The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

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• ISBN-10: 1982137274
• ISBN-13: 978-1982137274

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True greatness will be achieved through the abundant mind that works selflessly - with mutual respect, for mutual benefit.

Common Human Challenges

• Fear and Insecurity
• Instant Gratification
• Blame and Victimism
• Hopelessness
• Lack of Life Balance
• The Hunger to Be Understood
• Conflict and Differences

Personal Stagnation

Body

🚫 Cultural Tendency

• maintain lifestyle
• treat health problems with surgery and medication

✅ Principle

• prevent diseases and problems by aligning lifestyle to be in harmony with established, universally accepted principles of health

Mind

🚫 Cultural Tendency

• watch television
• passive entertainment

✅ Principle

• read broadly and deeply
• continuous education
• proactive knowledge acquisition

Heart

🚫 Cultural Tendency

• Use relationships with others to forward personal, selfish interests

✅ Principle

• deep, respectful listening and serving others brings greatest fulfillment and joy

Spirit

🚫 Cultural Tendency

• succumb to growing secularism and cynicism

✅ Principle

• recognize the source of our basic need for meaning and of positive things we seek in life is principles which natural laws I personally believe have their source in God.

Inside-Out

We must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as at the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

If we want to change a situation, we first have to change ourselves; and to change ourselves effectively, we first have to change our perceptions.

Character Ethic

What you are shouts so loudy in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

What we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

There are basic principles of effective living, and people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.

Paying the Piper

If you don’t pay the price day in and day out, you never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop an educated mind. The price must be paid and the process followed. We always reap what we sow; there is no shortcut.

The Power of a Paradigm

A paradigm is the way we “see” the world: what we perceive, understand, and interpret.

2 Maps

We each have many “maps” in our minds which can be divided into 2 groups:

1. We way things are (or realities)
2. The way things should be (or values)

• We interpret everything we experience through these maps, but we seldom question their accuracy; we are usually unaware that we have them. We assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be.
• The way we see things is the source of the way we think and act

⭐️ Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It’s not logical, its psychological.

• To try to change outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow.
• Each of us thinks we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are (or as we are conditioned to see it).

⭐️ The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.

• Most significant breakthroughs in the field of scientific endeavors began by challenging traditional methods and ways of thinking with old paradigms.
• Our paradigms are the sources of our attitudes, behaviors, and ultimately our relationships with others.
• What we see is highly interrelated to what we are.
• Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.

Principle Centered Paradigm

Principles are guidlines for human conduct that are proven to have enduring, permanent value. They’re fundamental and unarguably self-evident (we are innately conscious and aware they exist):

• fairness
• integrity
• honesty
• service
• excellence
• patience
• nurturance
• encouragement

Principles of Growth and Change

⭐️ Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.

In all of life, there are sequential stages of growth and development. Each step is important and each one takes times. No step can be skipped. It is simply impossible to violate, ignore, or shortcut this development process. It is contrary to nature, and attempting to seek such a shortcut only results in disappointment and frustration.

To relate effectively with others, we must learn to listen. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand.

A New Level of Thinking

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

-Albert Einstein

Inside-out is a process of continual renewal based on the natural laws which govern human growth and progress.

We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

-T.S. Elliot

The 7 Habits: An Overview

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

-Aristotle

Habits are powerful factors in our lives. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness (or ineffectiveness). Habits can be learned and unlearned; it involves a process and a tremendous commitment. Breaking deeply embedded habitual tendencies such as procrastination, impatience, criticalness, or selfishness that violate basic principles of human effectiveness involves more than a little willpower and a few minor changes in our lives. “Lift off” takes a tremendous effort.

“Habits” Defined

We will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.

• Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why to do it
• Skill is the how to do it
• Desire is the motivation, the want to do it

The being/seeing change is an upward process - being changing seeing, which in turn changes being, and so forth, as we move in an upward spiral of growth. By working on knowledge, skill, and desire, we can break through to new levels of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as we break with old paradigms that may have been a source of pseudo-security for years.

• Happiness can be defined as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrafice what we want now for what we want eventually, ie. we can postpone instant gratification for long-term fulfillment.

Reaching our full physical maturity does not necessarily assure us of simultaneous emotional or mental maturity:

• Dependent people need others to get what they want.
  • the paradigm of you:
    • you take care of me,
    • you come through for me
    • you didn’t come through for me
    • you are to blame for the results
  • letting the weaknesses of others ruin our emotional lives
  • feeling victimized by others and events outside our control
• Independent people can get what they want through their own effort.
  • the paradigm of I:
    • I can do it
    • I am responsible
    • I am self-reliant
    • I can choose
  • allows us to act, rather than be acted upon
  • frees us of the dependence on others and circumstances
• Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.
  • the paradigm of we:
    • we can do it
    • we can cooperate
    • we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together
  • is a choice only independent people can make
  • dependent people cannot choose to be interdependent because they don’t have sufficient character to do it; they don’t own enough of themselves

We cannot invert the process of personal growth from dependence to independence to interdependence anymore than we can harvest a crop before we plant it. It is an inside-out process and no steps can be skipped. That is why private victories precede public victories.

