A New Perspective

Steven R. Covey declares in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “we see the world not as it is, but as we are – or, as we are conditioned to see it.” (pg 28) In order to live our lives most effectively, the author encourages us to have a complete paradigm shift that is principle based, not just a personality shift of behaviors and attitude.

Personality ethics are social comparisons and judgments. When we focus on improving personality ethics, we tend to try to change just our techniques and often attempt to manipulate others into what is the acceptable social model. If there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause our true motives to surface and relationships will fail.

Many people fall in the trap of only focusing on personality ethics. Instead, we have to look deep inside ourselves and find what we fundamentally believe and think. True character ethics are timeless and universal to all humanity because they are principle based. Principles such as: fairness, integrity, honesty, human dignity, service, quality or excellence, potential and growth.

A little over a year ago, my husband and I felt so lost and unsure about parenting our oldest son, who was only four at the time. We had tried every parenting technique heard of, and felt we were “losing him.” After coming across an educational model, known as a “Thomas Jefferson Education,” that was principle based, Richard and I had such a significant paradigm shift we have profoundly changed our lives.

We stopped trying to squish our son (or any of our children) into the box of social norms. We began to focus first on ourselves by fundamentally changing our self-perception and how we viewed our children. We realized that we needed to begin with the end in mind – to know what our missions were, and then watch for and help each of our children with their individual missions.

We began to put first things first to create a more inspiring learning environment by reading classics and removing the television from our home. As parents, we realized that we needed to model the type of behavior and attitudes that we expected our children to have, by being more emotionally mature than they were, instead of borrowing strength from our position and authority.

Richard and I realized that “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them,” (Albert Einstein, pg 42). We found that principle based living and thinking was much more effective and satisfying, than just changing our parenting techniques. This road to valuing correct principles has been difficult, but well worth the effort. Keeping the end in mind, enables us to us have the courage to continue forward.