The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; Covey, Stephen R..

For me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

Paradigms

• If we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.
• As we loosened up our old perception of our son and developed value-based motives, new feelings began to emerge. We found ourselves enjoying him instead of comparing or judging him. We stopped trying to clone him in our own image or measure him against social expectations. We stopped trying to kindly, positively manipulate him into an acceptable social mold. Because we saw him as fundamentally adequate and able to cope with life, we stopped protecting him against the ridicule of others. We saw our natural role as being to affirm, enjoy, and value him.
• If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other—while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity—then, in the long run, I cannot be successful.
• Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.
• “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ARISTOTLE
• Basically, there are three kinds of assets: physical, financial, and human.

Private victory

• You’ll find that as you care less about what others think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves and their worlds.
• Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and their performance. Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. They are value driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn’t a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not. Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response. “No one can hurt you without your consent.” In the words of Gandhi. Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase. Reactive people, on the other hand, focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increased feelings of victimization.
• Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Look at the weaknesses of others with compassion, not accusation.
• To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. If you carefully consider what you wanted to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.
• The carpenter’s rule is “measure twice, cut once.” …Most business failures begin in the first creation, with problems such as under capitalization, misunderstanding of the market, or lack of a business plan.
• Leadership is not management. Management is the second creation, but leadership has to come first.  “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
• Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right brain activity. It’s more of an art; it’s based on a philosophy.
• Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, an integrated wholeness.
• Pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment.
• “He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.”
• Roles and goals give structure and organized direction to your personal mission.
• The involvement process is as important as the written product and is the key to its use.
• Remember, frustration is a function of our expectations.
• Many people refuse to delegate to other people because they feel it takes too much time and effort and they could do the job better themselves. But effectively delegating to others is perhaps the single most powerful high-leverage activity there is.
• Gofer delegation means “Go for this, go for that, do this, do that, and tell me when it’s done.” Stewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods.  Stewardship delegation are correct and applicable to any kind of person. In effect, it changes the nature of the relationship. The steward becomes his own boss.

Public victory

• An Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship. If I make deposits into an Emotional Bank Account with you through courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping my commitments to you, I build up a reserve. When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective. But if I have a habit of showing discourtesy, disrespect, cutting you off, overreacting, ignoring you, becoming arbitrary, betraying your trust, threatening you, or playing little tin god in your life, eventually my Emotional Bank Account is overdrawn. The trust level gets very low. Then what flexibility do I have? None. I’m walking on mine fields. I have to be very careful of everything I say. I measure every word. It’s tension city, memo haven. It’s protecting my backside, politicking.
• The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals.
• You may get the golden egg of temporary pleasure from putting someone down or sharing privileged information, but you’re strangling the goose, weakening the relationship that provides enduring pleasure in association. Integrity in an interdependent reality is simply this: you treat everyone by the same set of principles. As you do, people will come to trust you.
• Win/Lose people are prone to use position, power, credentials, possessions, or personality to get their way. Lose/Win is worse than Win/Lose because it has no standards—no demands, no expectations, no vision. Lose/Win is seen as capitulation—giving in or giving up.  Lose/Win means being a nice guy, even if “nice guys finish last.” Win/Lose people love Lose/Win people because they can feed on them. They love their weaknesses—they take advantage of them.
• When two Win/Lose people get together—that is, when two determined, stubborn, ego-invested individuals interact—the result will be Lose/Lose. Some people become so centered on an enemy, so totally obsessed with the behavior of another person that they become blind to everything except their desire for that person to lose, even if it means losing themselves. Lose/Lose is the philosophy of adversarial conflict, the philosophy of war. Lose/Lose is also the philosophy of the highly dependent person without inner direction who is miserable and thinks everyone else should be, too. “If nobody ever wins, perhaps being a loser isn’t so bad.”
• If you work in a regional office that is miles away from another regional office, and you don’t have any functional relationship between the offices, you may want to compete in a Win/Lose situation to stimulate business. However, you would not want to set up a Win/Lose situation like the “Race to Bermuda” contest within a company or in a situation where you need cooperation among people or groups of people to achieve maximum success. If you value a relationship and the issue isn’t really that important, you may want to go for Lose/Win. If I am a supplier to your company, for example, and I win on my terms in a particular negotiation, I may get what I want now. But will you come to me again? Lose/Win, you may appear to get what you want for the moment. But how will that affect my attitude about working with you, about fulfilling the contract? Win/Win or No Deal provides tremendous emotional freedom in the family relationship. Win/Win involves mutual learning, mutual influence, mutual benefits. To go for Win/Win, you not only have to be nice, you have to be courageous. You not only have to be empathic, you have to be confident.  To compensate for my lack of internal maturity and emotional strength, I might borrow strength from my position and power, or from my credentials, my seniority, my affiliations. They want other people to be the way they want them to be. They often want to clone them, and they surround themselves with “yes” people—people who won’t challenge them, people who are weaker than they. The Abundance Mentality, on the other hand, flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It is the paradigm that there is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody. It results in sharing of prestige, of recognition, of profits, of decision making.
• One thing I have found particularly helpful to Win/Lose people in developing a Win/Win character is to associate with some model or mentor who really thinks Win/Win.
• Without trust, the best we can do is compromise; without trust, we lack the credibility for open, mutual learning and communication and real creativity.
• Again, the key is the relationship.
• “Stephen, I know you won’t like this decision. I don’t have time to explain it to you, let alone get you involved. There’s a good possibility you’ll think it’s wrong. But will you support it?” If you had a positive Emotional Bank Account with me, of course I’d support it. I’d hope you were right and I was wrong. I’d work to make your decision work. But if the Emotional Bank Account weren’t there, and if I were reactive, I wouldn’t really support it. I might say I would to your face, but behind your back I wouldn’t be very enthusiastic. I wouldn’t make the investment necessary to make it succeed. “It didn’t work,” I’d say. “So what do you want me to do now?” If I were overreactive, I might even torpedo your decision and do what I could to make sure others did too. Or I might become “maliciously obedient” and do exactly and only what you tell me to do, accepting no responsibility for results.
• We need to approach Win/Win from a genuine desire to invest in the relationships that make it possible.
• For Win/Win to work, the systems have to support it. The training system, the planning system, the communication system, the budgeting system, the information system, the compensation system—all have to be based on the principle of Win/Win.
• We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first. If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
• You’ve spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening?
• We’re filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography. We want to be understood. Our conversations become collective monologues, and we never really understand what’s going on inside another human being.
• When people are really hurting and you really listen with a pure desire to understand, you’ll be amazed how fast they will open up. They want to open up.
• Put aside your own autobiography and genuinely seek to understand. Don’t push; be patient; be respectful. People don’t have to open up verbally before you can empathize.
• We obviously value the physical differences between men and women, husbands and wives. But what about the social, mental, and emotional differences?

