7 Habits

True independence of character empowers us to act rather than be acted upon.

7 Habits

Habit 1 - Be proactive. 

Main Idea We can choose our own response to any signals or information we receive. We have the ability to influence our own actions. Therefore, being proactive means to actively choose what our response will be in any situation rather than to react blindly.

 Proactive people are driven by values that are both well thought out and internalized.

proactivity means to control a situation from the inside out. Or in other words, to affect positive change, stop focusing on the immediate circumstances and instead consider your response to the conditions that exist. 

 Our response to the little irritations in life will also affect responses to disasters.

Habit 2 - Begin with the end in mind. 

Main Idea Beginning with the end in mind means using an image or paradigm of your character at the end of your life as a frame of reference or criterion by which everything is examined. Each part of your life should be examined in the context of the whole - the long-term view

Beginning with the end in mind is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation. The first creation can be either by conscious design, or as a result of outside pressures. We can create our own script or reactively live the scripts others create.

 Use a mission statement to write affirmations that will guide your actions. Good affirmations are personal, positive, present tense, visual and emotional.

 see it, feel it and experience it in their mind before they actually do it. They begin with the end in mind. 

Habit 3 - Put first things first. 

Main Idea The heart of effective personal time management is to spend the maximum time possible doing important jobs in a non-urgent atmosphere that increases your efficiency.  

1. Important & Urgent                         2. Important & Non-Urgent 

3. Urgent But Not Important               4. Not Urgent & Not Important 

1. Important and Urgent Activities These include responding to a crisis, pressing problem or tight deadline. Crisis managers and problem-minded people are consumed primarily with this area of time management.

 2. Important But Not Urgent Activities Preventative maintenance, relationship building, creative thinking, planning and recreation. This area is at the heart of effective personal management, and holds the key to business efficiency. 

3. Not Important But Urgent Activities Phone calls, mail, some meetings and other pressing matters. These tasks are often only urgent because someone else has that expectation, and some people spend time here thinking they are covering essential matters.

4. Not Important And Non-Urgent Activities Includes trivia, some mail, time wasters and pleasant harmless activities. Spending all your time here is a sure way to be totally ineffective. 

The goal is to maximize your time in quadrant 2 on important but non-urgent activities.

To be proactive about choosing quadrant 2 activities, get into the habit of saying “No” to quadrant 3 and 4 activities.

 The six criteria of quadrant 2 time management skills are;

 1. Coherence - harmony between your personal mission statement and both short- and long-term activities. 

2. Balance - identify your various roles and keep them focused so important areas are not inadvertently ignored. 

3. Quadrant 2 focus – deal with prevention and anticipation rather than crisis control. Rather than prioritizing your schedule, you schedule time to achieve your priorities.

 4. A people dimension - your planning needs to reflect thinking in terms of dealing effectively with other people, as they can influence your time schedule. 

5. Flexibility - time management needs to be tailored to exactly the way you need it to work for your life.

6. Portability - time management needs to be on the go and with you at all times, not just in your office. 

Time management begins with four key activities; 

1. Identify the key roles of your life. Everyone wears a number of different hats in their business, personal and social lives. Write down the roles you fill in the average week. 

2. Select goals – maybe two or three that you want to achieve in the coming week in each of your roles. 

3. Scheduling. Look at each week with your goals in mind. When are you going to set aside time to achieve your goals? 

4. Adapt on a daily basis. This may mean responding to unexpected events in meaningful ways. The more completely weekly goals are tied in to a wider framework of correct principles and a mission statement, the greater the increase in effectiveness. Long term organizing means the mission statement leads to the roles leading to goals and then to plans.

Public vistories

 You can’t be successful with other people if you haven’t paid the price of success with yourself first.

 Interdependence is like an Emotional Bank Account. We make deposits into this account by courtesy, kindness, honesty, openness and keeping commitments.

Make deposits into your Emotional Bank Account by;

 1. Understanding the individual. What may be a deposit to one person may be nothing or even a withdrawal to another. Therefore, you need to get to know the individual. 

