7 Habits of The Successful

An analysis of Stephen R. Covey’s book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”

By Theresa Mailey

A Brief Summary

Stephen Covey’s novel, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), was written based on stories sent to him by people who have practiced each of the seven habits. The stories are organized into four subject areas: Individual, Family, Community and Education, and Workplace. Each story is short; averaging one to three pages, and is introduced by a paragraph highlighting which of the seven habits is featured. Covey follows many of the stories with an anecdote which supports or reinforces the main point. Typical stories cover subjects such as repairing the communication in a marriage, dealing with the loss of a parent or spouse, and parenting small children or teenagers.

The book follows the pattern of its antecedent. The tone is upbeat, the stories tend to lead themselves into being read in short effort, and the message is motivating. The habits are drawn from universal human traits. The truths that are obvious are quickly challenged by abundant evidence that too many people seem unaware of them. As long as so many people behave in self-defeating ways — in business, in social settings, in their personal and family lives — there will be a market for the time-tested formula demonstrated in living the 7 Habits.

The Seven Habits is much more than a simple list of seven skills or common characteristics of effective people, Covey teaches the importance of Character Ethics; the timeless principles that make up our value systems. The character ethics are essential building blocks in creating one truly remarkable life. Using “seven habits” as the framework for his lesson, Covey shows us how to work from the inside-out to build the lives of our dreams.

A Guide To Life Management

This is a life-management guide that lays out the pathway to major success, achievement and happiness. The book targets the many individuals who appear to be successful in the outer world, but who have a problem struggling with an inner hunger for more. The issues that many people experience calls out for personal content and effectiveness and for satisfying personal and professional relationships. Author Covey provides the pathway to achieve just that.

Habit — The intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.”

Stephen R. Covey

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Habit 1 is “Be Proactive.” There are proactive and reactive people. A person who is proactive addresses problems without blame and finds solutions based on his core principles and values. Proactive Focus is positive energy that enlarges the Circle of Influence which comprises those things that people have most control over. Habit 2 is “Begin with the End in Mind.” Focusing on where you want to be and what you want to achieve will propel you to success as you start your journey toward effectiveness. Habit 3 is “Put First Things First,” is the mental creation of what you want to attain. Habit 4 is “Win-Win.” A proactive person with self-awareness and in touch with his deeply held principles and values will seek a win-win solution in dealing with others.

Habit 5 is “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.” It is impossible to understand and influence another person until you know yourself. Once you understand yourself, you’re ready to be understood. Habit 6 is “Synergize.” A synergistic environment empowers people to achieve the optimum success. Synergy means the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Habit 7 is “Renewal.” Once you have achieved success in the six habits, you must continually maintain and renew the four dimensions of your nature — physical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional. By focusing on the correct principals and developing a balanced focus between doing and increasing our abilities to do, we are empowered and can flourish in creative effective, useful and peaceful lives.

Character Vs Personality

An effective life requires the formulation of integration between a person’s character and personality that aims to reach a state of integrity. Whenever your character is different from your personality, this is called dis-integrity. Nowadays, most people stress all efforts on the 20% of personality, which causes a lot of psychological problems, as people pretend to be what is not true about them. This phenomenon even affected the quality of marriages, for couples building their relationships on fake qualities & superficial techniques, which soon shows up after marriage and cause disastrous problems.

Work On Self

That is why we should focus first in the “Inside Out” of ourselves, meaning that we should try to develop ourselves and work on our character (80%) before trying to decorate our personality (20%), or even trying to change people around us. However, in most of our short-living relationships, we can use personality skills to get by and to make favorable impressions.. A person’s behavior is directed by three main factors: Knowledge, Skill, and Paradigms (How you see things through your own eyeglasses point of view). Knowledge + Skill = 20% effective in life and Paradigms is 80% effective.

A Hunger For Success

Majority of the time successful people hunger for more success. To bring about success, consistency and effectiveness are necessary for healthy relationships. On the contrary, success can be accompanied with losses in personal relationships. It’s difficult to stay committed to personal goals, marriages can fail, and business relationships can collapse.

To achieve success on a primary level, we must first understand our paradigms and how to make a paradigm shift. A paradigm is like a map; we all have two fundamental maps in our minds; the way we think things are and the way we would like them to be. Our behaviors and attitudes originate from the assumptions we make. Trying to change is impossible without examining these paradigms; every person thinks he or she is objective but that is rarely the case. By exploring our paradigms we can be far more objective and can make superficial changes.

A Life of Habits

The habits we have define us. Unfortunately, they are often unconscious but they are consistent and constant. Habits are not impossible to break but trying to break a habit is a challenge. Changing habits makes us feel like we’re giving up part of ourselves. A habit can be defined as, “the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire.” Change of habits has to be motivated by a “higher purpose” and the individual must be willing to let go, sacrificing the familiar “now” for the new and improved better “later.”

Levels Of Determination

The Social Mirror, or social paradigm, is the only vision we have of ourselves; it includes criticisms or observations we’ve heard about ourselves and bought into. Genetic determination translates as characteristics or traits you’ve inherited. Psychic determination refers to the impact your parents had on you. Environmental determination refers to the elements of your current life. In addition to self-awareness humans have imagination, conscience and will; being proactive means taking initiative. Highly effective people take responsibility; they don’t blame a situation or conditions for their own actions.

Avoiding Bad Habits

In order to avoid bad habits, beginning with the end is the best way to succeed. Beginning with the end means to visualize an image of you at the end of your life. In that way, you can measure your success in the context of your whole life, at least the life you expect to have. By using measurement, an individual will have clarity about their destiny. As successful as people are, many strive for more. Lives can change when there is understanding about what really is important. Thinking about what you want as your eulogy will give knowledge to the definition of a successful life. Don’t allow others to shape your life.

Dependence, Independence, & Interdependence

The 7 habits transition us on a Maturity Continuum from “dependence to independence to interdependence.” We all start out dependent and grow to be independent. Then there’s a point when we must realize that all of nature is interdependent in order for all its parts to survive and flourish.

A solid foundation of independence is essential in order to build an effective interdependence and therefore will move into the Public Victory sector. One must travel the road to arrive at the destination; trying to cover the absence of the necessary lead-in to interdependence with personality techniques and skills will not work in the long term.

If you don’t know yourself, you can’t control yourself and you will not like yourself. When one approaches interdependence, a whole new world will await; deep and meaningful relationships, increased results and countless opportunities to serve; contribute to others, and learn from experiences.

The 7 Habits

Acquiring the seven habits of effectiveness will take people through the stages of character development. Habits 1 through 3 make up the “private victory” — where an individual will go from dependence to independence by taking responsibility for our own lives. Acquiring habits 4 through 6 is ones “public victory”: Once independent, a person will learn to be interdependent, to succeed with other people. The seventh habit makes all the others possible; periodically renewing the self in mind body, and spirit.

I will identify each of the seven habits shared by all truly effective people based on Covey’s analysis. These habits can be learned the collective experience of the past and present demonstrated that acquiring them will give an individual the character to succeed. If there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental goodness behind what someone does, the challenges of life will cause motives to surface, and human relationship failure will replace short-term success.

Habit 1: Be Proactive

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 you responsibility and 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.

For all of us, there are many things that concern us in our everyday lives that we can’t do anything about, but, there are also things we can do. Proactive people work on their circle of influence — the people and things they can reach — and spend less energy on their much wider circle of concern. By keeping their focus on their circle of influence, they extend its area. As someone becomes more proactive, they will make mistakes. While people choose their actions freely, we cannot choose their consequences; they are governed by natural law, out in the circle of concern. The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct it, and learn from it. To delay and to deny the mistake is to miss its lesson.

Rather than simply reacting to external forces, positive changes start from within. Highly effective people make the decision to improve their lives through the things that they can influence.

Habit 2: Begin With The End in Mind

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 to take the next step in the right direction. It’s 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 being placed against the wrong wall.

People may be very efficient by working frantically and unmindfully, but will be effective only when they begin with the end result in mind. The best way to start is to develop a personal mission statement. It describes what someone wants to be (character) and to do (achievements). The individual must succeed at home first; seek and merit divine help; remember the people involved; develop one new proficiency a year, hustle while waiting, and to keep a sense of humor.

