7 habits of highly Effective People

7 habits of highly Effective People

Habit 1: Being Proactive
You are the Creator, you are in charge. It is based on the unique human endowments of imagination, conscience, independent will and particularly self awareness. It empowers you to say “that’s an unhealthy program given from my childhood, from my social mirror, I don’t like that ineffective script, I can change.”

Habit 2: Begin with End in Mind
Habit 2 is the first or mental creation. It’s based on imagination – the ability to envision, to see the potential, to create our own minds what we cannot at present see with our eyes; and conscience – the ability to detect our own uniqueness and the personal, moral and ethical guidelines within which we can most happily fulfill it. It’s deep contact with our basic Paradigms and Values and the vision of what we can become.

Habit 3: Put First Thing First.
Habit 3 is the 2nd creation, the Physical Creation. It’s the fulfillment the actualization, the natural emergence of Habits 1 & 2. It’s the exercise of Independent Will towards becoming Principle Centered. It’s the day – in, day – out, moment by moment doing it.

Time Management: Organize and execute around priorities.


QUADRANT I
QUADRANT II

Urgent
Not Urgent
Important
Crisis
Pressing Problems
Deadlines Driven Projects
Prevention
Principle Centered Activities
Relationship Building
Recognizing new opportunities
Planning
Recreation

QUADRANT III
QUADRANT IV
Not Important
Interruptions
Some Calls
Some Mails
Some Reports
Some Meetings
Proximate, Pressing Matters
Popular Activities
Trivia
Busy Work
Some Mail
Some Phone Calls
Time Wasters
Pleasant Activities.




Pareto Principle: 80% of the results flow out of 20% activities.

Quadrant II tools

Coherence
Quadrant II focus
A people Dimension
Flexibility
Portability

Quadrant II Self Manager

Identify roles
Selecting Goals
Scheduling
Daily Adapting

Paradigm of Interdependence

Emotional Bank Account

Six Major Deposits:
Understanding the individual
Attending to the little things
Keeping Commitments
Clarifying Expectation
Showing Personal Integrity
Apologizing sincerely when you make a withdrawal.

Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Six choices
Win/Win
Win /Lose
Lose /Win
Lose / Lose
Win
Win/Win or No Deal

Win/ Win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win/ Win meant that agreements or situations are mutually beneficial, mutually satisfying.
Win / Lose Authoritarian approach: I get my way, you don’t get yours. Win / Lose people are prone to use positions, power credentials, possessions or personality to get their way.
Lose / Win: People who think lose / win are usually quick to please or appease. They seek strength from popularity or acceptance. They have little courage to express their own feelings and convictions and are easily intimidated by the ego strength of others.
Lose / Lose: When two Win / Lose people get together – that is, when two determined, stubborn, ego-invested individuals interact the result will be Lose / Lose. Both will lose. Both will become vindictive and want to “ get back “ or “get even”, blind to the fact that murder is suicide, that revenge is two edged sword.
Win: Another common alternative is simply to think Win. People with the Win mentality don’t necessarily want someone else to Lose. That’s irrelevant, what matters is that they get what they want.
Win / Win or No deal: If these individuals had not come up with a synergistic solution, one that was agreeable to both – they could have gone for even higher expression of Win / Win – Win / Win or no deal. No deal basically means that if we can’t find a solution that would benefit us both, we agree to disagree agreeably – no deal. One could say: - “I only want to go win /win. I want to win and I want you to Win. I wouldn’t want to get my way and have you not feel good about it, because downstream it would eventually surface and create a withdrawal. On the other hand I don’t think you would feel good if you got your way and I gave in. So let’s work for a win / win. Let’s really hammer it out. And if we can’t find it, then let’s agree that we won’t make a deal at all. It would be better not to deal than to live with a decision that wasn’t right for us both. Then may be another time we might be able to get together.

Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood:

Listening:
· Ignoring
· Pretending
· Selective Listening
· Attentive listening
· Empathic Listening

Communication experts estimate that only 10% of our communication is represented by the words we say. Another 30% is represented by our sounds and 60% by our body language.

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.

Four autobiographical responses:
· We evaluate – we either agree or disagree
· We Probe – we ask questions from our frame of reference.
· We advise – we give counsel based on our own experience.
· We interpret – we try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behaviour, based on our own motive and behaviour.

Then seek to be understood

Greeks had a magnificent philosophy which is embodied in three sequentially arranged words:
Ethos
Pathos
Logos

Ethos: is your personal credibility, the faith people have in your integrity and competency. It’s trust that you inspire your Emotional Bank Account.
Pathos: Pathos is the emphatic side – it’s the feeling. It means that you are in alignment with the emotional thrust of another person’s communication.
Logos: is the logic, the reasoning part of the presentation.
Sequence: Ethos, Pathos, Logos – Your Character, Your Relationship, Logic of your presentation. Most people in making presentation go straight to the Logos, the left brain logic, of their ideas. They try to convince other people of the validity of that logic without first taking Ethos and Pathos into consideration.
Don’t push; be patient; be respectful. People don’t have to open up verbally before you can empathize. Make the human element as important as the financial or technical element. You save tremendous amounts of time, energy and money when you tap into the human resources of a business at every level. When you listen, you learn. And you also give the people who work for you psychological air. You inspire loyalty that goes well beyond the eight to five physical demands of the job.

Habit 6: Synergize
What is Synergy? Simply defined, it means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most exciting part.

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don’t know exactly what is going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don’t know what new dangers and challenges you will find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness. You become a trail blazer a pathfinder. You open new possibilities, new territories, and new continents so that others can follow.