2. Attending to the little things. In relationships or associations, the big things are really the little things – courtesies and small acts of kindness. Little forms of disrespect can make large withdrawals if you’re not careful. 

3. Keeping commitments. Keeping a promise is a very large deposit, breaking a promise is the largest withdrawal it’s possible to make. People tend to build their hopes around promises. 

4. Clarifying expectations. The cause of many problems is simply conflicting or ambiguous expectations. Therefore, it’s vital in any new situation to get all expectations tabled so they can be discussed and covered. This may take courage on the part of all parties involved. 

5. Showing personal integrity. Integrity is the basis of many kinds of deposits, while lack of integrity undermines almost all other efforts to make deposits. Honesty is telling the truth or conforming our words to reality. Integrity is conforming reality to our words or keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. One important way to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present, as that communicates consistency. Integrity means you treat everyone by the same set of rules. 

6. Apologizing sincerely when you make a withdrawal. This requires a great deal of strength of character. 

Habit 4 - Think win/win. 

Main Idea The most effective way to work with other people is to structure a win/win relationship focused on results, not methods.

 Win/Win – A frame of mind and heart constantly seeking mutual benefit in business and personal transactions. All parties feel good about decisions and commit to the plan. 

Win/Win-or-No-Deal – Means that if a mutually beneficial deal cannot be structured, then there is general agreement to disagree agreeably! In other words, if you find you are both wanting to head in different directions, it is better not to try and set up a deal between both parties. Provides tremendous emotional freedom.

Of all the options, Win/Win-or-No-Deal is the most desirable, especially at the beginning of a business or personal association. There are five dimensions to the habit of thinking Win/Win; 

1. Character – Thinking win/win requires integrity (the value we place on our own principles) on the part of both parties. It also requires maturity – the balance between courage and consideration. Expressing feelings with courage tempered by consideration for the feelings of others is the mark of a mature person. Finally, to think win/win, we need an abundance mentality, meaning we realize there is plenty out there for everyone. People with a scarcity mentality think there is only one pie and they are fighting to get as large a slice as possible. People with an abundance mentality realize there are lots of opportunities, more than a person can take advantage of.

 2. Relationships – The Emotional Bank Account is a key to structuring a Win/Win. If enough deposits have been made over a period of time, you have a degree of credibility enabling you to focus on the issues, not on personality conflicts. If both parties have high emotional bank balances combined with a commitment to Win/Win, a tremendous amount of synergy is possible. If the other person is not thinking Win/Win, you have to take the lead and be proactive enough to keep hammering until they realize you genuinely want a Win/Win deal. The relationship can be the key to the success of the entire process.

 3. Agreements – These give definition and direction to Win/Win. To be effective, agreements should focus on desired results rather than the methods to be followed. Guidelines specifying the parameters for the results and the resources available to achieve the results should be included. Also a method of accountability for evaluation and an outline of what will happen as a result of the evaluation.

 4. Systems – Win/Win can only survive in an organization when the systems support it. If you talk Win/Win but reward Win/Lose, then don’t be surprised when everyone goes for Win/Lose scenarios. The training, planning, budgeting, communication, information and compensation systems all have to be geared towards Win/Win. 

5. Processes – The essence of structuring Win/Win is to separate the person from the problem, to focus on interests and not on positions, to invent options for positive mutual gain and to insist on objective criteria – some external standard or principle that both parties can accept. These processes are more fully examined in Habits 5 and 6.

Habit 5 - Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Main Idea Everyone has a natural tendency to rush in and try to give advice or try to fix things before taking the time to diagnose or try to understand why the other person feels the way they do. The trick, however, is to seek first to understand the other person, then to try and be understood yourself. 

The key to understanding another person is empathetic listening – really trying to understand everything (including the nonverbal signals) the other person is communicating. You listen for feeling and for meaning, for behavior and other signals. You are totally focused on the other person’s point of view, not projecting your own life’s story into their words.

 the professional salesman sells solutions to needs and problems.
 The key to good judgment is understanding. If we judge first, we will never fully understand.

