BEFORE YOU JUDGE

Steven Covey recalls riding on the New York subway one Sunday morning. It was a quiet time with many simply reading the paper, resting, or thinking quietly to themselves.

But the quiet was shatter when a man and his children entered the car Covey was sitting in. The man sat down and appeared impervious to the noisy and rambunctious children who began to disturb the other passengers.

After a few moments Covey could take it no longer. He turned to the man and said, "Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn't control them a little more?"

It brought the man back to consciousness of the situation, Covey goes on to say, which caused the father to say, "Oh, you're right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital an hour ago where their mother died. I don't know what to think, and I guess they don't know how to handle it either." Covey goes onto say that he saw and experienced the situation from an entirely different perspective after that and sought to help the man.