Continuous improvement creates an upward spiral of growth that lifts us to new levels of understanding and living each of the 7 habits as we come around to them on a progressively higher plane.

“Effectiveness” Defined

The 7 habits are habits of effectiveness. They become the basis of a person’s character, creating an empowering center of correct maps from which an individual can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, and continually learn and integrate other principles in an upward spiral of growth.

True effectiveness is a function of two things: what is produced (the golden eggs) and the producing asset or capacity to produce (the goose). Effectiveness lies in the P/PC balance:

• Production: the desired results (the golden eggs)
• Production Capability: the ability or asset (that produces the golden eggs)
  • Our most important financial asset is our own capacity to earn. If we don’t continually invest in improving our own PC, we severely limit our options. We’re locked into our present situation, running scared of our organization or our boss’s opinion of us, economically dependent and defensive.
  • Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers. We can buy a person’s hand, but we can’t buy their heart. Their heart is where their enthusiasm and loyalty reside. We can buy their back, but we can’t buy their brain. Their brain is their source of creativity, ingenuity, and resourcefulness.
  • PC work is treating employees as volunteers; they volunteer their best parts - their hearts and minds.

P/PC balance is the very essence of effectiveness.

What You Can Expect

Each of us guards a “gate of change” that can only be opened from the inside. If we decide to open our “gate of change” several positive things will happen. Our growth will be evolutionary, but the net effect will be revolutionary.

• increased self-confidence
• know ourselves in a deeper more meaningful way
  • our nature, deepest values, unique contribution capabilities
  • as we live our values, our sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner-directedness will infuse us with both exhiliration and peace
• define ourselves from within, rather than by other’s opinions or comparisons to others
  • we will find that we care less about what others think of us, and we will care more about what others think of themselves and their worlds, including their relationship with us.
  • we will find it easier and more desirable to change because our core-values are immutable
• replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns of effectiveness, happiness, and trust-based relationships

Be Patient With Ourselves

Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment. Obviously it’s not a quick fix.

That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly

-Thomas Paine

Private Victory

Habit 1: Be Proactive

Self-awareness is a unique human thought process which allows us to make and break our habits. Until we take into consideration how we see ourselves (and how we see others) into account, we are unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we cast our intentions and perceptions onto other’s behavior and consider ourselves objective.

🙁 Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of others to control them.

• The language of reactive people absolves them of responsibility, ie. they prefer to transfer responsibility (they are not responsible since they are not able to choose their response)
  • That’s me, that’s just the way I am
  • I can’t, if only, etc.
• A serious problem with reactive language is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
• In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb; reactive people make it a feeling
• Focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern (empowering the things within it to control them)
  • negative
  • weaknesses of others
  • problems in their environment
  • victimization
  • change others outside-in
• their criticism is worse than the behavior they want to correct
• make excuses for mistakes and never learn or improve

🙂 Proactive people are driven by values. It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place.

• I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday
• Our most difficult experiences become the crucibles that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and to inspire others to do so as well
• What matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life
• People who end up with good jobs are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary, consistent with correct principles, to get the job done.
• Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions; proactive people subordinate feelings to values
• Focus their efforts on the Circle of Influence (empowering themselves to work on things they can do something about)
  • positive
  • strengths of themselves and others
  • powerfully affect circumstances by choosing responses to those circumstances
  • change self inside-out
• acknowledge mistakes, correct and learn to improve

There are 3 widely accepted social maps based on stimulus/response theory, ie. we are conditioned to respond in a particular manner given a particular stimulus:

1. genetic: it’s in our DNA, we’re born like this
2. psychic: our childhood experience made us this way
3. environmental: our boss, significant other, etc. is responsible for our situation

However, these maps are reactive models and do not take into account our uniquely human ability to choose our response, ie. between stimulus and response is our freedom and power to choose that response.

Other unique human traits:

1. imagination: abstract thinking to create possibilities outside present reality
2. conscience: a deep inner awareness of right and wrong
3. independent will: the ability to act based on our self-awareness, free of all other influences

We are able to write new programs for ourselves which are disparate from our instincts and training. As human beings we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We have the initiative and responsibility to make things happen.

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes

What does it mean to “Begin with the End in Mind?”

• Use the end-of-life as a perceptual reference point, ie. at the end of our life, what matters to us?
  • this helps us to proplerly utilize each day towards end-goals
• Start with a clear understanding of our destination, to know where we’re going so we can better understand where we are now and ensure each step we take is in the right direction

Based on the Principle: All Things Are Created Twice**

1. mental creation
2. physical creation

By Design or Default

• If we don’t develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside of Circle of Influence to shape much of our lives by default
• Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people’s agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits

Leadership and Management: The Two Creations

1. Leadership is the first creation. Leadership is not management; leadership must come first
2. Management is the second creation.

⭐️ Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.

