Quick Summary of "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R.Covey

The Seven Habits

1. Be ProActive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first
4. Think Win/Win
5. Seek First to understand, then to be understood
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen the saw

• HABIT 1: Be ProActive

ProActivity means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. 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. Begin to develop the first and most basic habit of a highly effective person in any environment, the habit of Proactivity. Proactive people are driven by values -- carefully thought about, selected and internalized values. 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. As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, "No one can hurt you without your consent." In the words of Gandhi, "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.
 Cause our attitudes and behaviors flow out of our paradigms, if we use our self-awareness to examine them, we can often see in them the nature of our underlying maps. Our language, for example, is a very real indicator of the degree to which we see ourselves as proactive people.  

Reactive Language: There's nothing I can do. That's just the way I am. He makes me so mad. They won't allow that. I have to do that. I can't. I must. If only.
Proactive Language: Let's look at our alternatives. I can choose a different approach. I control my own feelings. I can create an effective presentation. I will choose an appropriate response. choose. I prefer. I will. 


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.
Our behavior is governed by principles(proactive or reactive). Living in harmony with them brings positive consequences; violating them brings negative consequences. We are free to choose our response in any situation, but in doing so, we choose the attendant consequence. "When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other." It is not what others do or even our own mistakes that hurt us the most; it is our response to those things."I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday".By working on ourselves instead of worrying about the conditions, we are able to influence the conditions.
The power to make and keep commitments to ourselves is the essence of developing the basic habits of effectiveness. Knowledge, skill, and desire are all within our control. We can work on any one to improve the balance of the three. As the area of intersection becomes larger, we more deeply internalize the principles upon which the habits are based and create the strength of character to move us in a balanced way toward increasing effectiveness in our lives. on'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.We are responsible for our own effectiveness, for our own happiness, and ultimately, I would say, for most of our circumstances. 

• HABIT 2: Begin with the end in mind

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
In your mind's eye, see yourself going to the funeral parlor or chapel, parking the car, and getting out. As you walk inside the building, you notice the flowers, the soft organ music. You see the faces of friends and family you pass along the way. You feel the shared sorrow of losing, the joy of having known, that radiates from the hearts of the people there. As you walk down to the front of the room and look inside the casket, you suddenly come face to face with yourself. This is your funeral, three years from today. All these people have come to honor you, to express feelings of love and appreciation for your life. As you take a seat and wait for the services to begin, you look at the program in your hand. There are to be four speakers. The first one is from your family, immediate and also extended -- children, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents who have come from all over the country to attend. The second speaker is one of your friends, someone who can give a sense of what you were as a person. The third speaker is from your work or profession. And the fourth is from your church or some community organization where you've been involved in service. Now think deeply. What would you like each of these speakers to say about you and your life? What kind of husband, wife, father, or mother would you like their words to reflect? What kind of son or daughter or cousin? What kind of friend? What kind of working associate? What character would you like them to have seen in you? What contributions, what achievements would you want them to remember? Look carefully at the people around you. What difference would you like to have made in their lives?

Take the construction of a home, for example. You create it in every detail before you ever hammer the first nail into place. You try to get a very clear sense of what kind of house you want. If you want a family-centered home, you plan a family room where it would be a natural gathering place. You plan sliding doors and a patio for children to play outside. You work with ideas. You work with your mind until you get a clear image of what you want to build. To varying degrees, people use this principle in many different areas of life. Before you go on a trip, you determine your destination and plan out the best route. Before you plant a garden, you plan it out in your mind, possibly on paper. You create speeches on paper before you give them, you envision the landscaping in your yard before you landscape it, you design the clothes you make before you thread the needle.  

A Personal Mission Statement The most effective way I know to Begin with the End in Mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based Because each individual is unique, a personal mission statement will reflect that uniqueness, both in content and form.Example:

• Succeed at home first.

• Seek and merit divine help. 

