... These behaviors are not things we need to think about, they represent little success strategies or ways of coping with life that we have found to be helpful. If you take a look at what Seneca said about human character, you will see how acquiring new habits leads to a fundamental change of character. Sow a thought, reap an action Sow action, reap a habit Sow a habit, reap a character Sow a character, reap a destiny. - Seneca [pic] Stephen Covey Stephen Covey was born in 1932. He lives with his wife, Sandra, and their family in Utah; in the Rocky Mountains. Covey achieved international acclaim, and is perhaps best known, for his self-help book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People which was first published by Simon & Schuster in 1989 and has sold around 12 million copies word-wide. Covey has a Harvard MBA and has spent most of his career at Brigham Young University, where he was professor of organizational behavior and business management. In addition to his MBA, he also has a doctorate which he completed whilst at...
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...The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People. AUTHOR: Stephen R Covey PUBLISHING HOUSE: Simon & Schuster FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1989 AWARDS: In August 2011, Time listed Seven Habits as one of " The 25 Most Influential Business Management Books. NO OF COPIES SOLD: it has sold more than 15 million copies in 38 languages since first publication. OTHER BOOKS: Covey has written a number of follow-up books: * First Things First * Principle Centered Leadership * The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, a sequel to The Seven Habits published in 2004 * The Leader in Me, a book on using the seven habits for young children, especially in schools, published in 2008. TYPE OF BOOK: self help book PURPOSE OF THE BOOK: In many ways it's a general purpose psychology book, dealing with such things as motivation, organizational skills, and how to deal with stress. THEME: The 7 Habits provide an incremental, sequential, integrated approach to the development of personal effectiveness moving us progressively from dependence (on others) to independence (taking care of ourselves) to interdependence (looking after others and combining strengths to multiply our individual effectiveness). This book's focal point is on an approach to obtain personal and interpersonal effectiveness. Covey emphasizes that if we want to make a change in our lives, we should probably first focus on our personal attitudes and behaviors THE STORY: Be Proactive: Covey states that we are responsible...
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...7 Habits of Highly Effective People Book Summary Before going into the actual 7 habits, the author Steve Covey goes into few important concepts. Character Ethic (good) There are basic principles of effective living and people can only experience true success and enduring happines as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character. Personality Ethic (not so good) It is manipulative, deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them. Personality ethic is illusory and deceptive and trying to get high quality results with its techniques and quick fixes – not effective at all. Paradigm The book talks a lot about paradigm shifts and I remember having to look it up in the dictionary to find the true meaning of it; paradigm meaning: model, theory, perception, assumption, the way we see world. Conditioning affects our perceptions/paradigms (old/young lady drawing example in the book worth checking out). We see the world not as it is but as ‘we are’ through our paradigms. Different people can have different views and still both be correct. The more aware we are of our basic paradigms the more we can examine/test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions getting a larger picture and far more objective view. Paradigm shifts move us from one way of seeing the world to another. They influence our relationship with others. Not all are good. If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives we...
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...7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is a very insightful book providing an approach to obtain personal and interpersonal effectiveness. I really gained a lot from Covey’s different examples he provided in each chapter via family, business and society in general. Covey explains how a person must make a paradigm shift prior to incorporating these habits into their life. We have to be committed to ourselves before we can commit to others. I really find this “inside-out” approach inspiring as change starts with oneself. By incorporating these habits in our lives it will make success easier to obtain both personally and professionally and failure a lot easier to swallow as well. But before we make any changes in our lives we first have to focus on our own personal attitudes and behaviors. Habit number one discusses the importance of being proactive. In order to be proactive we have to possess the initiative to make things happen. Being proactive is the ability to respond positively to our circumstances. I have heard so many times the expression, “that’s just the way I am, “to me this is one of the most frustrating things one can say. I just want to tell them “No, that is the way you are choosing to be and there is something you can do about it.” We all have to bypass the negativity and find a way to focus our time and energy on being effective. Covey explains how to focus your energy on our Circle of Influence by working on the things that you can do something about...