• An inner compass always gives us direction
• Efficient management without effective leadership is like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic. No management success can compensate for failure in leadership. But leadership is hard because we’re often caught in a management paradigm
  • Parents are often trapped in the management paradigm: thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling

Rescripting: Becoming Your Own First Creator

1. Through imagination, we can visualize the uncreated world of potential that lie within us
2. Through conscience, we can come in contact with universal laws or principles with our singular talents and avenues of contribution, and with personal guidelines within which we can most effectively develop them
3. Combined with self-awareness, these two endownments empower us to write our own script

Because we already live with many scripts that have been handed to us, the process of writing our own script is actually more a process of “rescripting,” or paradigm shifting – of changing some of the basic paradigms that we already have. As we recognize that ineffective scripts, the incorrect or incomplete paradigms within us, we can proactively begin to rescript ourselves.

⭐️ Real success is success with self. It’s not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.

• In developing our own self-awareness many of us discover ineffective scripts, deeply embedded habits that are totally unworthy of us, totally incongruent with the things we really value in life. Habit 2 says we don’t have to live with those scripts. We are response-able to use our imagination and creativity to write new scripts that are more effective, more congruent with our deepest values and with the correct principles that give our values meaning.
  • But we don’t always see those values. We get caught up in the thick of thin things. What matters most gets buried under layers of pressing problems, immediate concerns, and outward behaviors. We become reactive, and the way we interact with others every day often bears little resemblance of the way we deeply feel about them.
• We can change. We can live out our imagination instead of our memory. We can tie ourselves to limitless future potential instead of limited past. We can become our own first creators.
  • Begin each day with our values which truly matter in mind.
    • We can act with integrity
    • We don’t have to react to emotions or circumstances
    • We can be proactive and value driven when our values are clearly in mind

Personal Mission Statement

A personal mission statement based on correct principles becomes a standard of performance for ourselves. It becomes a personal constitution, the basis for making major, life-directing decisions, the basis for making daily decisions in the midst of the circumstances and emotions that affect our lives. It empowers individuals with the same timeless strength in the midst of change.

⭐️ The key to the ability to change is the changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.

🙂 With a mission statement, we can flow with changes. We don’t need prejudgements or prejudices. We don’t need to figure out everything else in life, to stereotype and categorize everything and everybody in order to accomodate reality.

🙁 Our personal environment is also changing at an ever-increasing pace. Such rapid change burns out a large number of people who feel they can hardly handle it, can hardly cope with life. They become reactive and essentially give up, hoping that things that happen to them will be good.

⭐️ Many so-called mental and emotional illnesses are really symptoms of an underlying sense of meaninglessness or emptiness

At The Center

Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.

🙁 Incorrect Centers:

• Spouse
  • strong emotional dependence
• Family
  • ironically destroys the very elements necessary for family success
• Money
  • often put aside family or other priorities
• Work
  • drive self to product at the sacrifice of health, relationships, and other important areas of life
  • fundamental identity comes from work
• Possession
  • sense of security lies in reputation or in the things acquired, and life is in a constant state fluctuations and threats
    • possessions may be lost, stolen, damaged, devalued, etc.
    • vicissitudes of self-worth when protecting assets, properties, position, reputation, etc.
• Pleasure
  • offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment
  • leisure time via television, video games, etc. allows us to continually take the course of least restistance which gradually wastes our lives
    • our capacities stay dormant
    • talent remains undeveloped
    • mind and spirit become lethargic
    • the heart is unfulfilled
• Friend/Enemy
  • emotional dependence on one individual, escalating need/conflict spiral, negative interactions, etc.
  • when someone feels they have been unjustly dealt with by an emotionally or socially significant person, it is very easy for them to become preoccupied with the injustice and make the other person the center of their life; rather than proactively leading their own life, the enemy-centered person is counterdependently reacting to the behavior and attitudes of a perceived enemy.
    • no intrinsic security: feelings of self-worth are volatile, a function of the emotional state of behavior of other people
    • no power: other people are pulling the strings
• Church
  • image or appearance are dominant considerations, leading to hypocrisy that undermines personal security and intrinsic worth
  • live life in compartments: acting, thinking, and feeling in certain ways on Sundays and in disparate ways on all other days
• Self
  • selfishness generates minimal security, guidance, wisdom, or power

🙂 Principle Center:

• Correct principles never change, they are deep fundamental truths
• The more we learn, the more clearly we can focus the lens through which we see the world
  • Wisdom and guidance come from correct maps which enable us to clearly see where we want to go and how to get there
    • Powerful living: self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive
    • Unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, actions of others, circumstances, or environmental influences

Natural Consequences of Principles

• Positive consequences occur when we live in harmony with principles
• Negative consequences occur when we ignore principles

⭐️ By centering our lives on timeless, unchanging principles, we create a fundamental paradigm of effective living. It is the center that puts all other centers in perspecive.

Our paradigm is the source from which our attitudes are behaviors flow. A paradigm is like a pair of glasses; if affects the way we see everything in life. If we look at things through the paradigm of correct principles, what we see in life is dramatically different from what we see though any other centered paradigm.

As principle centered people, we see things differently. And because we see things differently, we think differently, we act differently. Because we have a high degree of security, guidance, wisdom, and power that flows from a solid, unchanging core, we have the foundation of a highly proactive and highly effective life.

Writing and Using a Personal Mission Statement

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

-Viktor Frankl

We detect rather than invent our missions in life. Our conscience gives us an awareness of our own uniqueness and the singular contributions we can make.