• Never compromise with honesty. 

• Remember the people involved.  

• Hear both sides before judging.  

• Obtain counsel of others.  

• Defend those who are absent.  

• Be sincere yet decisive.  

• Develop one new proficiency a year.  

• Plan tomorrow's work today.  

• Hustle while you wait. 

• Maintain a positive attitude.  

• Keep a sense of humor.  

• Be orderly in person and in work. 

• Do not fear mistakes -- fear only the absence of creative, constructive, and corrective responses to those mistakes.  

• Facilitate the success of subordinates. 

• Listen twice as much as you speak.  

• Concentrate all abilities and efforts on the task at hand, not worrying about the next job or promotion

A personal mission statement based on correct principles becomes the same kind of standard for an individual. It becomes a personal constitution, the basis for making major, life-directing decisions, the basis for making daily decisions in the midst of the circumstances and emotions that affect our lives. It empowers individuals with the same timeless strength in the midst of change. People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.  Once you have that sense of mission, you have the essence of your own proactivity. You have the vision and the values which direct your life. You have the basic direction from which you set your long- and short-term goals. You have the power of a written constitution based on correct principles, against which every decision concerning the most effective use of your time, your talents, and your energies can be effectively measured.
Our meaning comes from within. Again, in the words of Frankl, "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

• HABIT 3: Put first things first

Will you take just a moment and write down a short answer to the following two questions? Your answers will be important to you as you begin work on Habit 3.  
Question 1: What one thing could you do (you aren't doing now) that if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your personal life?  
Question 2: What one thing in your business or professional life would bring similar results?  

 "The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don't like to do,"."They don't like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.".The main challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.

4 quadrants are given as:

 Focus on quadrant 1 and 2. Q1 deals with important and urgent jobs but Q2 deals with your relationships and life.






Quadrant II organizer will need to meet six important criteria. 
Coherence: Coherence suggests that there is harmony, unity, and integrity between your vision and mission, your roles and goals, your priorities and plans, and your desires and discipline. In your planner, there should be a place for your personal mission statement so that you can constantly refer to it. There also needs to be a place for your roles and for both short- and long-term goals. Balance: Your tool should help you to keep balance in your life, to identify your various roles and keep them right in front of you, so that you don't neglect important areas such as your health, your family, professional preparation, or personal development. Many people seem to think that success in one area can compensate for failure in other areas of life. But can it really? Perhaps it can for a limited time in some areas. But can success in your profession compensate for a broken marriage, ruined health, or weakness in personal character? True effectiveness requires balance, and your tool needs to help you create and maintain it.  
Quadrant II Focus:. You need a tool that encourages you, motivates you, actually helps you spend the time you need in Quadrant II, so that you're dealing with prevention rather than prioritizing crises. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to organize your life on a weekly basis. You can still adapt and prioritize on a daily basis, but the fundamental thrust is organizing the week. Organizing on a weekly basis provides much greater balance and context than daily planning. There seems to be implicit cultural recognition of the week as a single, complete unit of time. Business, education, and many other facets of society operate within the framework of the week, designating certain days for focused investment and others for relaxation or inspiration. The basic Judeo-Christian ethic honors the Sabbath, the one day out of every seven set aside for uplifting purposes. Most people think in terms of weeks. But most third-generation planning tools focus on daily planning. While they may help you prioritize your activities, they basically only help you organize crises and busywork. The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. And this can best be done in the context of the week.  
A "People" Dimension: You also need a tool that deals with people, not just schedules. While you can think in terms of efficiency in dealing with time, a principle-centered person thinks in terms of effectiveness in dealing with people. There are times when principle-centered Quadrant II living requires the subordination of schedules to people. Your tool needs to reflect that value, to facilitate implementation rather than create guilt when a schedule is not followed.  
Flexibility: Your planning tool should be your servant, never your master. Since it has to work for you, it should be tailored to your style, your needs, your particular ways.  
Portability: Your tool should also be portable, so that you can carry it with you most of the time. You may want to review your personal mission statement while riding the bus. You may want to measure the value of a new opportunity against something you already have planned. If your organizer is portable, you will keep it with you so that important data is always within reach. 

