7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is a self-help book for those looking to achieve personal and/or professional success. While he goes into considerable detail in the book, essentially Covey argues that cultivating your “Character Ethic” is key to achieving success. By adapting your motives and inner core with his principle-centered approach, you should be able to achieve sustainable personal and interpersonal effectiveness. And who couldn’t use a little more of that?

To give you an idea of how to cultivate your character using these principles, here is a brief overview of the 7 habits of highly effective people.

1. Be Proactive

While reactive people are often driven by emotions, proactive people tend to be driven by values. They know that they are always in control of their own actions, and avoid blaming it on external factors. By being proactive instead of reactive, they recognize that they’re ultimately responsible for their own behaviour, growth, and results.

2. Begin with the End in Mind

Think about your funeral. How would you like people to remember you? This can help you figure out some of your key values.

Once you identify what’s important to you, you should come up with a personal mission statement that identifies three things: who you want to be, what you want to achieve, and your underlying values. Then, you should live each day of your life with this statement in mind.

3. Put First Things First

The third habit is about going after those goals you set out in the previous step. This means prioritizing those tasks that are most important to your personal mission statement. This may mean saying no to people sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You need to manage your time effectively if you want to achieve success.

4. Think Win-Win

It’s important to think of life as more of a cooperative endeavor than a competition. Therefore, you must commit to creating win-win situations that are mutually beneficial to all concerned parties.

To do this, you need to cultivate interpersonal leadership. This means that, when interacting with others, you’re exercising traits such as self-awareness, conscience, independent will, and imagination. These can help you become an effective win-win leader.

5. Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

Those looking to improve interpersonal relationships should focus on becoming a proficient, empathic listener. You should listen with the intent of really understanding someone, as it will allow that person to feel more comfortable opening up to you. Once you have an idea of where the person is coming from, then you can try and make yourself understood using the same kind of language.

6. Synergize

This is the habit of creative cooperation. It often requires communication, openness, and vulnerability between multiple parties in order to tackle a problem most effectively. Synergy between team members allows us to discover ideas that we may never have thought of on our own, often resulting in better solutions.

7. Sharpen the Saw

The final habit is about enhancing yourself. More specifically, it’s about continuously improving yourself through the four dimensions of renewal: the physical, social and emotional, spiritual, and mental. You should try to exercise all these motivations on a regular basis, and do your best to keep them all in balance for best results.

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