فصل 13

• JUST PUSH PAUSE

So when someone is rude to you, where do you get the power to resist being rude back? For starters, just push pause. Yep, just reach up and push the pause button to your life just as you would on your remote control. (If I remember right, the pause button is found somewhere in the middle of your forehead.) Sometimes life is moving so fast that we instantly react to everything out of sheer habit. If you can learn to pause, get control, and think about how you want to respond, you’ll make smarter decisions. Yes, your childhood, your parents, your genes, and your environment influence you to act in certain ways, but they can’t make you do anything. You are not determined but are free to choose.

While your life is on pause, open up your toolbox (the one that you were born with) and use your four human tools to help you decide what to do. Animals don’t have these tools and that’s why you’re smarter than your dog. These tools are self-awareness, conscience, imagination, and willpower. You might want to call them your power tools.

SELF-AWARENESS:

I can stand apart from myself and observe my thoughts and actions.

CONSCIENCE:

I can listen to my inner voice to know right from wrong.

IMAGINATION:

I can envision new possibilities.

WILLPOWER:

I have the power to choose.

Let’s illustrate these tools by imagining a teen named Rosa and her dog, Woof, as they go for a walk: “Here, boy. What say we go outside,” says Rosa as Woof leaps up and down, wagging his tail.

It’s been a rough week for Rosa. Not only has she just broken up with her boyfriend, Eric, but she and her mom are barely on speaking terms.

As she strolls down the sidewalk, Rosa begins thinking about the past week. “You know what?” she muses to herself. “Breaking up with Eric has really been tough on me. It’s probably why I’ve been so rude to Mom and taking out all my frustrations on her.” You see what Rosa is doing? She’s standing apart from herself and evaluating and measuring her actions. This process is called self-awareness. It’s a tool that is native to all humanoids. By using her self-awareness, Rosa is able to recognize that she’s allowing her breakup with Eric to affect her relationship with her mom. This observation is the first step to changing the way she has been treating her mother.

Meanwhile, Woof sees a cat up ahead and instinctively takes off in a frenzy after it.

Although Woof is a loyal dog, he is completely unaware of himself. He doesn’t even know that he is a dog. He is incapable of standing apart from himself and saying, “You know what? Ever since Suzy (his dog friend next door) moved, I’ve been taking out my anger on all the neighborhood cats.” As she continues her stroll, Rosa’s thoughts begin to wander. She can hardly wait for the school concert tomorrow, when she will be performing a solo. Music is her life. Rosa imagines herself singing at the concert. She sees herself dazzling the audience, then bowing to receive a rousing standing ovation from all of her friends and teachers … and, of course, all the cute guys.

In this scene, Rosa is using another one of her human tools, imagination. It is a remarkable gift. It allows us to escape our present circumstances and create new possibilities in our heads. It gives us a chance to visualize our futures and dream up what we would like to become.

While Rosa is imagining visions of grandeur, Woof is busily digging up the earth trying to get at a worm.

Woof’s imagination is about as alive as a rock. Zilch. He can’t think beyond the moment. He can’t envision new possibilities. Can you imagine Woof thinking, “Someday, I’m going to make Lassie look like chopped liver”?

“Hi, Rosa, whatcha doin’?” says Heide, pulling up alongside Rosa in her car.

“Oh, hello, Heide,” replies a startled Rosa, as she brings her thoughts back to earth. “You surprised me. I’m just taking Woof for a walk.” “Hey, I heard about you and Eric. What a bummer.”

Rosa is bothered by Heide’s reference to Eric. It’s none of her business. Although she is tempted to be curt with Heide, she knows Heide is new at school and desperately in need of friends. Rosa feels that being warm and friendly is the right thing to do.

“Yeah, breaking up with Eric has been tough. So how are things with you, Heide?” Rosa has just used her human tool called conscience. A conscience is an “inner voice” that will always teach us right from wrong. Each of us has a conscience. And it will either grow or shrink depending upon whether or not we follow its promptings.

Meanwhile, Woof is relieving himself on Mr. Newman’s newly painted white picket fence.

Woof has absolutely no moral sense of right and wrong. After all, he is just a dog. And dogs will do whatever their instincts compel them to do.

Rosa’s walk with Woof comes to an end. As she opens the front door to her house, she hears her mom yell from the other room, “Rosa, just where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you. “ Rosa had already made up her mind to not lose her cool with her mom, so, despite wanting to yell back “Get out of my face,” she responds calmly, “Just out for a walk with Woof, Mom …”

“Woof! Woof! Come back here,” screams Rosa as Woof darts out the open door to chase the local paper boy on his bike.

