7 Habits – Part 1
7 Habits – Part 2
Habit 1: Be Proactive
R&I – Resourcefulness and Initiative
Grit = R&I – Resourcefulness and Initiative are key predictors of success.
Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind
4 Pillars – Security, Guidance, Wisdom and Power
Leadership is communicating to another their worth and potential so
clearly they are inspired to see it in themselves. P 161
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Time Management Matrix
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Habit 4: Think Win – Win
Character  Relationships  Agreements
Character is the foundation: Integrity, Maturity, and Abundance Mentality
Roger Fisher and William Ury – “Getting to Yes”
Hyrum Smith – “What Matters Most: The Power of Living your Values”
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be
Understood
Diagnose before prescribing.
It’s not what you say, but how you make others feel that has a long lasting
impression.
Consider this: You’ve spent years learning how to read and write, years
learning how to speak. But what about listening. P275
Empathic listening – most people do not listen with the intent to
understand; they listen with the intent to reply.
Four developmental stages of listening. Active listening. Rephrase the
content. Reflect feeling. Rephrase content and reflect feeling.
Habit 6: Synergize
Compromise means that 1 + 1 = 1
Synergy means that 1 + 1 = 8, or 16 or even 1,600!
October 01, 2018
Ijust finished reading "The 7 habits of highly effective people", a bestseller by Stephen R. Covey, that has inspired me in many levels. I am
sharing some of the learnings I got, mostly as a personal bookmark,
but hopefully this post can be useful for the community.
Habit 1: Be Proactive

It is not what happens to us, but our response to
what happens to us that hurts us. There is a space
between stimulus and response, and the key to our
growth and happiness is how we use that space.

While reactive people feel victimized and out of
control, proactive people have the power to choose
how to respond to any circumstances (i.e., smiling
with bad weather).

We must focus our efforts on the things we can do
something about, and accept what we can't change
(past events, weather,...).

Try replacing victimized language (i.e., "There is
nothing I can do", "I have to do it",...) with proactive
language ("Let's see all the options", "I choose to do
it",...).
Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind

Management is doing things right. Leadership is
doing the right things. Effective management without
effective leadership is "like straightening deck chairs
on the Titanic".

Try visualizing what you want to be said of you in
your funeral from your partner, relatives, co-
workers, friends,.... You will find your ultimate
definition of success.

Write your Personal Mission Statement, a sort
of Constitution summarizing what you want to be, to
do, and the values and principles that govern your
life. Here is mine:
"Live in a way that, looking back from my deathbed, I
have clear conscience, I have had a positive impact on
thousands of people's lives, and I can say that this
journey was fun and worth every minute"

You can create specific mission statements for each
role you have in your life: as a partner, parent,
friend, co-worker,...

Top performers visualize themselves in rich detail
before important activities, such as a job interview,
an important football match, a public keynote,...
They create an internal "comfort zone", so that when
they get into the situation it isn't foreign anymore.
Source: Christina O
Habit 3: Put first things first

In the matrix above, we classify tasks
by urgency and by importance (contribution to your
mission and values). We tend to react to urgent
matters but we must act (be proactive) on important
matters.

Q1 - Urgent and important. A.K.A. firefighting. If you
spend too much time solving crises you will be
stressed and burned out. Thinking preventively can
reduce the frequency of crises.

Q2 - Important but not urgent. This is the heart of
effective personal management, where you spend
time on things that can have an important impact on
your personal and professional lives, but you never
have time to do because you are busy with urgent
things. Working out, acquiring new skills, family
time, innovating processes at work,... they all fit in
Q2.

Q3 - Urgent but not important. Solving problems
based on other people's priorities that are normally
in conflict with your own. Here is where it becomes
so important to say "no" to these tasks, that take
time from Q2.

Q4 - Not urgent and not important. These are nondemanding activities that are our refuge when we
are burned out from crisis management.

Ideally we should eliminate Q3 and Q4 activities,
reduce Q1 through prevention and spend most of our
time in Q2.

Technique: Weekly planning:
1. Think about the roles you have in your life. For
example, I can be a husband, father, son, brother,
friend, tech architect, agile coach and basketball
referee. Include another one: "myself".
2. For each one, reflect about your top 1-2
priorities (in Q2) that you want to act on during the
following week. For example, as "myself" I want to
workout and study Norwegian, as a father I want to
organize my child's birthday party,...
3. Put them all in your calendar and make sure
you do them. These are your most important tasks
for the week. Then you can fill the empty slots in
your calendar with other less important tasks.
Habit 4: Think Win&Win

With a Win/Win mentality, all parties feel good about
the decision and feel committed to the action plan in
a cooperative, non-competitive way.

A balance between high courage (to confront)
and consideration (to emphatically understand) in an
environment of trust is essential.

Win/Win mentality represents the believe that there
is plenty of pie out there for everybody, in contrast
with the scarcity mentality that stops people from
collaborating.

In most cases, it is better to have a "no-deal" when
no Win/Win can be found.

Win/Win Performance Agreement (example). The
boss must make clear to the employees the
requirements for the different rewards
(promotions,...). Based on that, the employees must
state in advance what they want to accomplish, and
work together on a plan to achieve it. If the
requirements are met, both will win. If not, the
employee won't feel betrayed. With a Win/Win
performance agreement between the boss and
his/her subordinates, the employees can manage
themselves, reducing overhead and increasing trust.

Organizations cannot achieve cooperation between
employees if their reward system encourages them
to compete with each other.

Competition makes sense in the market place, or
against last year's performance or other teams with
no need to cooperate.
Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood

We have the tendency to fix things up with good
advice (to prescribe); but often we don't take the
time to deeply understand the problem first
(to diagnose).

Most people don't listen with the intent to
understand, but with the intent to reply, reading
their autobiography into other people's lives ("I know
exactly how you feel, I went through the very same
thing last year when...").

Emphatic listening is a technique where you rephrase
the content of what the other person said and reflect
the feeling, all from a sincere desire to
understand. Example: "I am done with this job" -
"Oh, you sound frustrated about your job, tell me
about it".

Emphatic listening helps the other person to open
up. Once you understand the situation in deep, then
you can seek to help with advice (to be understood).

Seeking to understand requires consideration;
seeking to be understood takes courage.
Source: Chieformula
Habit 6: Synergize

Synergy: the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts.

High trust and cooperation (see diagram above)
produce the best results.

The essence of synergy is to value the differences, to
build on strengths and to compensate for
weaknesses.

We must recognize our own perceptual limitations
and appreciate the rich resources available.

If two people have the same opinion, one is
unnecessary. We should celebrate when someone
has a different point of view.
Habit 7: Sharpen the saw

A man in the woods working feverishly to saw down
a tree. Someone asks him - "why don't you take a
break and sharpen that saw? You would go a lot
faster". He responds - "I don't have time. I'm too
busy sawing".

Habit 7 is taking time to sharpen our saw, by
renewing the four dimensions of our nature, all of
them from the Q2 quadrant:
o
Physical: exercise, good nutrition, stress
management.
o
Mental: professional training, visualizing,
planning, writing.
o
Spiritual: value clarification and commitment,
study and meditation.
o
Social/Emotional: serve others, empathy,
synergy, intrinsic security.