7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R.

Covey

1. BE PROACTIVE
- Take responsibility for your life: Proactive people don’t blame
circumstances, conditions or conditioning for their behavior. Their
behavior is a product of their own conscious choice.
- Act or be acted upon: It’s your responsibility to act in any given
situation. If you wait to be acted upon, you will be acted upon. Growth
and opportunity consequences attend either road.
- Make and keep commitments: The commitments and promises you
make to yourself and others and your integrity to those commitments-
provide the clearest manifestations of your proactivity.
- Be a model not a critic: Look at the weaknesses of others with
compassion, not accusation. It’s not what they’re doing or should be
doing that’s the issue. The issue is your own chosen response to the
situation and what you should be doing.
- Listen to your language: Your language is a very real indicator of the
degree to which you see yourself as a proactive person. That is ,it’s
better to say “I choose” rather than “I can’t” or “I control my own
feelings” rather than “They make me so mad”.
- Focus on your circle of influence: Proactive people focus their efforts in
their Circle of influence. They work on the things they can do
something about.
- Take the initiative: Taking the initiative doesn’t mean being pushy,
obnoxious, or aggressive. It means creating an atmosphere where
others can seize opportunities and solve problems in an increasingly
reliant way.
2. BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND
- Understand you ultimate destination: Begin today with the image of
the end of your life as your frame of reference by which everything
else is examined. Each day will then contribute to the vision you have
of your life as a whole.
- Expand your perspective: You don’t have to wait for external
circumstances to create perspective-expanding experience. You can do
so yourself by: visualizing your own funeral (how will people eulogize
you?), visualizing your retirement, visualizing how you’d feel if a family
member died, and so on.
- Determine your center: Determine your life is money-, family-, work-,
spouse-, pleasure-, possession-, church-, friend-, enemy-, and/or self-
centered. The ideal is to create one clear center from which you
consistently derive a high degree of security, guidance, wisdom and
power.
- You your whole brain: Instead of just using the side of your brain that
tends to be dominant, cultivate the ability to have good crossover
between both sides so that you can sense what a situation calls for and
then use the appropriate tools to deal with it.
- Affirm and visualize: Create affirmations with these basic ingredients:
They’re personal. Positive, in the present tense, visual, and emotional.
Then, each day, visualize the realization of these affirmations. You’ll
find that your behavior and circumstances will change for the better.
- Develop a personal mission statement: Write down your philosophy of
life focusing on what you want to be (character) and what to be
(character) and do (contributions and achievements), and on the
values or principles upon which being and doing are based.
- Identify your roles and goals: Identify the specific roles you play in
different areas of your life, and then think about the long-term goals
you want to accomplish in each of those roles. Roles and goals give
structure and direction to your personal mission.
3. PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST
 - Manage yourself: Effective management is putting first things first. If
you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from
within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple of
your own deep values and their source.
- Schedule your time wisely: Check your monthly or annual calendar for
any appointments you may have previously made, and evaluate their
importance in the context of your goals.
- Delegate responsibility: Transferring responsibility to other skilled and
trained people enables you to devote your energy to other high-
leverage activities. Delegation means growth, both for individuals and
organizations.
- Learn to say no: Decide what your highest priorities are, and have the
courage and independent willpower to say no- pleasantly, smilingly,
and unapologetically- to the things that are less important to you.
- Build personal relationships: By focusing on relationships and results
rather than time and methods, you can become a listener, a trainer,
and a consultant to those in your sphere of influence. Your
effectiveness- and that of those around you- will increase dramatically.
- Plan your week: Weekly organizing gives you the freedom and the
flexibility to handle unanticipated events, to shift appointments if you
need to, to savor relationships and interactions with others, and to
deeply enjoy spontaneous experiences.
- Organize and execute around balanced priorities: The way you spend
your time is a result of the way you see your time, and the way you
really see your priorities, which should grow out of your principle-
centered personal mission.
4. THINK WIN-WIN
- Take the win-win approach: Win-Win sees life as a cooperative not a
competitive, arena. Win-Win is based on the paradigm that there’s
plenty for everybody, that one person’s success is not achieved at the
expense –or exclusion of the success- of others.
- Develop and maintain integrity: Integrity is the value you place on
yourself. As you clearly identify your values and proactively organize
and execute around those values on a daily basis, you develop self-
awareness and independent will by making and keeping meaningful
promises and commitments.
- Be mature: Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration,
both of which are essential to win-win. If you’re mature, you can listen,
you can empathically understand, and you can also courageously
confront.
- Adopt an abundance mentality: An abundance mentality flows out of a
deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It stems from the
paradigm that there’s plenty out there... and enough to spare foe
everybody. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives, and creativity.
- Build win-win relationships: Trust is the essence of win-win
relationships. Because you trust others and they trust you, you can be
open; you can put your cards on the table. Even though you may see
things differently, you’re committed to understanding each other’s
viewpoints.
