This book helps me to align all my thoughts and activities in a way, that living life getting more effective than ever before. Reading a book will not help you until you put it into a perspective and take action, and for this book, it’s a must! Each chapter itself works as a tool that you can use in your life for personal and interpersonal effectiveness.
7 Habits explain precisely:
- Be proactive
- Begin with the end in mind
- Put first things first
- Think win/win
- Seek to understand first, before making yourself understood
- Learn to synergize
- Sharpen the saw
The first three habits consider a Private/personal victory, 4, 5, and 6 consider a Public/social victory.
Private Victory:
The first three habits explain based on programming concepts:
- Habit 1 says “You’re the programmer”
- Habit 2 says “Write the program”
- Habit 3 says “Run the program”
The first three habits explain based on a creator:
- Habit 1 says, You’re the creator
- Habit 2 says, Mental creation
- Habit 3 says, Physical creation
Before moving into the area of Public Victory, we should remember that effective interdependence can only be built on a foundation of true independence. Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Algebra comes before calculus.
Public victory:
- Habit 4 says, Interpersonal Leadership
- Habit 5 says, Empathic Communication
- Habit 6 says, Creative Cooperation
Highlights from 7 Chapters:
Be proactive:
Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and their performance. Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value-driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn’t a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not.
There are two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise — and keep it. Or we can set a goal — and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives.
Begin with the end in mind:
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficient in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
Once you have that sense of mission, you have the essence of your own proactivity.
Put first things first
We react to urgent matters. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative and more proactivity. We must act to seize the opportunity, to make things happen.
We accomplish all that we do through delegation — either to time or to other people. If we delegate to time, we think of efficiency. If we delegate to other people, we think effectiveness.
The key to effective management is delegation!
Think win/win
Win-win can only survive in an organization when the systems support it. If you talk win-win but reward win-lose, you’ve got a losing program on your hands.
As people really learn to Think Win-Win, they can set up the systems to create and reinforce it. They can transform unnecessarily competitive situations into cooperative ones and can powerfully impact their effectiveness by building both P and PC.
Seek to understand first, before making yourself understood
This is one of the greatest insights in the field of human motivations: Satisfied needs do not motivate. It’s only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival — to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated. When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem-solving.
Communications experts estimate, in fact, that only 10 percent of our communication is represented by the words we say. Another 30 percent is represented by our sounds, and 60 percent by our body language. In empathic listening, you listen with your ears, but you also, and more importantly, listen with your eyes and with your heart. You listen for feeling, for meaning. You listen for behavior. You use your right brain as well as your left. You sense, you intuit, you feel. Empathic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thought, feelings, motives, and interpretation, you’re dealing with the reality inside another person’s head and heart. You’re listening to understand. You’re focused on receiving the deep communication of another human soul.
Learn to synergize
Ecology is a word that basically describes the synergism in nature — everything is related to everything else. It’s in the relationship that creative powers are maximized, just as the real power in these Seven Habits is in their relationship to each other, not just in the individual habits themselves.
When you see only two alternatives — yours and the “wrong” one — you can look for a synergistic Third Alternative. There’s almost always a Third Alternative, and if you work with a win-win philosophy and really seek to understand, you usually can find a solution that will be better for everyone concerned.
Sharpen the saw
The spiritual dimension is your core, your center, and your commitment to your value system. It’s a very private area of life and a supremely important one. It draws upon the sources that inspire and uplift you and tie you to the timeless truths of all humanity. And people do it very, very differently.
When you’re able to leave the noise and the discord of the city and give yourself up to the harmony and rhythm of nature, you come back renewed.
Applications of 7 habits:
Habit 1: Be proactive
Try the 30-day test of proactivity:
Knowing that we are responsible — “response-able” — is fundamental to being effective in any area.
Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind
Sharing the author’s mission statement:
My mission is to live with integrity and to make a difference in the lives of others.
To fulfill this mission:
- I have charity: I seek out and love the one — each one — regardless of his situation.
- I sacrifice: I devote my time, talents, and resources to my mission.
- I inspire: I teach by example that we are all children of a loving Heavenly Father
- I am impactful: What I do makes a difference in the lives of others.
These roles take priority in achieving my mission:
- Husband — my partner is the most important person in my life. Together we contribute the fruits of harmony, industry, charity, and thrift.
- Father — I help my children experience progressively greater joy in their lives.
- Son/Brother — I am frequently “there” for support and love.
- Christian — God can count on me to keep my covenants and to serve his other children. Neighbor — The love of Christ is visible through my actions toward others.
- Change Agent — I am a catalyst for developing high performance in large organizations.
- Scholar — I learn important new things every day.
Writing your mission in terms of the important roles in your life gives you balance and harmony. It keeps each role clearly before you. You can review your roles frequently to make sure that you don’t get totally absorbed by one role to the exclusion of others that are equally or even more important in your life.
Habit 3: Put first things first:
| Urgent, | Not urgent | |
| Important | 1
| 2
|
| Not Important | 3
| 4
|
Working on Quadrant 2 is the heart of personal time management.
Try to estimate what percentage of your time you spend in each quadrant, then reduce your time from quadrants 1, 3, and 4.
There are four key activities in Quadrant II organizing, focusing on what you want to accomplish for the next 7 days:
- Identify Roles
- Select Goals – two or three items to accomplish for each role for the next week, including some of your longer-term goals and personal mission statement
- Scheduling/Delegating – including the freedom and flexibility to handle unanticipated events and the ability to be spontaneous
Daily Adapting – each day respond to unanticipated events, relationships, and experiences in a meaningful way
Habit 4: Think to win/win
- Select a specific relationship where you would like to develop a Win-Win Agreement.
- Identify three key relationships in your life. Write down some specific ways you could make deposits in each Emotional Bank account.
Habit 5: Seek to understand first, before making yourself understood
- Next time you catch yourself inappropriately using one of the autobiographical responses — probing, evaluating, advising, or interpreting — try to turn the situation into a deposit by acknowledgment and apology. (“I’m sorry, I just realized I’m not really trying to understand. Could we start again?”)
Habit 6: Learn to synergize
- Think about a person who typically sees things differently than you do. Consider ways in which those differences might be used as stepping-stones to Third Alternative solutions. Address those concerns in a creative and mutually beneficial way.
Habit 7: Sharpen the saw
- Commit to writing down specific “sharpen the saw” activities in all four dimensions every week, to do them, and to evaluate your performance and results.
- Physical: eating right, getting enough sleep, and exercising regularly.
- Social/emotional: Service, empathy, synergy, and intrinsic security.
- Spiritual: Value clarification and commitment, study, and meditation
- Mental: Reading, visualizing, planning, and writing.
Favorite Quotes:
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” –Warren Bennis
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life, he can only respond by being responsible.” –Frankl
Conclusion:
There is intrinsic security that comes from service, from helping other people in a meaningful way. One important source is your work, when you see yourself in a contributive and creative mode, really making a difference. Another source is anonymous service — no one knows it and no one necessarily ever will. And that’s not the concern; the concern is blessing the lives of other people. Influence, not recognition, becomes the motive.
The late Dr. Hans Selye, in his monumental research on stress, basically says that a long, healthy, and happy life is the result of making contributions, of having meaningful projects that are personally exciting and contribute to and bless the lives of others.
