I am a great fan of Dr. Stephen Covey's wonderful book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, he teaches that the First Habit is to be Proactive.

Dr. Covey explains that being proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. Being proactive is being "response-able;" being able and willing to actively choose how you respond, act and behave, rather than just being reactive. This is the first step to achieving true independence.

Though the 7 Habits had not been written yet, flying in Vietnam in the '60s required us all to become proactive about paying attention, about embracing that "it is what it is" and truly listening, to whoever was trying get through our macho masks and tell us things we really needed to hear, think about and understand.

Now 40 some years later, after more than 30 years as an airline captain, I'm a Cockpit Resources Management facilitator. My primary goal in this role is to get pilots, especially captains, to care about "what's right, not who's right." (Wikipedia says Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) is a procedure and training system to reduce Threats and Errors in systems where human error can have devastating effects. Used primarily for improving air safety, CRM focuses on interpersonal communication, leadership, decision making and workload management in the cockpit.)

In Dr. Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habit 5 is Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood. Dr. Covey presents this as the most important principle of communicated and not, as we all sometimes do, to be mentally preparing what we will say next, instead of actively listening.

This story is about me thinking I understood, when in fact, I did not. It is a story about me being very stupid and living to tell the tale.

It is in fact three stories about how the lessons from Dr. Covey can help a pilot stay alive while doing difficult things in difficult places.

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