Synergistic Communication:
When you communicate synergistically, you are simply opening your mind and heart and expressions to new possibilities, new alternatives, new options.

Synergy in the Classroom:
There are times when neither the teacher nor the student knows for sure what’s going to happen. In the beginning, there is a safe environment that enables people to be really open and to learn and to listen each other’s ideas. Then comes brainstorming, where the spirit of evaluation is subordinated to the spirit of creativity, imagining and intellectual networking. Than an absolutely unusual phenomenon begins to take place. The entire class is transformed with excitement of a new thrust, a new idea, a new direction that’s hard to define, yet it’s almost palpable to the people involved.

Synergy in Business: Once people have experienced real synergy, they are never quite the same again. They know the possibility of having other such mind expanding adventures in the future.

Synergy and Communication

Levels of Communication


High
Synergistic
(win/win)

Respectful
Trust (compromise)

Defensive
(win / Lose or Lose / win)
Low
Low High

Cooperation

The lowest level of communication coming out of low trust situation would be characterized by defensiveness, protectiveness and often legalistic language, which covers all the basics and spells out qualifiers and the escape clauses in the event things go sour. Such communication produces only win/ win or Lose / lose.

The middle position is respectful communication, this is the level where fairly mature people interact. They have respect for each other, but they want to avoid the possibility of ugly confrontations, so they communicate politely but not empathically. Respectful communication works in independent situations and even in interdependent situations, but the creative possibilities are not opened up. It is not creative or synergistic. It produces a low form of Win / Win.

The synergistic position of high trust produces solutions better than any originally proposed, and all parties know it. Further more, they genuinely enjoy the creative enterprise. A mini culture is formed to satisfy in and of itself.

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 became 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 muscle had not been developed or perhaps they had atrophied after early childhood because of the heavy left brain emphasis or formal education or social scripting.

When a person 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 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 the Differences: Valuing the differences is the essence of synergy – the mental, the emotional, the 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.

Force Field Analysis: Driving forces generally are positive, reasonable, logical, conscious and economic. In juxta position, restraining forces are often negative, emotional, illogical, unconscious and social / psychological. Both sets of forces are very real and must be taken into account in dealing with change.
You create an atmosphere in which it is safe to talk about these forces. You unfreeze them, loosen them up and create new inquiry that actually transform those restraining forces into driving ones. You involve people in the problem, immerse them in it, so that they soak in it and feel it is their problem and they tend to become an important part of the solution.
As a result, new goals, shared goals are created and the whole enterprise moves upward, often in ways that no one could have anticipated. And the excitement contained within that movement creates a new culture. The people involved in it are enmeshed in each other’s humanity and empowered by new fresh thinking, by new creative alternatives and opportunities.

All nature is Synergistic: Synergy it is effectiveness in an interdependent reality – it is teamwork, team building, the development of unity and creativity with other human beings.

Habit 7: Renew your Skills/ Sharpen the Saw:

Four Dimensions of Renewal:


Physical
Exercise, Nutrition, Stress Management
Mental
Reading, visualizing, planning & writing
Social
Service, empathy, synergy, intrinsic security
Spiritual
Value clarification & commitment, study and meditation.

Healthy & Balanced Life: 4 Values

Perspective: Spiritual
Autonomy: Mental
Connectedness: Social
Tone: Physical.

Sharpen the saw basically means exercising all four dimensions of our nature, regularly and consistently in wise and balanced ways. This is 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.
When you exercise your patience beyond your past limits, the emotional fiber is broken, nature overcompensates and next time the fiber is stronger.

Physical Dimension: Eating / Getting sufficient rest, relaxation/ exercising.
Exercising – Endurance, Flexibility, Strength.

Spiritual Dimension: Spiritual dimension is your core, your center, your commitment to your value system. If one’s motives are wrong, nothing can be right.

Mental Dimension:
Limit the TV watching one hour per day or seven hours per week.
Education: Continually honing and expanding the mind.

Reading, Writing, Organizing and Planning.

Daily Private Victory:
Spend one hour each on Physical, Spiritual and Mental development.

Phillips Brooks:
Some day, in the years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation or trembling under the great sorrows of your Life. But the real struggle is here, now ….. Now it is being decided, whether in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character can not be made except by a steady, long continued process.

Social Emotional Dimension:
The social and the economic dimensions of our lives are tied together because our emotional life is primarily, but not exclusively, developed out of and manifested in our relationships with others.
Where does intrinsic security come from? It doesn’t come from what other people think of us or how they treat us. It doesn’t come from the scripts they handed us. It doesn’t come from our circumstances or position. It comes from within. It comes from accurate paradigms and correct principles deep in our own mind and heart. It comes from inside – out congruence, from living a life of integrity in which our daily habits reflect our deepest values.

Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.

There is intrinsic security that comes from services, our helping other people in a meaningful ways. 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.

Scripting Others: We can treat others as responsible individuals – script them as principle centered, value based, independent, worthwhile individuals. Goethe taught “treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he should be and he will become as he can and should be.”

Self Renewal in all Four Direction:

In an organization, the physical dimension is expressed in economic terms. The mental or psychological dimension deals with the recognition, development and use of talent. The social / economic dimension has to do with human relations, with how people are treated. The spiritual dimension deals with finding meaning through purpose or contribution through Organizational integrity.
Whenever an Organization neglects any one or more of the areas, it negatively impacts the entire organization. The creative energies that could result in tremendous positive energy are instead used to fight against the Organization and become restraining forces to growth and productivity.