This first Habit's central thesis is:
"You must be the master of your destiny - don't be the victim of it."

Your behavior must be the product of your conscious decisions - your behavior must NOT be the product of your external conditions.

What must be important to you is HOW you respond to what happens to you - not WHAT happens to you.

SECOND:

Inside the typical communication model - where there is a "Sender" of a message and a "Recipient" of such message - what is your answer to this question?

In terms of what gets communicated, what is it that really counts? What the Sender says - or what the Recipient hears?

I repeat:

In terms of what truly gets communicated, what is it that really counts in the communication process? What the Sender says - or what the Recipient hears and understands?

Think about it.

As a Sender, you can say "Hello" - but if your Recipient hears "Good bye" - the "Good bye" is what truly gets communicated.

In the end, it doesn't matter what the Sender says - in the end, what really counts in the communication process is what the Recipient receives, hears, and understands.

In this sense, the communication is Receiver based.

In other words - it is the Sender's responsibility to make sure that the Recipient understands exactly what the Sender wants to communicate.

Now - keeping in mind Stephen Covey's first Habit: