We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a
habit.
–Aristotle
What are Habits?
Habits are rituals and behaviors that we perform
automatically, allowing us to carry out essential
activities such as brushing our teeth, taking a
shower, getting dressed for work, and following
the same routes every day without thinking
about them. Our unconscious habits free up
resources for our brains to carry out other more
complex tasks like solving problems or deciding
what to make for dinner.
We all have habits and we activate hundreds every day.
These habits can be divided into three groups.
The first group are the habits that we simply don’t
notice because they have been part of our lives
forever—like tying shoelaces or brushing teeth.
The second are habits that are good for us and which
we work hard on establishing—like exercising, eating
well or getting enough sleep.
The final group are the habits that are bad for us—like
smoking, procrastinating or overspending. But where
are all these habits stored
Scientists have learned that a certain part of the
brain called the basal ganglia plays a crucial role
in creating new habits and maintaining existing
ones, leading researchers to an understanding of why some
people, even after major brain damage, will still do certain
things they’ve always done before, like find their way home
without any conscious previous recollection of where they are
going. These people often don’t even know how or why they can
still do certain things, but if the basal ganglia is intact, those old
habits are still available. The latest research also shows that
habits are so ingrained in our brains that we keep acting in
accordance with them even when we no longer benefit from
them
Researchers from Duke University have shown that
over 40% of what we do is
determined not by decisions
but by habits. This suggests that we can
change a huge part of our lives just by eliminating bad
habits and creating good ones instead. People who
fully understand this have been able to find wonderful
new ways to change their lives for the better.
Changing Habits
Habits are patterns of behavior
composed of three overlapping
components:
1- knowledge
2-attitudes
3-skills.
And since these are learned rather than inherited, our
habits constitute our second nature, not our first
Understanding habit formation
In the Power of Habit, Duhigg (2012) explains that MIT researchers
discovered a three-step neurological pattern that forms the core of
every habit (see figure 1).
The first step is cue. It is a trigger that tells your brain to go into
automatic mode and prompts the behavior to unfold.
The second step is routine, which is the behavior itself and the action
you take.
The last step is reward. It helps your brain determine if a particular
habit loop is worth remembering or not.
Generally, habits have immediate or latent rewards. Habits with
immediate rewards are easier to pick up and condition, whereas those
with delayed rewards are more difficult to commit to and maintain.
Think about how easy it is to check your iPhone compared to exercising
more.
But, we are not our habits Hence, we should avoid defining
ourselves in terms of our habits and characteristic tendencies.
Habits of effectiveness can be learned; habits of
ineffectiveness, unlearned.
“All successful people have the habit of doing the things
failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either,
necessarily, but their dislike is subordinated to the strength of
their purpose.” Successful people daily weave habits of
effectiveness into their lives in order to achieve desired results.
Often, they are internally motivated by a strong sense of
mission.By subordinating their dislike for certain tasks to
their goals, they commonly develop seven basic habits and
discipline their lives in accordance with the underlying
principles.
The Character Ethic and the Personality Ethic
The Seven Habits grew out of Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s extensive
review of success literature in America since 1776. In his
research, he discovered that during the nation’s formative
years and throughout its first 150 years, the character ethic
(moral qualities of self-discipline) was emphasized over
personality development. Prominently featured were such
traits as temperance, sincerity, humility, courage, integrity,
honesty, industry, and thrift. The character Ethic taught that
there are certain basic principles of enduring happiness as
they learn and intergrate these principles into their basic
character.
Since the 1930s, however, the emphasis has
steadily shifted from character to personality
or influence techniques, methods, and
skills – all designed to achieve quick and
painless results. The “success literature” of
recent years has virtually severed social and
career development from character
development, leaving people uprooted and
swayed by the whims of others and the winds of
expediency.
This Personality Ethic teaches that success is a
function of public image, of attitudes and
behaviors, skills and formulas that lubricate the
processes of human interaction. This
personality-based approach often becomes
manipulative, even deceptive, encouraging
people to use techniques to get other people to
like them, or to fake interest in the hobbies of
others to get out of them what they want, or to
intimidate their way through life.
Timeless Principles Character, basically, is a
composite of habits. The Seven Habits are based
upon the timeless principle called the Law of the
Harvest: we tend to reap what we sow. “Sow a
thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a
habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a
character, reap a destiny,” the maxim goes.