- Establish win-win agreements: In the win-win agreement, the following
five elements are made very explicit:
i. Desired results are recognized;
ii. Guidelines are delineated;
iii. Resources are identified;
iv. Accountability is set up; and
v. Consequences are specified
- Create systems to support win-win: For win-win to work, the training,
planning, communication, budgeting, information, and compensation
 systems all have to support it. Unnecessarily competitive ones, thereby
powerfully impacting effectiveness.
5. SEEK FIRST TO UNDERSTAND THEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD
- First understand the problem: You may find that you have a tendency
to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But you may often fail to
take the time to deeply understand the problem first. This is the key to
interpersonal communication.
- Influence others by example: Your example flows naturally out of your
character, the kind of person you truly are. Your character is
constantly radiating and communicating. From it, others come to
instinctively trust or distrust you and your actions.
- Practice empathic listening: Empathic listening means listening with
the intent to understand. This type of listening gets inside another
person’s frame of reverence. You see the world the way they do; you
understand their paradigm; you relate to how they really feel.
- Diagnose then prescribe: Diagnosing, then prescribing, is a principle
that’s appropriate for medicine, law, product design, engineering, and
much more. In fact, it’s a principle evident in all areas of life. It has its
greatest power, though, in the area of interpersonal relations.
- See the perspective of others: Show that you really understand where
another person or organization is coming from: What are their goals?
What is their point of view? When you truly see the perspective of
others, you significantly increase the credibility of your own ideas and
opinions.
- Set up one-on-one time: Create opportunities to interact one-on-one
with your boss, your children, your spouse, your friends, and your
employees. When you listen, you learn, which opens the door to
creative solutions and mutual trust.
- Employ ethos, pathos and logos: Ethos relate to your personal
credibility; pathos ahs to do with your feeling, empathic side; logos is
your logic. When you employ all three of these qualities in your
interactions, you’re taking all known facts and perceptions into
account, which benefits everyone.
6. SYNERGY
- Understand the essence of synergy: Define, synergy means that the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the
relationship the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself the
most catalytic, empowering, unifying, and exciting part.
- Communicate synergistically: When you communicate synergistically,
you’re opening your mind heart, and expressions to new possibilities,
new alternatives and options. You’re not sure how things will work out,
but you have an inward sense of excitement, security, and adventure.
- Valuing: The difference between people is the essence of synergy.
Truly effective people have the humility to recognize their own
perceptual limitations and appreciate the resources available through
interactions with others.
- See the other person’s position: The next time you have a
disagreement or confrontation with someone, attempt to understand
that person’s concerns. Address these issues in a creative and mutually
beneficial way.
- Intrapersonal synergy provides the internal security sufficient to handle
the risks of being open and vulnerable. Internalizing these principles
helps us develop the abundance mentality of win-win and the
authenticity of Habit 5.
- Open a new script inside your brain: When you have access to both the
intuitive, creative, and visual right brain; and the analytical, logical,
verbal left brain, then your whole brain is working. In other words,
there is psychic energy taking place in your own head.
 - Be synergistic within yourself: Don’t take insults personally, sidestep
negative energy, and look for the good in others. You can utilize that
good as different as it may be to improve your point of view and
enlarge your perspective.
7. SHAPEN THE SAW
- Take the time to sharpen the saw: Sharpening the saw means
exercising all four dimensions of your nature the physical, the
social/emotional, the mental, and the spiritual- regularly and
constantly in wise and balanced ways.
- Care for your physical body: Nurture your physical self by eating the
right foods, getting sufficient rest and relaxation, and exercising on a
regular basis. A good exercise program will build your body in 3 areas:
endurance, flexibility, and strength.
- Rejuvenate your spirit: Meditate engage in daily prayers, read uplifting
books, commune with Mother Nature- in some way try to remove
yourself from the discord of the everyday world that invades your
sense of inner peace.
- Expand your mind: Continue developing your mind no matter how old
you are: Take classes that interest you. Read great works of literature,
write in a journal- learn to think analytically, and express yourself
intelligently everyday.
- Renew your social emotional side: Build relationships with others born
of trust, and create a life of integrity for yourself- the most
fundamental source of personal worth. This is how you’ll develop peace
of mind that is, your life will be in harmony with true principles and
values.
- Help other people in meaningful ways. : Contribute to others through
your work, your friendships and through anonymous service. You
concern need only be blessing the lives of others. Influence, not
recognition, becomes the true motive.
- Encourage those around your to be proactive: Believe in other people
even if they don’t believe in themselves. Listen to them and empathize
with them. Help them affirm their positive traits. Doing so increases
the opportunities for interaction with other proactive people.
- Educate and obey your conscience: To keep progressing, you must
learn, commit, and do learn, commit, and do and learn, commit and do
all over again.