Renewal

• Healthy balanced life around four values: perspective (spiritual), autonomy (mental), connectedness (social), and tone (physical). George Sheehan, the running guru, describes four roles: being a good animal (physical), a good craftsman (mental), a good friend (social), and a saint (spiritual).
• There are emotional muscles as well, such as patience. When you exercise your patience beyond your past limits, the emotional fiber is broken, nature overcompensates, and next time the fiber is stronger.
• But as soon as we leave the external discipline of school, many of us let our minds atrophy. We don’t do any more serious reading, we don’t explore new subjects in any real depth outside our action fields, we don’t think analytically, we don’t write
• Education—continuing education, continually honing and expanding the mind—is vital mental renewal. Proactive people can figure out many, many ways to educate themselves.
• Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context. Organizing and planning represent other forms of mental renewal
• “I can see that we’re approaching this situation differently. Why don’t we agree to communicate until we can find a solution we both feel good about. Would you be willing to do that?”
• “Let me listen to you first.
• it only becomes optimally effective as we deal with all four dimensions in a wise and balanced way. To neglect any one area negatively impacts the rest. I have found this to be true in organizations as well as in individual lives. 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/emotional dimension has to do with human relations, with how people are treated. And the spiritual dimension deals with finding meaning through purpose or contribution and through organizational integrity.
• Your mental dimension, you reinforce your personal management (Habit 3). As you plan, you force your mind to recognize high leverage Quadrant II activities, priority goals, and activities to maximize the use of your time and energy,
• As you become involved in continuing education, you increase your knowledge base and you increase your options. Your economic security does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce—to think, to learn, to create, to adapt.
• Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live primarily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren’t living; they are “being lived.” They are reacting,
• “There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children—one is roots, the other wings.”
• Everyone has values; even criminal gangs have values.
• Interdependence is ten times more difficult than independence. It demands so much more mental and emotional independence to think win/win when another person is into win/lose,
• In other words, to work successfully with others in creative cooperative ways requires an enormous amount of independence, internal security, and self-mastery.
• High tech without high touch does not work, and the more influential technology becomes, the more important the human factor