Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

either.”
Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly
I saw things differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation
vanished. I didn't have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior;
my heart was filled with the man's pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion
flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I'm so sorry. Can you tell me about it?
What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.
Many people experience a similar fundamental shift in thinking when they
face a life-threatening crisis and suddenly see their priorities in a different light,
or when they suddenly step into a new role, such as that of husband or wife,
parent or grandparent, manager or leader.
We could spend weeks, months, even years laboring with the personality
ethic trying to change our attitudes and behaviors and not even begin to
approach the phenomenon of change that occurs spontaneously when we see
things differently.
It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our
lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if
we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic
paradigms.
In the words of Thoreau, “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil,
there is one striking at the root.” We can only achieve quantum improvements in
our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to
work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.
Seeing and Being
Of course, not all Paradigm Shifts are instantaneous. Unlike my instant
insight on the subway, the paradigm-shifting experience Sandra and I had with
our son was a slow, difficult, and deliberate process. The approach we had first
taken with him was the outgrowth of years of conditioning and experience in the
personality ethic. It was the result of deeper paradigms we held about our own
success as parents as well as the measure of success of our children. And it was
not until we changed those basic paradigms, quantum change in ourselves and in
the situation.
In order to see our son differently, Sandra and I had to be differently. Our
new paradigm was created as we invested in the growth and development of our
own character.
Our Paradigms are the way we “see” the world or circumstances -- not in
terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, and
interpreting. Paradigms are inseparable from character. Being is seeing in the
human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We