Personal responsibility, or proactivity, is fundamental to the first creation. Until we accept the idea that we are responsible, that we are the programmer, we won’t really invest in writing the program. As proactive people, we can begin to give expression to what we want to be and to do in our lives. We can write a personal mission statement, a personal constitution. Our mission statement is the criterion by which we measure everything else in our lives.

The process is as important as the product. Writing or reviewing a mission statement changes us because it forces us to think through our priorities deeply, carefully, and aligns our behaviors with our beliefs.

Use Our Whole Brain

People tend to stay in the “comfort zone” of their dominant hemisphere and process every situation according to either a left- or right-brain preference, and we live primarily in a left-brain dominant world. Many of us find it more difficult to tap into our right brain capacity. We are capable of performing many different kinds of thought processes and we barely tap our potential. As we become aware of its different capacities, we can consciously use our minds to meet specific needs in more effective ways.

Two Ways to Tap into the Right-Brain

Expand Perspective

• sometimes we are knocked out of our left-brain environment and thought patterns and into the right-brain by an unplanned experience; extreme adversity can cause us to stand back, look at our lives, and ask ourselves some hard questions: “What really matters? Why am I doing what I’m doing?”
• if we are proactive, we don’t have to wait for a horrible circumstance to change, we can consciously create our own
  • write our own eulogy
  • visualize our own retirement party
  • visualize our 25^th or 50^th wedding anniversary

Visualization and Affirmation

• personal leadership is not a singular experience
  • it is an ongoing process of keeping our vision and values before us and aligning our life to be congruent with those most important things which matter most to us
  • a good affirmation example:
    • “it is deeply satisfying (emotional) that I (personal) respond (present tense) with wisdom, love, firmness, and self-control (positive) when my children misbehave”
  • we can write the program, write the script, in harmony with our values and personal mission statement
    • if we do this, day after day, our behaviors will change; instead of living out the scripts given to us by our parents, society, genetics, environment, etc., we will be living out the script we have written from our own self-selected value system

⭐️ World-class athletes and other peak performers are visualizers. They see it, feel it, experience it before actually doing it. They begin with the end in mind. Our creative visual right-brain is one of our most important assets, both in creating our personal mission statement and in integrating it into our life.

• in effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person’s life
• the higher use of imagination is in harmony with the use of conscience to transcend self and create a life of contribution based on unique purpose and on the principles that govern interdependent reality

Identifiying Roles and Goals

The logical/verbal left-brain becomes important also as we attempt to capture our right-brain images, feelings, and pictures. Writing is a kind of psycho-neural muscular activity which helps bridge and integrate the conscious and subconscious minds. Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought and helps break the whole into parts.

Writing our mission in terms of important roles in our life provides balance and harmony. After we identify our various roles, we can think about the long-term goals we want to accomplish in each of those roles.

An effective goal focuses primarily on results rather than activity. It gives meaning and purpose to all we do: we are proactively in charge of our lives and proplerly utilizing each day to fulfill our personal mission statement.

Habit 3: Put First Things First

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

-Goethe

Habit 3 is the instantiation of Habit 2:

• Habit 1: we are the creator and in charge of our lives
  • Via unique human endowments: imagination, conscience, independent will, and self-awareness
  • “That’s an unhealthy program I’ve been given from my childhood, from my social mirror. I don’t like that ineffective script. I can change.”
• Habit 2: is the first creation, a mental ability to imagine and see our potential with our minds what we cannot presently see with our eyes
  • a deep contract with our basic paradigms and values and the vision of what we can become
• Habit 3: is the second creation, the physical creation.
  • The fulfillment, actualization, and natural emergence of Habits 1 + 2
  • Habits 1 + 2 are prerequisites to Habit 3
  • We can be come principle-centered day-in and day-out, moment-by-moment, by living Habit 3, by practicing effective self-management.

Management is clearly different from leadership:

• Management via the left-brain: breaking down, analysis, sequencing, specific application
• Leadership via the right-brain: more of an art based on philosophy

Effective management is putting first things first. If we are effective managers of ourselves, then our discipline comes from within; it is a function of our independent will. We are a disciple, a follower of our own deep values and their source. And we have the will, the integrity, to subordinate our feelings, our impulses and moods to those values.

The Common Denominator of Success

The successful person had the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.

• That subordination requires a purpose, a mission (Habit 2)
• It also requires independent will, the power to do something when we don’t want to do it

Rather than focusing on things and time, fourth generation expectations focus on preserving and enhancing relationships and on accomplishing results – in short, on maintaining the P/PC balance.

Quadrant II

Effective people are not problem-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventatively. They have a genuine Quadrant I crises and emergencies that require their immediate attention, but the number is comparatively small. They keep P and PC in balance by focusing on the important, but not urgent, high-leverage capacity-building activities of Quadrant II.

What It Takes to Say “No”

We have to be proactive to work on Quadrant II because Quadrant I and III work on us. To say “yes” to important Quadrant II priorities, we have ot learn to say “no” to other activities, sometimes apparently urgent things.

The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.” Even when the urgent is good, the good can keep us from our best, keep us from our unique contribution, if we let it.