 

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others. Some people say that you have to like yourself before you can like others. I think that idea has merit, but if you don't know yourself, if you don't control yourself, if you don't have mastery over yourself, it's very hard to like yourself, except in some short-term, psych-up, superficial way. Real self-respect comes from dominion over self, from true independence. And that's the focus of Habits 1, 2, and 3. Independence is an achievement. Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make. Unless we are willing to achieve real independence, it's foolish to try to develop human-relations skills. We might try. We might even have some degree of success when the sun is shining. But when the difficult times come -- and they will -- we won't have the foundation to keep things together. 

The Emotional Bank Account
We all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up a reserve from which we can make withdrawals when we need to. An Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that's been built up in a relationship. It's the feeling of safeness you have with another human being. 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. Your trust toward me becomes higher, and I can call upon that trust many times if I need to. I can even make mistakes and that trust level, that emotional reserve, will compensate for it. My communication may not be clear, but you'll get my meaning anyway. You won't make me "an offender for a word." 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.  
Building and repairing relationships takes time. If you become impatient with this apparent lack of response of his seeming ingratitude, you may make huge withdrawals and undo all the good you've done. It's hard not to get impatient.Building and repairing relationships are long-term investments.

Six Major Deposits

• Understanding the Individual
• Attending to the Little Things
• Keeping Commitments 
• Clarifying Expectations
• Showing Personal Integrity 
• Apologizing Sincerely When You Make a Withdrawal 

Integrity includes but goes beyond honesty. Honesty is telling the truth -- in other words, conforming our words to reality. Integrity is conforming reality to our words -- in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. This requires an integrated character, a oneness, primarily with self but also with life. One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present. When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.      

• HABIT 4: Think Win/Win

 




Covey explains that there are six paradigms of human interaction:

1. Win-Win: Both people win. Agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial and satisfying to both parties.

2. Win-Lose: "If I win, you lose." Win-Lose people are prone to use position, power, credentials, and personality to get their way.

3. Lose-Win: "I lose, you win." Lose-Win people are quick to please and appease, and seek strength from popularity or acceptance.

4. Lose-Lose: Both people lose. When two Win-Lose people get together -- that is, when two, determined, stubborn, ego-invested individuals interact -- the result will be Lose-Lose.

5. Win: People with the Win mentality don't necessarily want someone else to lose -- that's irrelevant. What matters is that they get what they want.

6. Win-Win or No Deal: If you can't reach an agreement that is mutually beneficial, there is no deal.

The best option is to create Win-Win situations. With Win-Lose, or Lose-Win, one person appears to get what he wants for the moment, but the results will negatively impact the relationship between those two people going forward.
The Win-Win or No Deal option is important to use as a backup. When we have No Deal as an option in our mind, it liberates us from needing to manipulate people and push our own agenda. We can be open and really try to understand the underlying issues.
"What I want isn't as important to me as my relationship with you. Let's do it your way this time." attitude is important to maintain the relationship. Every time winning is not worth it where winning violates others values.And if I focus on my own win and don't even consider your point of view, there's no basis for any kind of productive relationship. In the long run, if it isn't a win for both of us, we both lose. That's why win-win is the only real alternative in interdependent realities. 

 

• Character:Character is the foundation of win-win, and everything else builds on that foundation. There are three character traits essential to the win-win paradigm.

• INTEGRITY. 