Developing a Mission Statement

It is necessary to develop a principle-centered personal mission statement. The mission statement should be extended into long-term goals based on personal principles.

A personal mission statement is a sort of written constitution; its power lies in the fact that it’s fundamentally changeless. The key to living with change is maintaining a sense of who you are and what you value. Everyone is drawn away from real effectiveness when the center of themselves is something other than personal principles.

Money Centered Vs Pleasure Centered

The self-esteem of someone money- centered can’t support the ups and downs of economic life. Money-centered peopleoften put aside family or other priorities, assuming everyone will understand that economic demands come first. In many cases they don’t always tend to do so, and that can damage the most important relationships by thinking that they do.

Being pleasure-centered cheats one of lasting satisfactions; too much free time, on the paths of least resistance, insure that the mind and spirit become torpid, and the heart is unfulfilled. People must center their lives on correct principles. Unlike other centers based on people and things experiencing frequent change, correct principles don’t change. People can depend on them.

Habit 3: Put First Things First

The next habit involves self-leadership and self-management: putting first things first. Leadership decides what the “first things” are, and management is the discipline of carrying out the program. We have a constant amount of time, no matter what we do. The challenge faced is managing oneself; to be an effective manager, we must organize and execute around priorities.

Instead of trying to fit all the things in your lives into the time allotted, the focus is to enhance relationships and achieving results. We all face the same dilemma; we are caught between the urgent and the important. Something urgent requires immediate attention. It is usually visible, and it presses on us, but may not have any bearing on the long-term goals.

Important things, on the other hand, have to do with results; they contribute to our mission, our values, and our high-priority goals. People react to urgent matters; they often must act to take care of important matters, even as urgent things are desperate for our attention. People get carried away from their real goals and values by subordinating the important to the urgent; some are beaten up by all day and everyday problems. Their only relief is in escaping once in a while to calmness.

Effective people don’t solve problems, they pursue opportunities; they feed opportunities and starve problems; they have genuine emergencies by thinking and acting preventively. A person’s effectiveness will increase dramatically with a small increase in genuine activities; personal crises will be fewer and smaller. To say “yes” to important things require someone to learn to say no to other activities (some of those activities being urgent).

Defying The Important Things in Your Life

The first step into identifying the important things in life is these key roles: business, family, and church-whatever comes to mind as important; think of those you will act in for the coming week; think of two or three important results you feel you should accomplish in each role; look at the week ahead with your goals in mind, and block out the time each day to achieve them. Once the key goals are in place, there will be much time for everything else.

How well a person succeeds in certain skills will depend on how resilient and determined they are at defending the most important priorities. Time must be spent into doing what fits into your personal mission; observe the proper balance between production and building production capacity. It is important to identify the key roles taken in life and to make time for each of them.

Habit 4: Seek To Understand, Then Be Understood

The most important word to know in mastering this habit is to “listen.” Listen to colleagues, family, friends, customers, but not with the intent to reply, to convince, or 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 them, emotionally and intellectually.

Empathy is powerful, and it’s powerful because it gives a person the accurate data to work with, instead of projecting and assuming their own thoughts and motives. You can only work with someone productively and make an appropriate deposit in your Emotional Bank Account with them if you understand what really matters most to that person. Empathic listening can be a powerful emotional deposit in itself, because it provides the speaker with psychological air. When that need is met, that individual can work on their agreement in an atmosphere of trust.

One must seek relationships and agreements that are mutually beneficial. In a situation where the “win/win” deals perspective isn’t achieved, accept the fact that the best alternative is agreeing to not making any deals. When a situation occurs in developing an organizational culture, make sure that win/win behavior among employees is rewarded and avoid accidently rewarding win/lose behavior.

Habit 5: Think Win/Win

Moving from “private sector” to “public sector” is associated with habit five. Self and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others, the emotional bank account. The emotional bank account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that’s been built up in a personal relationship. It takes into account courtesy; kindness; honesty; and having someone keep commitments and eventually build a reserve. The trust of someone else other than oneself becomes higher, even if mistakes occur, the trust level will compensate for it. Communication is easy, instant, and effective.