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.
Those who watched the lunar voyage
of Apollo 11 were transfixed as the
first men walked on the moon and
returned to earth. But to get there,
those astronauts literally had to break
out of the tremendous gravity pull of
the earth. More energy was spent in
the first few minutes of lift off, in the
first few miles of travel, than was
used over the next several days to
travel half a million miles
Habits, too, have tremendous gravity pull-more
than most people realize or would admit.
Breaking deeply imbedded 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. “Liftoff” takes a tremendous effort,
but once we break out of the pull of gravity, our
freedom takes on a whole new dimension.
Effectiveness and Balance
We are effective when we balance Production
and Production Capability.
Most people, when they talk about being
effective, mean getting results. Getting results
is certainly a key part of being effective, but
that’s not all there is to it. Effectiveness has a
second dimension as well. That second
dimension of effectiveness is preserving and
enhancing our assets.
By assets,
we mean more than just money, equipment,
and buildings. We also mean things like
physical health, mental alertness, emotional
stability, skills, knowledge, values, and
relationships with other people.
These intangibles are assets because we can’t
produce results without them. That is why
effective people pay attention to them and why
this definition of effectiveness has an extra
dimension that deals with them
Production (P) and production Capability (PC)
The point is that consistent effectiveness always
comes from a balance - a balance between results
and the assets that produce results.
We call the results Production, which we
abbreviate with the letter P. We call the assets
Production Capability, which we abbreviate PC.
Effectiveness then, is a balance between
Production and Production Capability, or P and
PC.
Our Production Capability comes from three
kinds of assets: physical, financial, and human.
To most people, assets mean the sort of things that we list on a balance
sheet, mainly money and capital equipment. Most corporations, however,
now recognize that people are assets as well. People are the “human
resource,” and “human resource management” is becoming an
increasingly important item on the corporate agenda. Of course, human
resources belong on our personal agenda as well. We are fully
effective only when we attend to the human elements of our
lives, beginning with ourselves. We are our most important
“human resource,” followed closely by the relationship that we
have with other people. Humana assets, added to the usual balancesheet, make three asset categories: physical, financial, and human.
Physical assets are office, car, tools, equipment, and so on. Financial assets
are the various forms of money.
Human assets, added to the usual balance-sheet
assets, make three asset categories: physical,
financial, and human.
1-Physical assets are office, car, tools, equipment,
and so on.
2- Financial assets are the various forms of money.
3-Human assets are such things as health, talent,
education, and our relationships with other
people.
The three kinds of assets form our Production
Capability, that extra dimension that allows us to
become truly effective.
Of the three kinds of assets, human
assets are the
most important – and often the most
neglected. On the whole, human assets are more important
than physical or financial assets because they determine how the
other two assets are used. They become more important as
organizations become more complex or more dependent on
expensive and complicated technology. Among the various
human assets, relationships are particularly important.
Weak relationships cause poor communication, tension, disagreements,
jealousy, back- biting, and criticism-negative elements that are costly, both
to the organization and to us as individuals. They drain time, energy, and
resources that we might otherwise turn into corporate profit and personal
fulfillment.
Human assets are often neglected, perhaps because
they’re less tangible. It’s harder to know their
condition and what to do affect them. In addition,
when we act on physical and financial assets, we
don’t have to consider how they feel, nor do we have
to take into account how they might act back. But
people – the reservoirs of human resources-have
feelings and act back, so we have to deal, not just
with action, but with interaction, which is both more
subtle and more complicated. As a result, it’s easy to
avoid dealing with human assets until they cause
problems that can’t be ignored.
The Emotional Bank Account –A metaphor about
relationship.
The Emotional Bank Account represents the
amount of trust that has been built up in the
relationship.
–We build or deplete our Emotional Bank Account
balance with other people just as we do an
ordinary bank account balance: by making
deposits and withdrawals. Deposits increase the
balance; withdrawals reduce it. –We build strong
and productive relationships by making deposits
in an Emotional Bank Account
Deposits are things we do that increase trust in the
relationship:
small kindnesses and courtesies, keeping promises,
clarifying and honoring expectations, integrity, loyalty,
apologies, and so on.
Withdrawals are acts that decrease trust:
unkindness, criticism, breaking promises, disloyalty, and so
on.