• MATURITY

•  ABUNDANCE MENTALITY

if we can't make and keep commitments to ourselves as well as to others, our commitments become meaningless. We know it; others know it. They sense duplicity and become guarded. There's no foundation of trust and win-win becomes an ineffective superficial technique. Integrity is the cornerstone in the foundation. Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration. If a person can express his feelings and convictions with courage balanced with consideration for the feelings and convictions of another person, he is mature, particularly if the issue is very important to both parties. We have a very hard time being genuinely happy for the successes of other people -- even, and sometimes especially, members of their own family or close friends and associates. It's almost as if something is being taken from them when someone else receives special recognition or windfall gain or has remarkable success or achievement which doesn't support win win. Public Victory does not mean victory over other people. It means success in effective interaction that brings mutually beneficial results to everyone involved. Public Victory means working together,
communicating together, making things happen together that even the same people couldn't make happen by working independently.

• HABIT 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

Let's say you go to an optometrist and tell him that you've been having trouble seeing clearly, and he takes off his glasses, hands them to you and says, "Here, try these -- they've been working for me for years!" You put them on, but they only make the problem worse. What are the chances you'd go back to that optometrist?
Unfortunately, we do the same thing in our everyday interactions with others. We prescribe a solution before we diagnose the problem. We don't seek to deeply understand the problem first.


Covey points out, communication experts estimate that:

• 10% of our communication is represented by our words
• 30% is represented by our sounds
• 60% is represented by our body language

Habit 5 says that we must seek first to understand, then to be understood. In order to seek to understand, we must learn to listen.


The key to good judgment is understanding. By judging first, a person will never fully understand. Seek first to understand is a correct principle evident in all areas of life. It's a generic, common-denominator principle, but it has its greatest power in the area of interpersonal relations. 
You can always seek first to understand. That's something that's within your control. And as you do that, as you focus on your Circle of Influence, you really, deeply understand other people. You have accurate information to work with, you get to the heart of matters quickly, you build Emotional Bank Accounts, and you give people the psychological air they need so you can work together effectively.

• HABIT 6: Synerzize

the exercise of all of the other habits prepares us for the habit of synergy. When properly understood, synergy is the highest activity in all life -- When properly understood, synergy is the highest activity in all life -- the true test and manifestation of all the other habits put together.It means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more. For example, if you plant two plants close together, their roots will co-mingle and improve the quality of the soil, so that both plants will grow better than they would on their own.
You must think Win-Win and seek first to understand for synergize.
Valuing the differences is the essence of synergy -- the mental, the emotional, the psychological differences between people. And the key to valuing those differences is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are. 

Synergy allows you to:

• Value the differences in other people as a way to expand your perspective

• Sidestep negative energy and look for the good in others
• Exercise courage in interdependent situations to be open and encourage others to be open
• Catalyze creativity and find a solution that will be better for everyone by looking for a third alternative

• HABIT 7: Sharpen The Saw

Tremendous consequences come from little things...

The single most powerful investment we can ever make in life -- investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute. We are the instruments of our own performance, and to be effective, we need to recognize the importance of taking time regularly to sharpen the saw in all four ways as:
 

The greatest battles of life are fought out daily in the silent chambers of the soul. If you win the battles there, if you settle the issues that inwardly conflict, you feel a sense of peace, a sense of knowing what you're about. And you'll find that the Public Victories -- where you tend to think cooperatively, to promote the welfare and good of other people, and to be genuinely happy for other people's successes will follow naturally.
Education -- continuing education, continually honing and expanding the mind -- is vital mental renewal. Sometimes that involves the external discipline of the classroom or systematized study programs; more often it does not. Proactive people can figure out many, many ways to educate themselves. It is extremely valuable to train the mind to stand apart and examine its own program.
a life of integrity is the most fundamental source of personal worth. Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way. It comes from within. It comes from accurate paradigms and correct principles deep in our own mind and heart. It comes from Inside-Out congruence, from living a life of integrity in which our daily habits reflect our deepest values. Each Daily Private Victory makes a deposit in your personal intrinsic security account. 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. That's true financial independence. It's not having wealth; it's having the power to produce wealth. It's intrinsic.