to him. He started naming all the things he wanted to do. Not one had anything to do with his job.

I was intrigued. “Well, are you happy?” I asked him when he finished. 

He said, “Well, no.”

I said, “But you’re successful, right?” and laughed a little. He just sat there thinking.

I didn’t see him again for a couple of months because we were traveling to different parts of the country. One day, I spotted him in the hallway. Wanting to catch up on his life, I thought I’d walk him to where he was going. “Hey, Christian wait up. Where you going? I’ll walk with you.”

“I’m not going anywhere. This is my last day,” he said with a grin. 

I was shocked. “What”

“Yeah, I was just in to see the boss. He asked me why I was leaving. I told him it was your fault.”

“Oh no. You’re kidding me. Why’d you tell him that?”

“Well, I told him about our conversation in El Paso. About how you make me look at my life to see whether I was doing what I wanted to do with my life.

And I wasn’t . So I quit this job to start doing the things I really love. Thanks, buddy.”

I haven’t seen him for about two years now. When he quit his job, he and his wife started their own little roofing company. He likes working with wood. He used to be in the telecommunications field; now he’s hammering shingles on roofs and building porches. And guess what? He’s happy. 

The Western world is very action-oriented, the Eastern world more reflective. Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind, and Habit: 3 Put First Things First, attempt to bridge East and West-reflect, and then act on your decision. This story beautifully illustrates the power of choice (Habit 1: Be Proactive), thinking carefully about what matters most (Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind), and then acting upon it (Habit 3: Put First Things First). This man made a courageous 180-degree shift by putting his success ladder against the wall of happiness. The best way to predict your future is to create it.

Source: Living the 7 Habits