Highly Effective

Sept 19, 2024

I first learned the lesson at St. Michael's Church in Cranford, NJ, when I was about 10. Someone in a pew behind ours sneezed in a loud and, frankly, comical way. Several people, including me, turned around to stare. Some, probably including me, giggled.

After church, my mother brought up the incident and said that such occasions are useful for practicing self control. "When you hear a noise, think for a second about whether the sound itself tells you what happened without turning around to look," she advised. "You already know what it looks like to sneeze. Besides, people don't like to be gawked at."

So the next time I heard a sudden sound out of my line of vision, I thought something like, That sounds like a baby having a tantrum. I know what that looks like. The mom doesn't need me looking at them. And it worked! The strategy became an easy way to train myself in a lifelong habit of doing my best to think before reacting. This became critical once I had kids, and there is no question Madison and Ella benefited from that early church lesson.

In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, Stephen Covey notes that “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.”

Growth and happiness? If we're fortunate enough to find roads there, they're worth taking.

—Deb