While Rosa is using her fourth human tool of willpower to control her anger, Woof, who has been told not to chase the paper boy, is overcome by his instincts. Willpower is the power to act. It says that we have the power to choose, to control our emotions, and to overcome our habits and instincts.

As you can see in the above example, we either use or fail to use our four human tools every day of our lives. The more we use them, the stronger they become and the more power we have to be proactive. However, if we fail to use them, we tend to react by instinct like a dog and not act by choice like a human.

• HUMAN TOOLS IN ACTION

Dermell Reed once told me how his proactive response to a family crisis changed his life forever. Dermell was raised in one of East Oakland’s roughest neighborhoods, the fourth in a family of seven kids. No one in the Reed family had ever graduated from high school before, and Dermell wasn’t about to be the first. Dermell was unsure about his future. His family was struggling. His street was filled with gangs and drug dealers. Could he ever get out? While in his house, on a still summer night before his senior year, Dermell heard a series of gunshots.

“It’s an everyday thing to hear gunshots, and I didn’t pay it no mind,” said Dermell.

Suddenly one of his friends, who’d been shot in the leg, burst through the door and began hollering that Dermell’s little brother, Kevin, had just been shot and killed in a drive-by shooting.

“I was upset and I was angry and I was hurt and I lost somebody I ain’t never going to see again in my life,” Dermell told me. “He was only thirteen years old. And he was shot over a petty little street scuffle. I can’t explain how life went after that. It was just straight downhill for the whole family.” Dermell’s natural reaction was to kill the murderer. After all, Dermell was raised in the streets and this was the only real way he could pay back his dead brother. The police were still trying to figure out who did it, but Dermell knew. On a muggy August night, a few weeks after Kevin’s death, Dermell got hold of a .38 caliber revolver and went out in the streets to get revenge on Tony “Fat Tone” Davis, the crack dealer who had killed his brother.

“It was dark. Davis and his friends couldn’t see me. There he was sitting, talking, laughing, having fun, and here I am within fifty feet of him, crouched behind a car with a loaded gun. I was sitting there thinking, ‘I could just pull this little trigger and kill the guy who killed my brother.’” Big decision.

At this point, Dermell pushed pause and caught hold of himself. Using his imagination, he thought about his past and his future. “I thought about my life in a matter of seconds. I weighed my options. I weighed the chances of me escaping, not getting caught, the police trying to figure out who I was. I thought about the times Kevin would come watch me play football. He always told me I was going to be a pro football player. I thought about my future, about going to college. About what I wanted to make of my life.” Pausing, Dermell listened to his conscience. “I’m holding a gun, I’m shaking, and I think the good side of me told me to get up and go home and go to school. If I took revenge, I’d be throwing away my future. I’d be no better than the guy who shot my brother.” Using raw willpower, Dermell, instead of giving in to his anger and throwing away his life, got up, walked home, and vowed that he would finish college for his dead brother.

Nine months later Reed had made the honor roll and was graduating from high school. People in his school couldn’t believe it. Five years later, Reed had become a college football star and a college graduate.

Like Dermell, each of us will face an extraordinary challenge or two along the way, and we can choose whether to rise to those challenges or to be conquered by them.

Elaine Maxwell sums up the entire matter quite well: “Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man’s doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.” It’s kind of like the old Volkswagen commercials. “On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers … Drivers wanted!” So let me ask you, are you in the driver’s seat of your life or are you merely a passenger? Are you conducting your symphony or simply being played? Are you acting like a can of soda pop or a bottle of water?

After all that’s been said and done, the choice is yours!

COMING ATTRACTIONS

In the chapter that follows, I’ll take you on a ride you’ll never forget called The Great Discovery. Come along. It’s a thrill a minute!

BABY STEPS

1 The next time someone flips you off, give them the peace sign back.

2 Listen carefully to your words today. Count how many times you use reactive language, such as “You make me …” “I have to …” “Why can’t they “I can’t…” 3 Do something today that you have wanted to do but never dared. Leave your comfort zone and go for it. Ask someone out on a date, raise your hand in class, or join a team.

4 Write yourself a Post-it note: “I will not let___ Place it in your locker, on your mirror, or in your planner and refer to it often.

5 At the next party, don’t just sit against the wall and wait for excitement to find you, you find it. Walk up and introduce yourself to someone new.

6 The next time you receive a grade that you think is unfair, don’t blow it off or cry about it, make an appointment with the teacher to discuss it and then see what you can learn.

7 If you get in a fight with a parent or a friend, be the first to apologize.

8 Identify something in your circle of no control that you are always worrying about. Decide now to drop it.

9 Push the pause button before you react to someone who bumps into you in the hall, calls you a name, or cuts in line.

10 Use your tool of self-awareness right now by asking yourself, “What is my most unhealthy habit?” Make up your mind to do something about it.