The idea behind the metaphor is this: by making deposits, we
build a reservoir of goodwill and trust that enables us to
communicate more effectively with others. On the other hand,
when we take withdrawals, we separate ourselves from other
people and lose whatever benefits our relationship with them
might have brought us
Deposits work only when they are sincere. On the
surface, the idea of making Emotional Bank Account
deposits seems straightforward, as does the idea that
they can work to our advantage; however, there’s a
subtle trap hidden there that we need to be aware of.
The trap is this: Emotional Bank Account deposits
work to our advantage only if that’s not what we have
in mind when we do them. In other words, if we make
deposits with the idea of taking advantage of others,
they can turn into withdrawals because they’re
insincere.
When we make obvious withdrawals, people at least
have the advantage of knowing where we stand. But
when we’re insincere, they’re likely to sense it
without understanding it, and they won’t know what’s
going on. That uncertainty can destroy trust as
quickly and as surely as the obvious withdrawals. The
antidote to insincere deposits is “unconditional love.”
Unconditional love means exactly that: love given
without conditions, love given with nothing expected
in return. We can express unconditional love only by
making unconditional deposits, meaning deposits
that we make for their own sake, not because we
expect to get anything from them.
Our most constant relationships require us to
make the most constant deposits. We may think
that the people we’re close to regularly don’t
need deposits. But the opposite is true. When
we’re apart from people, they can understand
our lack of deposits, and they may even forget
our withdrawals. But when we’re with someone,
that same lack of deposits can become a
withdrawal because it shows a lack of care and
concern.
In this respect, Emotional Bank Account differ
from regular bank accounts. We can leave
money in a regular bank account, do nothing
with it, and have it grow anyway, or at least stay
steady. Emotional bank accounts don’t work
that way. If we don’t tend to them through
regular deposits, they lose value. As Thoreau
put it, “The finest qualities of our nature, like
the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by
the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat
ourselves nor one another very tenderly.”
Building and repairing relationships take patience.
1-When relationships aren’t going well, we want to repair
them quickly. But we can’t fix in a day something that we’ve
created over months or years of withdrawals.
2- In addition, relationships are so important to us that we’re
almost always interested in their status, It’s easy to get
anxious to know how things stand. But if we try to find out too
soon, we risk making a withdrawal.
Testing a relationship too soon is like pulling up a young plant
to see if it’s taken root. As we mentioned above, deposits
should be made for their own sake, as an expression of love,
not measured for their effect. The effect will come, but only if
we have patience to allow it to take its natural course.
When we live the primary laws of love, we encourage
people to live the primary laws of life.
1-Primary Laws are fundamental and timeless
principles that express the orderly and lawful nature of
life. We become effective by following these primary
laws.
2-There is, for example, a “Primary Law of Love.” It is
that love must be unconditional. There are also
“Primary Laws of Life,” laws that express the value of
such principles as integrity, creativity, self-discipline,
and appreciation.
When we live the primary laws of love, we encourage
people to live the primary laws of life.
3-The nature of these primary laws is such that
learning to live any one law helps us live them all. As
we become more able to express unconditional love,
for example, we also become more able to live with
integrity, creativity, self-discipline, and appreciation.
4- This interconnection among the primary laws is
also a factor in our relationships with other people.
When we love people unconditionally, for example, we
also encourage them to live with integrity, creativity,
self-discipline, and appreciation.
Our own deposits and withdrawals are the only thing that we can control in a
relationship. Often in our relationships we want to control other people. At the same
time, we resist their attempts to control us, scarcely remembering that if we resist
control, they no doubt resist it as well. The fact is, neither we, nor they, can be controlled
by anyone else. We are each responsible for our own control.
We can be influenced, however, and we can influence others.
Influence comes from a Latin word meaning “to flow,” which suggests
how influence and control are different. Control is based on force and
creates resistance. Influence is based on those primary laws of life and
love that we talked about and allows people, of their own free will, to flow
in a direction that leads them to cooperate with us.
When we make sincere deposits in a relationship, we set up conditions that
allow us to have influence. But we don’t gain control of the other person, because those
same conditions also allow us to be influenced. This mutual influence is what makes
relationships effective, and it comes from making a relationship effective, and it comes
from making deposits rather than from taking withdrawals. We can control nothing in a
relationship but our deposits or withdrawals, but that’s all that we need to control.