We say “yes” or “no” to things daily, usually many times a day. A center of correct principles and a focus on our personal mission empowers us with wisdom to make those judgements effectively.

Many people recognize the value of Quadrant II activies in their lives, but lack a principle center and personal mission statement, they don’t have the necessary foundation to sustain their efforts. Their independent will alone cannot effectively discipline them again their center.

Management follows leadership. The way we spend our time is the result of the way we see our time and priorities.

Living It: Engage!

“Run the program” and/or “Live the program.”

• primarily a function of our independent will, self-discipline, integrity, and commitment

As we go through our week, there will undoubtedly be times when our integrity will be placed on the line. Our principle center, self-awareness, and conscience can provide a high degree of intrinsic security, guidance, and wisdom to empower us to use our independent will and maintain integrity to the truly important.

Effectiveness with People, Efficiency with Things

Frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities. Habit 2 allows our higher values to drive us to subordinate our schedule to them. We can adapt and be flexible: with people, fast is slow, and slow is fast. People are more important than things.

Trust is the highest form of human motiviation. It brings out the very best in people. But it takes time and patience, and it doesn’t preclude the necessity to train and develop people so their competency can rise to the level of that trust. Ultimately more work will get done in much less time. But that takes the internal capacity to way to manage/delegate, not just produce. The focus is on effectiveness, not efficiency.

⭐️ Certainly we can clean up that room better than a child, but the key is that we want to empower the child to do it. It takes time. We have to get involved in the training and development. It takes time, but how valuable that time is downstream! It saves us so much in the long run.

Effective delegation is perhaps the best indicator of effective management simply because it is so basic to both personal and organizational growth.

The key to effective management of self is in the Quadrant II paradigm that empowers us to see through the lens of importance rather than urgency.

Paradigms of Interdependence

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

-Samuel Johnson

⭐️ The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are.

• We cannot be successful with other people if we haven’t paid the price of success with ourselves. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others. We have to like ourselves before we can like others, but if we don’t know ourself, or we don’t control ourself, if we don’t have mastery over ourself, it is very hard to like ourselves (except in some short-term, psych-up, superficial way).
• Unless we are willing to achieve real independence, it’s foolish to try to develop human relations skills. We might try. We might even have some degree of success when the sun is shining. But when the difficult times come (and they will), we won’t have the foundation to keep things together.
• The techniques and skills that really make a difference in human interaction are the ones that almost naturally flow from a truly independent character.

🙁 We often live for years with the chronic pain of our lack of vision, leadership or management in our personal lives. Because the pain is chronic, we get used to it, we learn to live with it.

The Emotional Bank Account

🙂 When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.

• Probably the most important deposit we can make would be to just listen, without judging or preaching or reading your own autobiography into what is being said. Just listen and seek to understand. Let others feel our concerns for them, our acceptance of them as a person.
• Building and repairing relationships takes time and are long-term investments
  • It takes character to be proactive, to focus on our circle of influence, to nurture growing things

Six Major Depostits

1. Understanding the Individual: really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits we can make, and it is the key to every other deposit
   • what is important to another person must be as important to us as the other person is to us
   • by accepting the value another person places on what they have to say, we show an understanding of them that makes a great deposit
2. Attending to the Little Things: little kindnesses and courtesies are so important.
   • In relationships the little things are the big things.
   • People are very tender, very sensitive inside, age or experience doesn’t make much difference, even within the most toughened and calloused exteriors, are tender feelings and emotions of the heart
3. Keeping Commitments: keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal
   • by cultivating the habit of keeping promises, we build bridges of trust that span the gaps of understanding between us and others
4. Clarifying Expectations: unclear expectations in the area of goals undermines communication and trust
   • the cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals
   • we can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment, and withdrawals of trust
     • that’s why it’s so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table
     • we create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by others
     • when expectations are not clear and shared, people begin to become emotionally involved and simple misunderstandings become compounded, turning into personality clashes and communication breakdowns
5. Showing Personal Integrity: personal integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits
   • Lack of integrity can undermine almost any other effort to create high trust accounts
   • If we are inwardly duplicitous, we will fail to build trust with others
   • One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present
   • confrontation takes considerable courage, and many people would prefer to take the course or least resistance, belittling and criticizing, betraying confidences, or participating in gossip about others behind their backs. But in the long run, people will trust and respect us if we are honest and open and kind with them. We care enough to confront.
   • whether we communicate with words or behavior, if we have integrity, our intent cannot be to deceive
     • integrity means avoiding any communication that is deceptive, full of guile, or beneath the dignity of people
6. Apologizing Sincerely When You Make a Withdrawal
   • when we make withdrawals from the emotional bank account, we need to apologize and we need to do it sincerely
     • it takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. a person must possess theirself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.
     • it is the weak who are cruel, gentleness can only be expected from the strong
     • we cannot walk our way out of problems we behaved ourselves into
     • sincere apologies make deposits, however, repeated apologies interpreted as insincere make withdrawals
     • it is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another thing not to admit it. people will forgive mistakes, because mistakes are usually of the mind, mistakes of judgement. but people will not easily forgive the mistakes of the heart, the ill intention, the bad motives, the prideful justifying cover-up of the first mistake.
       • rubber-balls vs. glass-balls

The Laws of Love and the Laws of Life

When we truly love others without condition, without strings, we help them feel secure, safe, validated, and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity.

