The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

by Stephen R. Covey

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.

we must learn to listen. And this requires emotional strength. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand—highly

wanted her to do. But borrowing strength builds weakness. It builds weakness in the borrower because it reinforces dependence on external factors to get things done. It builds weakness in the person forced to acquiesce, stunting the development of independent reasoning, growth, and internal discipline.

And finally, it builds weakness in the relationship. Fear replaces cooperation, and both people involved become more arbitrary and defensive.

Perhaps a sense of possessing needs to come before a sense of genuine sharing. Many people who give mechanically or refuse to give and share in their marriages and families may never have experienced what it means to possess themselves, their own sense of identity and self-worth. Really helping our children grow may involve being patient enough to allow them the sense of possession as well as being wise enough to teach them the value of giving and providing the example ourselves.

Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.

Either way—authoritarian or permissive—you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to be liked. But what happens, meantime, to the goose? What sense of responsibility, of self-discipline, of confidence in the ability to make good choices or achieve important goals is a child going to have a few years down the road?

PC work is treating employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that’s what they are. They volunteer the best part—their hearts and minds. ***

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.”

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.

When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

“They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.” It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place.

But until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.”

It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.

In other words, what matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.

The response is usually agreement—most people can see how powerfully such an approach would affect their opportunities for employment or advancement. But many of them fail to take the necessary steps, the initiative, to make it happen.

Holding people to the responsible course is not demeaning; it is affirming.

But we can, at least, affirm their basic nature and create an atmosphere where people can seize opportunities and solve problems in an increasingly self-reliant way.

The organization does not have to be at the mercy of the environment; it can take the initiative to accomplish the shared values and purposes of the individuals involved.

A serious problem with reactive language is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?”

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, by determining which of these two circles is the focus of most of our time and energy, we can discover much about the degree of our proactivity. Enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.

Indirect control problems are solved by changing our methods of influence.

There are some people who interpret “proactive” to mean pushy, aggressive, or insensitive; but that isn’t the case at all.

Proactive people aren’t pushy. They’re smart, they’re value driven, they read reality, and they know what’s needed.

The proactive approach is to change from the inside-out: to be different, and by being different, to effect positive change in what’s out there—I can be more resourceful, I can be more diligent, I can be more creative, I can be more cooperative.

If I have a problem in my marriage, what do I really gain by continually confessing my wife’s sins?

I also diminish my ability to influence her—my nagging, accusing, critical attitude only makes her feel validated in her own weakness. My criticism is worse than the conduct I want to correct. My ability to positively impact the situation withers and dies.

If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control—myself.

We can be happy and accept those things that at present we can’t control, while we focus our efforts on the things that we can.

consequences and mistakes.

We can’t recall them, we can’t undo them, we can’t control the consequences that came as a result.

It is not what others do or even our own mistakes that hurt us the most; it is our response to those things.

Our response to any mistake affects the quality of the next moment. It is important to immediately admit and correct our mistakes so that they have no power over that next moment and we are empowered again.

Through our human endowments of self-awareness and conscience, we become conscious of areas of weakness, areas for improvement, areas of talent that could be developed, areas that need to be changed or eliminated from our lives. Then, as we recognize and use our imagination and independent will to act on that awareness—making promises, setting goals, and being true to them—we build the strength of character, the being, that makes possible every other positive thing in our lives.

It is here that we find two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise—and keep it. Or we can set a goal—and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods.

The power to make and keep commitments to ourselves is the essence of developing the basi...

Try it in your marriage, in your family, in your job. Don’t argue for other people’s weaknesses. Don’t argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it—immediately. Don’t get into a blaming, accusing mode. Work on things you have control over. Work on you. On be.

“The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the

grief he proposes to remove.”

The same is true with parenting. If you want to raise responsible, self-disciplined children, you have to keep that end clearly in mind as you interact with your children on a daily basis. You can’t behave toward them in ways that undermine their self-discipline or self-esteem.

Habit 1 says, “You are the creator.” Habit 2 is the first creation.

Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Suppose that whenever they begin to do something I feel is inappropriate, I sense an immediate tensing in the pit of my stomach. I feel defensive walls go up; I prepare for battle. My focus is not on the long-term growth and understanding but on the short-term behavior. I’m trying to win the battle, not the war.

I pull out my ammunition—my superior size, my position of authority—and I yell or intimidate or I threaten or punish. And I win. I stand there, victorious, in the middle of the debris of a shattered relationship while my children are outwardly submissive and inwardly rebellious, suppressing feelings that will come out later in uglier ways.

The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.

Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.

Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it. Guidance means your source of direction in life. Encompassed by your map, your internal frame of reference that interprets for you what is happening out there, are standards or principles or implicit criteria that govern moment by moment decision making and doing.

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.

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.