
One Sentence-Summary:"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey provides practical and timeless principles for personal and professional success, emphasizing proactive behavior, goal setting, and fostering effective communication and collaboration.
The 7 HAbits of Highly Effective People Summary
Want to know the secrets to success? This iconic 1989 self-help book by Stephen R Covey, shows you how to become a more effective person not only in business but in the rest of your life, by changing how you see the world and better understanding your own definition of success.
The book has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide since its publication, and may owe its success to that fact that Covey tried to help readers adopt a set of timeless and universal values to aid them in creating habits that can be applied to any situation.
His book isn't about giving you a set of rules or principles to follow, but about changing your character and how you see the world. This then informs your behaviours and how you react to different situations. There are no quick fixes here!
The book uses the example of getting lost in a new city. A person with a negative paradigm (the way you see the world), will see it as a frustrating waste of time. Someone with a positive paradigm will see it as an exciting adventure. Covey’s 7 habits of highly effective people aim to adjust your character so you see the world in a positive paradigm. . The titles of these habits can seem a little cryptic at first, so we’ve tried to unpack them for you.

1. Be proactive |
2. Begin with the end in mind |
3. Put First Things First |
4. Think Win-Win |
5. Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood |
6. Synergize |
7. Sharpen the Saw |
1. BE PROACTIVE
You won’t find it in an ordinary dictionary, but the word is common now in management
literature:
Proactivity means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives.
If we think our lives are a function of our conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to have control over us - we have let ourselves become reactive. Reactive people are often affected by the weather, proactive people carry their own weather with them.
Being proactive means recognizing our responsibility to make things happen. The people who end up with the good jobs are those who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary, consistent with correct principles, to get the job done.
I worked with a group of people in the home- improvement industry. A heavy recession was
taking a toll on their business, and they were discouraged as we began the seminatrThe first
day, we talked about “What’s happening to us?” The basic answer was that they were laying
off their friends just to survive. The group finished their first day even more discouraged.
The second day, we talked about “What’s going to happen in the future?” They concluded
things were going to get worse before they improved. They were more depressed than ever.
On the third day, we focused on the proactive question, “What is our response?” In the
morning, we brainstormed practical ways of managing better and cutting costs; in the
afternoon, we talked about increasing market share. By concentrating on a few do-able things, everyone was able to wrap up the meeting with a new spirit of excitement and hope, eager to get back to work. We all had faced reality, and discovered we had the power to choose a positive response.
2. BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND
In your mind’s eye, see yourself going to the funeral of a loved one. As you walk into the
chapel, notice the flowers, the soft organ music. You see the faces of friends and family; you
feel the shared sorrow of losing, the joy of having known.
As you reach the front of the room and look inside the casket, you suddenly come face4o-face with yourself. This is your funeral, three years from now. Take a seat and look down at the program in your hand. The first speaker is from your extended family; the second is a close friend; the third is an acquaintance from your business life; the fourth is from your church or some community-service organization where you’ve worked.
What character would you like each of these speakers to have seen in you - what difference
would you like to have made in their lives?
The second habit of effectiveness is to begin with the end in mind. It means to know where
you’re going so as to understand where you are now, and take your next step in the right
direction. It’s ma7’ingly easy to get caught up in an activity trap in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall. We may be very efficient by working frenetically and heedlessly, but we will be effective only when we begin with the end result in mind.
The best way to start is to develop a personal mission statement. It describes what we want to be (character) and to do (achievements). The following is from my friend Rolfe Kerr’s personal
3. PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST
Question: What one thing could you do - which you aren’t doing now - that If you did it regularly,
would make a tremendous difference in your business or personal life?
The next habit involves self-leadership and self-management: putting first things first. Leader
ship decides what the “first things” are, and management is the discipline of carrying out your program.
As Peter Drucker has pointed out, the expression “time management” is something of a
misnomer: We have a constant amount of time, no matter what we do; the challenge we face
is to manage ourselves. To be an effective manager of yourself, you must organize and
execute around priorities.
We don’t manage time. We can only I manage ourselves
4.SEEK TO UNDERSTAND, THEN BE UNDERSTOOD
The most important word to know in mastering this habit is “listen.” Listen to your colleagues,
family, friends, customers - but not with intent to reply, to convince, to manipulate. Listen
simply to understand, to see how the other party sees things.
The skill to develop here is empathy. Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of
agreement, a judgment. The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with
someone; it’s that you fully understand him, emotionally and intellectually.
Empathic listening is with the ears, eyes, and heart - for feeling, for meaning.
It’s powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with, instead of projecting and
assuming your own thoughts and motives. You can only work with someone productively and
make an appropriate deposit in your Emotional Bank Account with him if you understand
what really matters most to him.
5.THINK “WIN/WIN”
Once we’ve mastered the first three habits, we’re ready to move from the “private victory” to
the “public victory.” Self and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships s others.
We all know what a financial bank account is. If we make de is in it, money will be there for us
to withdraw when we need it. The Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor that describes the
amount of trust that’s been built up in a personal relationship. If into an account with you
through courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping my commitments to you, I build up a
reserve. Your trust for me becomes higher, and I can call on it III need to; I can even make
mistakes, and that trust level will compensate for it. Communication is easy, instant, and
effective.
But if I have a habit of showing discourtesy, disrespect, cutting you off, overreacting, betraying
your trust, or threatening you, my account gets overdrawn. The trust level is low; what
flexibility do I have?
None. I am walking on mine fields. I’m politicking; I have to measure every word. Many
organizations and many marriages are like this.
6. SYNERGIZE
When Winston Churchill was called to lead Great Britain’s war effort, he remarked that all his
life had prepared him for this hour.
In a similar sense, the exercise of all the other habits prepares us for the habit of synergy.
Properly understood, synergy is the highest activity of life. Through it, we create new,
untapped alternatives - things that didn’t yet exist. We unleash people’s greatest powers. We
make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
The creative process is also terrifying, because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or where it’s going to lead. You leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness. You become a pathfinder.
The basis of synergy is that two people can disagree, and both can be right. It’s not logical. It’s psychological. I was hired to lead discussion at the annual two-day planning meeting for top executives of a big insurance company. The usual pattern was to discuss major issues chosen through a questionnaire. Past meetings had been generally respectful exchanges, and on occasion they deteriorated into win/lose ego battles. They were usually predictable and boring.
I convinced them to commission several executives to write anonymous “white papers,” which were passed out to all the executives ahead of time, so they could immerse themselves in the differing points of view.
By removing both the need to be polite (and uncreative) and the threat of other egos (since
the papers were anonymous), the release of creative
energy was incredible.
7.SHARPEN THE SAW
Suppose you come upon a man in the woods feverishly sawing down a tree.
“You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”
“Over five hours,” he replies, “and I am beat. This is hard.”
“Maybe you could take a break for a few minutes an sharpen that saw. Then the work would
go faster.”
“No time,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing.”
Habit seven is taking time to sharpen the saw (you’re the saw). It’s the habit that makes all the others possible.
To sharpen the saw means renewing ourselves, in all four aspects of our natures:
Physical - exercise, nutrition, stress management;
Mental - reading, visualizing, planning, writing;
Social/Emotional - service, empathy, synergy, security;
Spiritual - spiritual reading, study, and meditation;
To exercise in all these necessary dimensions, we must be proactive. No one can do it for us ormake it urgent for us; it is a quadrant IV activity.
For instance, exercise is a typical, high- leverage, quadrant II activity that most of us don’t do
consistently enough.
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