Creating unity necessary to run an effective business or a family or a marriage requires great personal strength and courage.

P Problems are PC Opportunities

In an interdependent situation, every P problem is a PC opportunity, a chance to build the emotional bank accounts that significantly affect interdependent production.

• “Here an a great opportunity for me to really help my child and to invest in our relationship.”
  • Many interactions change from transactional to transformational, and strong bonds of love and trust are created as children sense the value parents give to their problems and to them as individuals.

Public Victory

Habit 4: Think Win/Win

Whether we are the president of a company or the janitor, the moment we step from independence into interdependence in any capacity, we step into a leadership role. We are in a position of influencing other people. And the habit of effective interpersonal leadership is Think Win/Win.

⭐️ “Public Victory” does not mean victory over other people. It means success in effective interaction that brings mutually beneficial results to everyone involved.

🙂 Win/Win

If we search deeply within ourselves, beyond the scripting, beyond the learned attitudes and behaviors, the real validation of Win/Win, as well as every other correct principle, is in our own lives.

• a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mututal benefit in all human interactions
• sees life as a cooperative, not competitive arena
• based on the abdundancy paradigm, there is plenty for everybody, and one person’s success is not achieved at the expense or exclusion of the success of others

🙁 Win/Lose

• prone to use position, power, credentials, possessions, or personality to get their way
• competition, not cooperation, lies at the core of the educational process
  • cooperation is usually associated with cheating
• defensive minds are neither creative nor cooperative
• most of life is interdependent, not independent, reality; most results we want depend on cooperation between us and others. the win/lose mentality is dysfunctional to that cooperation

🙁 Lose/Win

• quick to please or appease
• seek strength via popularity or acceptance
• little courage to express their own feelings and convictions
• easily intimidated by the ego strength of others
• bury alot of feelings; and unexpressed feelings never die, they’re buried alive and come forth later in uglier ways
  • psychosomatic illnesses, particularly of the respiratory, nervous, and circulatory systems often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose/Win mentality
  • disproportionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion
    • people who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings towards a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their self-esteem and eventually the quality of their relationships with others

🙁 Lose/Lose

Some people become so centered on an enemy, so totally obsessed with the behavior of another person that they become blind to everything except their desire for that person to lose, even if it means losing themselves.

• philosophy of war and adversarial conflict
• highly dependent person without inner direction who is miserable and thinks everyone else should be too

5 Dimensions of Win/Win

1. Character

Integrity

• clearly identified values based upon unchanging principles
• proactively organize and execute around our values on a daily basis
• develop self-awareness and independent will by making and keeping meaningful promises and commitments

Maturity

• the balance between courage and consideration
  • courage may focus on getting the golden egg, consideration deals with the long-term welfare of the other stakeholders
• the ability to express one’s own feelings and convictions balanced with consideration for the thoughts and feelings of others

Abundance Mentality

• there is plenty out there for everybody
• people with the opposite mentality, scarcity mentality, have a hard time sharing recognition, credit, power, or profit - even with those who help in the production and have a hard time celebrating the success of others
• adundance mentality flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security
• a character rich in integrity, maturity, and abundance mentality has a genuineness that goes far beyond technique in human interaction

2. Relationships

• The stronger we are, the more genuine our character, the higher our level of proactivity, the more committed we really are to Win/Win, the more powerful our influence will be with other people. This is the real test of interpersonal leadership. It goes beyond transactional leadership into transformational leadership, transforming the individuals involved as well as the relationship.
• an agreement means very little in letter without the character and relationship base to sustain it in spirit; so we need to approach Win/Win from a genuine desire to invest in the relationships that make it possible

3. Agreements

It is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them. And in high trust culture, it’s much more accurate. In many cases people know in their hearts how things are going much better than the records show. Discernment is often far more accurate than either observation or measurement.

In the Win/Win agreement, the following 5 elements are made very explicit:

1. Desired results (not methods) identify what is to be done and when
2. Guidelines specify the parameters (principles, policies, etc.) within which results are to be accomplished
3. Resources identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational support available to help accomplish the results
4. Accountability sets up the standards of performance and the time of evaluation
5. Consequences specify the good and bad, natural and logical, what does and will happen as a result of the evaluation

4. Systems

• we basically get what we reward
• the spirit of Win/Win cannot survive in an environment of competition and contests
• often the problem is in the system, not in the people; if we put good people in bad systems, we get bad results; we have to water the flowers we want to grow

5. Processes

1. see the problem from the other point of view; seek to understand and give expression to the needs and concerns of the other party
2. identify the key issues and concerns (not positions) involved
3. determine what results would constitute a fully acceptable solution
4. identify possible new options to achieve those results

Habit 5: Seek First To Understand Then To Be Understood

🙁 We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first.

