Seven Habbits

Objectives

By understanding the seven habits of highly effective people, you should be able to apply them to change your life and those of others

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The Fundamental Needs of Life

How Mature are YOU?

Habit #1: Be Proactive!

Responsibility and Values

Freedom of Choice

Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern

Revenge and the Language of Proactive People

Habit #2: Start with the end in mind

Create a mission for your life

Habit #3: Put First things First!

SMART Goals

Effectiveness and Leadership

Habit #4: Think Win-Win

To learn more about how to achieve a Win-Win result, check this lecture.

Habit #5: Seek first to understand, then, to be understood

Habit #6: Synergize

Celebrate Differences

How Objective are you?

Habit #7: Sharpen the Saw

Building Trust and Influencing People

Effectiveness vs. Efficiency – How to be a better person?

Often, we associate Efficiency with better outcomes of a process or a project. That is, being efficient is being able to do more with your time, money or other resources. On the other hand, effectiveness relates to the degree to which you are capable of affecting people.

An effective person focuses more on getting people to adopt certain ideas or behaviors regardless of the time or resources it may require to accomplish that task. For example, if you want your subordinates in a company to adopt a new policy, it might be efficient to make sure that everybody knows the new policies while enacting punishment and reward schemes for not complying and complying with them. Meanwhile, you might save a lot of monitoring to your subordinates' behavior if you could talk them into adopting those policies as their own believes! Then, you will not have to worry about punishment, reward, or monitoring; that is effective and efficient.

Improving yourself

According to the book, “The seven Habits of highly Effective People” (Covey, 1989), the human maturity passes through three stages:

Dependent
Independent
Interdependent

Strictly speaking, no one can be really independent! The independence that Covey aims at is the “Emotional Independence.” An emotionally independent person is one whose reactions to external motivations are built on his personal values and believes rather than the inputs from the environment.

According to (Smith, 1995), the 9th law states that:

Your self-esteem must ultimately come from within

In other words, if you are an independent person, you will not need others to make you feel happy, or force you to feel sad. Satisfaction and self esteem can be generated from inside your brain and that is the essence of the first habit “Be Proactive” (Covey, 1989) that leads to Independence.

In the search for proactivity, many scientists and world figures have mentioned a lot of statements. One of the most important ones was by the psychologist Viktor Frankel

The last of human freedoms is the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.

Another characteristic of proactive people is their ability to take initiatives in their life. That can be simply translated through their boldness in facing new circumstances or their willingness to introduce drastic changes in their lives whenever they believe that it is necessary.

Further, a proactive person will pay much more attention to problems that they may be able to affect by their actions while ignoring problems that they can not affect. Covey translated that into the graphical presentation of two circles; the smaller, inner, one called the circle of influence and the outer one called the circle of concerns. He claimed that the more attention you pay to the circle of influence, the larger it gets.

The second step towards independence is planning. Covey says that you need two habits to plan properly: “Begin with the end in mind””and “Put first things first”. The first (Second habit) draws upon the importance of having major goals in your life (Life Mission) in order to be able to set your intermediate goals. The second (Third habit) involves the arrangement of tasks and objectives according to their priority in achieving your life goals.

In a similar track, Hyrum Smith (Smith, 1995) introduces the laws that he believes will get you to achieve more with your time and reach more life satisfaction. The first 7 laws state that:

Law 1: You control your life by controlling your time.
Law 2: Your governing values are the foundation of personal fulfillment.
Law 3: When your daily activities reflect your governing values, you experience inner peace.
Law 4: To reach any significant goal, you must leave your comfort zone.
Law 5: Daily planning leverages time through increased focus.
Law 6: Your behavior is a reflection of what you truly believe.
Law 7: You satisfy needs when your beliefs are in line with reality.

In the process of planning your activities, both Covey and Smith emphasise the importance of reviewing your mission statement or life goals whenever you are setting intermediate goals or tasks in order to make sure that your activities are in line with your main objectives. Further, regular daily or weekly planning is highly recommended for the tasks you need to do as that is of extreme value to true efficiency of time management.

Getting better with people

When you reach the level of Independence, according to (Covey, 1989), through embracing the first three first habits, you become ready to go through the second stage of maturity to reach Interdependence. The three habits you need to embrace to go through this stage are:

Think Win-Win
Seek first to understand then to be understood
Synergyze

When you think win-win, you are always seeking the mutual benefit of both you and the other side of the interaction. You will never act in a win-win manner unless you truly believe that there is enough for every one (the principle of abundance). Similarly, the 10th law proposed by Hyrum Smith (Smith, 1995) states that:

Give more and you’ll have more.

That was the first step towards gaining people trust, make them feel that you care about their needs; the following step is the fifth habit: “seek first to understand then to be understood.” This habit needs you to activate your patience and listening skills. Listening to people and giving them the opportunity to express their point of view does not only allow you to understand it, it also gives them the feeling that you care about them and love them (satisfying two of the primary human needs discussed earlier).

In the same context Dale Carnegie (Carnegie, 1937) stated two principles, among the twelve principles to “Win People to Your Way of Thinking,”:

Principle 8 - Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
Principle 9 - Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.

The last habit that will get you to reach interdependence, according to Covey, is that you become able to create more, through cooperation with others, than what you and the other may be able to create independently. That habit may be generated through the continuous build to trust and understanding between the different actors in life or the workplace.

Maintaining your life

It is quite unimaginable that you can continue operating a machine, such as your car, without providing it with the appropriate maintenance, such as fuel, oil, and spare parts. However, very frequently, we ignore maintaining ourselves! Our bodies, brains, relationships, and souls are the constituents of the most important machine that we can ever possess. If we ignore the necessary maintenance of any of the parts of the machine you call "Me", you will end up losing that machine to unnecessary, and often unexpected, breakdown.

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