But if someone has a habit of showing discourtesy, disrespect, cutting off others, overreacting, betraying someone’s trust, or is threatening, the account gets overdrawn. The trust level is low and there is no flexibility.

The fifth habit, “think win/win,” requires making an important deposit in another person’s Emotional Bank Account: finding a way both people can benefit by the other’s interaction. All the other possibilities: win/lose (I win, you lose); lose/win (I lose, you win); and lose/lose, are ineffective, either in the short term or the long term.

The best way to approach a Win/Win situation is to remember that it manifests caution: “Win/win — or no deal.” An individual’s attitude should be, “I want to win, and I want you to win, if we can’t hammer something out under those conditions, let’s agree that we won’t make a deal this time. Maybe we’ll make one in the future.” If the deal hurts them, it will hurt you.

Using the paradigm of Win/Win requires three traits:

• 1. Integrity — Value that is placed on oneself; self-awareness, possessed of an independent will make and keep meaningful promises and commitments to themselves and others; maturity, the balance between courage and consideration and must have enough empathy and goodwill to work for a win for their counterpart as well as enough courage to make a win for themselves; abundance
• 2. Mentality — One must know and believe that there is plenty out there for everyone. Do not think that to succeed self, others must fail and don’t carry secret hopes that other people must suffer misfortune. An abundance of a positive mentality — which recognizes that possibilities for success and growth are limitless — sees others as being the opportunity to complement their own strengths.
• 3. Understanding — One of the most important principles of interpersonal relations, one must seek to understand the other person. Once the understanding is found, only then should oneself be understood. Effective listening is not echoing what the other person has said through their own experience, it is putting oneself in the perspective of the other person; empathetically listening for both meaning and feeling.

Habit 6: Synergy

The exercise of all the other habits prepares for the habit of synergy; synergy is the highest activity of life. Through synergy, people create new, unexploited alternatives; things that didn’t yet exist. People unleash people’s greatest powers. We make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The creative process is also terrifying as it is exciting, because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or where it’s going to lead. People find it difficult to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness; this synergy results in a pathfinder being born. The basis of synergy is that two people can disagree, and both can be right; it’s not logical, it’s more so psychological. Once people have experienced synergy, they are not the same.

When someone experiences synergy, they know that the possibility of many mind-expanding adventures always exists. The device that opens people up to synergy’s power depends on all the habits of effectiveness at once; this requires confidence, integrity, and empathy. It’s all embodied in a crucial ability: to value and exploit the mental, emotional, and psychological differences between people.

Through trustful communication, the individual must find ways to maintain individual differences to create a whole that is greater in detail. Through mutual trust and understanding, one often can solve conflicts and find a better solution than would have been obtained through either person’s own solution.

Habit 7: Sharpen The Saw

Habit seven is taking time to sharpen the saw and the saw is the individual. It’s the habit that makes all the others possible. To sharpen the saw means renewing oneself, in all four aspects of human natures: physical — exercise, nutrition, stress management; mental — reading, visualizing, planning, writing; social/Emotional — service, empathy, synergy, security; and spiritual — spiritual reading, study, and meditation. To exercise in all of these necessary facets, the individual must be proactive.

A person must be wise enough not to sacrifice much for their profession that they neglect family, friends, and the community in which they live in. Taking care of the spiritual dimension renews the core, the center, the commitment to all seven principles. People do this in a variety of ways: some meditate on the scriptures; others deeply involve themselves in great literature or music, or commune with nature.

Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions and maintain a balance among these dimensions.

The Beginning Of Your Journey

Hopefully I was able to give a general idea of the seven habits and understand how they can significantly improve the quality of the individual’s life. The ‘Seven Habits’ is based on a captivating proposition: that people will succeed more in life if they decide to effect change first within themselves, then project that change out, rather than let circumstances control their actions. Covey encourages the reader to be in charge of his or her own life: a message that’s inspiring and motivating.

Source

Covey, Stephen R. 2004. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Free Press.