⭐️ This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication

• Reading and writing are both forms of communication. So are speaking and listening. In fact, these are the four basic types of communication. And think of all the hours we spend doing at least one of these things. The ability to do them well is absolutely critical to our effectiveness.
  • Communication is the most important skill in life. We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: we’ve spend years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening? What training or education have we had which enables us to listen so that we really, deeply understand another human being from that individual’s own frame of reference?
    • If you want to interact effectively with me, you first need to understand me, otherwise I don’t feel safe enough to open myself up to you
    • The real key to your influence with me is your example, your actual conduct. Your example flows naturally out of your character, or the kind of person you truly are
    • Your character is constantly radiating, communicating. From it, in the long run, I come to instinctively trust or distrust you and your efforts with me.
    • Unless you’re influenced by my uniqueness, I’m not going to be influenced by your advice.
    • You have to build the skills of empathic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust. And you have to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that create a commerce between hearts

Empathic Listening

⭐️ “Seek first to understand” involves a very deep shift in paradigm. We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives. They’re constantly projecting their own home movies onto other people’s behavior. They prescribe their own glasses for everyone whom they interact. If they have a problem with someone, their attitude is, “That person just doesn’t understand.”

• The essence of empathic listening is not that we agree with someone; it’s that we fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.
• In empathic listening, we listen with our ears, but we also, and more importantly, listen with our eyes and our hearts. We listen for feeling, for meaning. We listen for behavior. We use our right brain as well as our left. We sense, intuit, and feel.
  • We’re dealing with the reality inside another person’s head and heart. We’re focused on receiving that deep communication of another human soul
  • Emphatic listening is a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account. It’s deeply therapeutic and healing because it gives a person “psychological air.”
    • 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 understand, affirmed, validated, and appreciated
    • When we listen with empathy to another person, we give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, we can then focus on influencing or problem solving. This need for psychological air impacts communication in every area of life.
• Seeking first to understand, diagnosing before we prescribe, is hard. It’s so much easier in the short run to hand someone a pair of glasses that have fit us so well these many years.
  • Empathic listening is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because we open ourselves up to be influenced. We become vulnerable. It’s a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence, we have to be influenced. That means we have to really understand.
    • This is why Habits 1, 2, 3 are so foundational. They give us the changeless inner core, the principle center, from which we can handle the more outward vulnerability with peace and strength.
  • Empathic listening takes time, but it doesn’t take anywhere near as much time as it takes to back up and correct misunderstandings when we’re already miles down the road, to redo, to live with unexpressed and unsolved problems, to deal with the results of not giving people psychological air.
    • A discerning empathic listener can read what’s happening down deep fast, and can show such acceptance, such understanding, that others feel safe to open up layer after layer until they get to that soft inner core where the problem really lies.
    • People want to be understood. And whatever investment of time it takes to do that will bring much greater returns of time as we work from an accurate understanding of the problems and issues and from the high Emotional Bank Account that results when a person feels deeply understood.
      • Seeking to understand requires consideration; seeking to be understood takes courage
• The time we invest to deeply understand the people we love brings tremendous dividends in open communication.
  • Make the human element as important as the financial or technical element
  • Before problems come up, before we try to evaluate and prescribe, before we try to present our own ideas, seek to understand. It’s a powerful habit of effective interdependence
  • When we really, deeply understand each other, we open the door to creative solutions and third alternatives. Our differences are no longer stumbling blocks to communication and progress. Instead, they become the stepping stones of synergy.
  • Watch what happens to ourselves, the more deeply we understand other people, the more we will appreciate them, the more reverent we will feel about them. To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground
    • Don’t push; be patient; be respectful. People don’t have to open up verbally before we can empathsize.

Habit 6: Synergize

I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity in important things, diversity in all things, generosity.

-Inaugural Address of President George Bush

⭐️ Synergy means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

• The essence of synergy is to value differences, to respect them, to build on strengths, to compensate for weaknesses
• It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without a doubt, we have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness. We become a trailblazer, a pathfinder. We open new possibilities, new territories, new continents, so that others can follow.
• Most all creative endeavors are somewhat unpredictable. They often seem ambiguous, hit-or-miss, and trial-and-error. We must have a high tolerance for ambiguity and retrieve our security from integrity to principles and innner values; this decouples our “need” for structure, certainty, and predictability in our VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous)
• The more authentic we become, the more genuine in our expression, particularly regarding personal experiences and even self-doubts, the more people can relate to our expression and the safer it makes them feel to express themselves.

If a person of your intelligence and competence and commitment disagrees with me, then there must be something to your disagreement that I don’t understand, and I need to understand it. You have a perspective, a frame of reference I need to look at.

Negative Synergy

⭐️ Seeking the third alternative is a major paradigm shift from the dichotomous, either/or mentality.

• the problem is that highly dependent people are trying to succeed in an interdependent reality
  • they don’t really want to listen
  • they want to manipulate
    • synergy can’t thrive in that environment

🙂 One of the very practical results of being principle-centered is that it makes us whole, truly integrated. People who are scripted deeply in logical, verbal, left-brain thinking will discover how totally inadequate that thinking is in solving problems which require a great deal of creativity. They become aware and begin to open up a new script inside their right brain. It’s not that the right brain wasn’t there; it just lay dormant. The muscles had not been developed, or perhaps they had atrophied after early childhood because of the heavy left-brain emphasis of formal education or social scripting.