 Once you understand, then you have got to try to be understood yourself. Maturity is defined as the balance between courage and consideration. Seeking to understand requires consideration, seeking to be understood takes courage. Win/Win requires a high degree of both.

Habit 6- Synergize
Main Idea Synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, each of the parts combine to create new and exciting unexpected discoveries that were not possible before. It is a creative force of unparalleled power created in the principles of creative cooperation.

Synergy draws its energy and its effectiveness from the differences between people.  When we value the differences in perception that exist between people, we are able to transcend the limits created.

Habit 7 - Sharpen the saw.
Main Idea Habit 7 is taking time to sharpen the saw. In other words, don’t get so busy sawing that you don’t realize you are using a blunt saw. Take the time on a regular basis to sharpen your saw in the physical, spiritual, mental and social or emotional dimensions.
Sharpening the saw involves four separate dimensions;
1. Physical exercise – Spending a minimum of 30 minutes per day exercising will vastly improve the quality of the remaining hours every day.
2. Spiritual – Renewing the spiritual dimension provides leadership to your life. The spiritual dimension is at the very core of your value system, make sure it is being refreshed frequently in your own life. Immersion in great literature or music, time spent alone communicating with nature, personal mission statement- recommit ourselves to our center and purpose in life. We can mentally live out events before they actually occur.
3. The mental dimension – Formal education teaches the processes of mental development, study discipline, exploration of new subjects, analytical thought and expressive writing. ignore TV and instead develop serious study programs around new subjects.   read broadly and to expose yourself to the thoughts of great minds.  Writing is powerful it also affects our ability to think clearly, to reason accurately and to be understood effectively. Organizing and planning are other habits which sharpen the mind.
4. The social / emotional dimension –  skills required-communication and creative cooperation. Our emotional lives are primarily developed out of and manifested in our relationships with others. Renewing our social / emotional dimension can be carried out in our normal, everyday interactions with other people.  Success in this area is highly related to our sense of intrinsic security. If we are relying on the paradigms of other people for our own sense of worth, we are walking a perilous path. We should instead be developing an inner sense of integrity built on accurate paradigms and correct principles. Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and no other way except effective interdependent living. There is also an intrinsic security that comes from service, from helping other people in a meaningful way. When you view your own life as constructive and exciting because of the difference you are making in the lives of other people, you’re on the path towards a long, healthy and helpful life. 
 As you improve in one dimension, you increase abilities in the other dimensions as well. A Daily Private Victory, in which you spend one hour a day in the renewal of the physical, spiritual and mental dimensions, is the key to the development of the 7 Habits. It is also the foundation for the Daily Public Victory. Renewal is the principle – and the process – enabling us to move on an upward spiral of growth and change, of continuous improvement.
 The upward spiral consists of three steps;
1. To Learn
2. To Commit
3. To Do
Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit and do on increasingly higher planes. To keep progressing, we must repeat the cycle over and over.

Inside Out Again 
Key Idea The discovery that there is a gap between stimulus and response that we alone can fill in empowers us to take full charge of our own lives. No longer can we accept that we are a victim of circumstances, or that we have achieved anything simply because it is in our genes. The 7 Habits give anyone the ability to work from the inside out (character-driven acts) as opposed to an outside in approach (circumstances-driven). Real change comes from the inside out. It doesn’t come from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior. It comes from striking at the roots of the fabric of our thoughts, the paradigms we use and the essential pattern of our characters. Achieving unity with ourselves, our loved ones, our friends and working associates is the highest and most delicious fruit of the 7 Habits. Building a character of total integrity isn’t easy but it’s possible. It isn’t a quick fix. By centering our lives on correct principles and creating a balanced focus between doing and increasing our ability to do, we become empowered in the task of creating effective, useful and peaceful lives.


“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.” — Goethe