The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: The Infographics Edition

by Stephen R. Covey

INTEGRITY. We’ve already defined integrity as the value we place on ourselves.

MATURITY. Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration.

High courage and consideration are both essential to Win/Win. It is the balance that is the mark of real maturity. If I have it, I can listen, I can empathically understand, but I can also courageously confront.

ABUNDANCE MENTALITY. The third character trait essential to Win/Win is the Abundance Mentality, the paradigm that there is plenty out there for everybody.

Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the Sc...

The Abundance Mentality takes the personal joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment of Habits 1, 2, and 3 and turns it outward, appreciating the uniqueness, the inner direction, the proactive nature of others. It recognizes the unlimited possibilities for positive interactive growth and development, creating new Third Alternatives.

So I recommend reading literature, such as the inspiring biography of Anwar Sadat, In Search of Identity, and seeing movies like Chariots of Fire or plays like Les Misérables that expose you to models of Win/Win.

When you’re dealing with a person who is coming from a paradigm of Win/Lose, the relationship is still the key. The place to focus is on your Circle of Influence. You make deposits into the Emotional Bank

You stay longer in the communication process. You listen more, you listen in greater depth. You express yourself with greater courage. You aren’t reactive. You go deeper inside yourself for strength of character to be proactive.

That very process is a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account.

And the stronger you are—the more genuine your character, the higher your level of proactivity, the more committed you really are to Win/Win—the more powerful your influence will be with that other person.

So we need to approach Win/Win from a genuine desire to invest in the relationships that make it possible.

Agreements From relationships flow the agreements that give definition and direction to Win/Win.

They are sometimes called performance agreements or partnership agreements, shifting the paradigm of productive interaction from vertical to horizontal, from hovering supervision to self-supervision, from positioning to being partners in success.

Traditional authoritarian supervision is a Win/Lose paradigm. It’s also the result of an overdrawn Emotional Bank Account. If you don’t have trust or a common vision of desired results, you tend to hover over, check up on, and direct. Trust isn’t there, so you feel as though you have to control people.

“Here are the objectives and the criteria. Here are the resources, including learning from each other. So go to it. As soon as you meet the criteria, you will be promoted to assistant managers.”

They were finished in three-and-a-half weeks. Shifting the training paradigm had released unbelievable motivation and creativity.

This kind of thinking can similarly affect every area of organizational life if people have the courage to explore their paradigms and to concentrate on Win/Win.

I am always amazed at the results that happen, both to individuals and to organizations, when responsible, proactive, self-directing individuals are turned loose on a task.

Win/Win Performance Agreements Creating Win/Win performance agreements requires vital paradigm shifts. The focus is on results, not methods...

and the relationships out of which it grows. In that context, it defines and directs the interdependent interaction for which it was created. Systems Win/Win can only survive in an organization when the systems support it. If you

So often the problem is in the system, not in the people. If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.

As people really learn to think Win/Win, they can set up the systems to create and reinforce it. They can transform unnecessarily competitive situations to cooperative ones and can powerfully impact their effectiveness by building both P and PC.

Think about an upcoming interaction wherein you will be attempting to reach an agreement or negotiate a solution. Commit to maintain a balance between courage and consideration.

Habit 5: Seek First To Undestand, Then To Be Understood

PRINCIPLES OF EMPATHIC COMMUNICATION The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.

Suppose you’ve been having trouble with your eyes and you decide to go to an optometrist for help. After briefly listening to your complaint, he takes off his glasses and hands them to you.

“Put these on,” he says. “I’ve worn this pair of glasses for ten years now and they’ve really helped me. I have an extra pair at home; you can wear these.”

You don’t have much confidence in someone who doesn’t diagnose before he or she prescribes. But how often do we diagnose before we prescribe in communication?

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. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.

CHARACTER AND COMMUNICATION Right now, you’re reading a book I’ve written. Reading and writing are both forms of communication. So are speaking and listening. In fact, those are the four basic types of communication. And think of all the hours you sp...

You have to build the skills of empathic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust. And you have to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that create a commerce between hearts.

“Oh, I know exactly how you feel!” “I went through the very same thing. Let me tell you about my experience.”

That’s the case with so many of us. 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.

Empathic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives and interpretation, you’re dealing with the reality inside another person’s head and heart.

This is one of the greatest insights in the field of human motivation: Satisfied needs do not motivate. It’s only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.

When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving.

Empathic listening is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. You become vulnerable. It’s a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced.

That’s why Habits 1, 2, and 3 are so foundational. They give you the changeless inner core, the principle center, from which you can handle the more outward vulnerability with peace and strength.

This principle is also true in sales. An effective sales person first seeks to understand the needs, the concerns, the situation of the customer. The amateur salesman sells products; the professional sells solutions to needs and problems.

The professional learns how to diagnose, how to understand. He also learns how to relate people’s needs to his products and services.

The professional lawyer first gathers the facts to understand the situation, to understand the laws and precedents, before preparing a case.

forget understanding the consumer’s buying habits and motives—just design products. It would never work.

A good engineer will understand the forces, the stresses at work, before designing the bridge.

A good teacher will assess the class before teaching. A good student will under...

You will never be able to truly step inside another person, to see the world as he sees it, until you develop the pure desire, the strength of personal character, and the positive Emotional Bank Account, as well as the empathic listening skills to do

What a difference real understanding can make! All the well-meaning advice in the world won’t amount to a hill of beans if we’re not even addressing the real problem. And we’ll never get to the problem if we’re so caught up in our own autobiography, our own paradigms,

There are times when transformation requires no outside counsel. Often when people are really given the chance to open up, they unravel their own problems and the solutions become clear to them in the process.

Empathic listening takes time, but it doesn’t take anywhere near as much time as it takes to back up and correct misunderstandings when you’re already miles down the road, to redo, to live with unexpressed and unsolved problems, to deal with the results of not giving people psychological air.