• When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative, and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working. In other words, there is a psychic synergy taking place in our own head. And this tool is best suited to the reality of what life is, because life is not just logical, it is also emotional.

Valuing Differences

⭐️ Life is not always a dichotomous either/or; there are almost always third alternatives

Valuing differences is the essence of synergy, the mental, emotional, psychological differences between people. And the key to valuing those differences is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are.

• The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize their own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings. That person values difference because those differences add to their knowledge, to their understanding of reality. When we’re left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data.
  • Is it logical that two people can disagree and that both can be right? It’s not logical: it’s psychological. We interpret the data points differently because we’ve been conditioned to interpret them differently.
    • I want to communicate with you because you see it differently; I value that difference. By doing that, I not only increase my own awareness; I also affirm you. I give you pyschological air.

All Nature is Synergistic

• Synergy works; it’s a correct principle. It is the crowning achievement of all the previous habits. It is effectiveness in an interdependent reality - it is teamwork, team building, the development of unity and creativity with other human beings.
• Our own internal synergy is completely within our Circle of Influence. We can respect both sides of our own nature - the analytical side and the creative side. We can value the difference between them and use that difference to catalyze creativity.
• We can exercise the courage in interdependent situations to be open, to express our ideas, our feelings, and our experiences in a way which will encourage other people to be open also.
• We can value the difference in other people. When someone disagrees with us, we can say, “Good! You see it differently.” We don’t have to agree with them; we can simply affirm them, and we can seek to understand.
• When we only see two alternatives - ours and the “wrong” one - we can look for a synergistic third alternative. There’s almost always a thirld alternative, and if we work with a Win/Win philosophy and really seek to understand, we usually can find a solution which will be better for everyone concerned.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw - Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal

We must be proactive. Taking time to sharpen the saw is a definite Quadrant II activity. Personal PC must be pressed upon until it becomes second nature, until it becomes a kind of healthy addiction. Because it’s at the center of our Circle of Influence, no one else can do it for us. We must do it ourselves.

This is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in life - investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute. We are the instruments of our own performance, and to be effective, we need to recognize the importance of taking time regularly to sharpen the saw in all four ways.

Four Dimensions of Renewal

1. Physical: exercise, nutrition, stress management
2. Spiritual: value clarification & commitment, study & meditation
3. Mental: reading, visualizing, planning, writing
4. Social/Emotional: service, empathy, synergy, intrinsic security

The Physical Dimension

⭐️ Probably the greatest benefit we will experience from exercising will be the development of our Habit 1 muscles of proactivity. As we act based on the value of physical well-being instead of reacting to all the forces that keep us from exercising, our paradigm of ourself, our self-esteem, our self-confidence, and our integrity will be profoundly affected.

• Caring effectively for our physical body - eating the right kinds of foods, getting sufficient rest and relaxation, and exercising on a regular basis.
• We have “emotional muscles” to be “exercised” as well. When we exercise our patience beyond our past limits, the emotional fiber is broken, nature overcompensates, and the next time the fiber is stronger.

The Spiritual Dimension

⭐️ The greatest battles of life are fought out daily in the silent chambers of the soul. If we win battles there, if we settle the issues that inwardly conflict, we feel a sense of peace, a sense of knowing what we’re about. And we’ll find that the public victories - where we tend to think cooperatively, to promote the welfare and good of other people, and to be genuinely happy for other people’s successes - will follow naturally.

🙂 Nature bequeaths its own blessing on those who immerse themselves in it. When we’re able to leave the noise and the discord of the city and give ourself up to the harmony and rhythm of nature, we come back renewed.

The Mental Dimension

There’s no better way to inform and expand our mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. The person who doesn’t read is no better off than the person who can’t read.

⭐️ Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process

It is said that wars are won in the general’s tent. Taking one hour each day to sharpen the saw in the first three dimensions - the physical, the spiritual, and the mental - is a practice which will affect every decision, every relationship. It will greatly improve the quality, the effectiveness, of every other hour of the day, including the depth and restfulness of our sleep. It will build the long-term physical, spiritual, and mental strength to enable us to handle difficult challenges in life.

The Social/Emotional Dimension

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privledge to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

-George Bernard Shaw

⭐️ Service is the rent we pay for the privledge of living on this Earth

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.

• With abundance mentality, giving a positive reflection to others in no way diminishes us
• What do we relect to others about themselves?
  • Learner disability may be the result of teacher inflexibility
    • The more we can see people in terms of their unseen potential, the more we can use our imagination rather than our memory.
    • 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.

Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live primarily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren’t living; they are “being lived.” They are reacting, unaware of their unique endowments that lie dormant and undeveloped within. And there is no shortcut in developing them. The law of the harvest governs; we will always reap what we sow - no more, no less. The law of justice is immutable, and the closer we align ourselves with correct principles, the better our judgement will be about how the world operates and the more accurate our paradigms (our maps of the territory) will be.

THE BUCK STOPS HERE. I WILL PUT IN THE WORK. OVER AND OVER AGAIN.