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... 2/2/2014 | I was inspired by Stephen R. Covey’s, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The 7 Habits have encouraged me to rethink how I was looking at the world and it has changed how I plan to move forward in my life. Covey defines a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge is the what to do and why, skill is the how to do, and desire is the motivation or want to do, “In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three”, (Covey 55). Covey describes the Maturity Continuum which moves us progressively from dependence to independence to interdependence. The 7 Habits are tools which provide an approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. Part 1 The first three habits focus on transitioning from dependence to independence, the mastery of self. Each of us begins life as an infant. We are completely dependent upon others to care for us. “They gradually, over the ensuing months and years, we become more independent- physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially-until eventually we can essentially take care of ourselves, becoming inner-directed and self-reliant”, (Covey 57), it is in our nature to transition to independence. Wikipedia.org summarizes The 7 Habits in correlation to each phase, beginning with self-mastery. Habit 1: Be Proactive describes how to take initiative in life by understanding how our decisions are determining factors for effectiveness in your life. Covey encourages...
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...person cannot say, 'I choose otherwise.' To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know. It is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another thing not to admit it. People will forgive mistakes, because mistakes are usually of the mind, mistakes of judgment. But people will not easily forgive the mistakes of the heart, the ill intention, the bad motives, the prideful justifying cover-up of the first mistake. Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. How you treat the one reveals how you regard the many, because everyone is ultimately a one. There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. And, of course, the meat of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Habit 1: Be Proactive Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind Habit 3: Put First Things First Habit 4: Think Win/Win Habit 5: Seek...
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...Time Management Essays-Various Top Five Time Management Mistakes Time management is not necessarily working "harder", but rather, "smarter." And to accomplish significantly more in our days, we need not increase our efforts. As an example, in a horse race, the first horse may earn a $50,000 purse and the second horse may earn a $25,000 purse. The first horse gets twice as much money as the second horse, not because it ran twice as far or twice as fast. It was only a "nose ahead" of the competition. So it is with our daily results. We need not run twice as fast or put in twice the effort to significantly increase our daily success. We only need to be a "nose ahead" of where we already are. We are all productive in our days. We would not survive the demands of this world if we were not. The real challenge is how much more productive can we become? And, a lot of our time management has to do with more of what we are not doing rather than what we are doing. Sometimes our mistakes and omissions will keep us from running at a full pace. Here are the Top Five Time Management Mistakes we should all avoid to help us to increase our daily success both on and off the job, in less time and with less stress. 1. Start your day without a plan of action. You will begin your day by responding to the loudest voice (the squeaky wheel gets the grease) and spend it in a defensive mode, responding to other people's and events' demands. The tail will wag the dog. If there is a void of...
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...Sarah E. Al-Falahy BSA-2B MWF 7:40-8:40am “Your life doesn’t just ‘happen.’ Whether you know it or not, it is carefully designed by you. The choices, after all, are yours. You choose happiness. You choose sadness. You choose decisiveness. You choose ambivalence. You choose success. You choose failure. You choose courage. You choose fear. Just remember that every moment, every situation, provides a new choice. And in doing so, it gives you a perfect opportunity to do things differently to produce more positive results.”—Stephen Covey Life is full of wonders and complexities. Every day we live adds twist and color to our existence. In the lyrics of Francis Magalona’s song entitled Kaleidoscope World, “Every color, every hue, is represented by me and you…” which somewhat relates to why people uniquely responds to certain circumstances. Though unique, I believe that there are ways that may actually work and be effective for all. One of those ways is contained in what my Management teacher assigned us to read, Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” The book is really about knowing and nurturing the fundamental truths in your life and making them accessible to you at all times to the point where it’s easy to draw solutions to problems from them, making you a much more effective person in all aspects of life. Habit 1: Be Proactive (Principles of Personal Vision) There’s a lot of things that are happening everyday and minority of it concerns us. Based on...
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...employee/ customer satisfaction, and often profitability. This can only be achieved through concise planning, high efficiency, and a bit of luck. We must begin with a focus; all organizations operate with a goal in mind. It is human nature in that we must have some sort of shiny gold star or an orchestra of applause and accolades to motivate us in order to thrive in our endeavors. How we come to achieve our goals is based on motivations and effectiveness. Stephen Covey’s book, First Things First looks at time management strategies and how one can best achieve effectiveness and therefore succeed in obtaining their goals Covey’s approach to effectiveness works with two very important dynamics in mind illustrated by the clock and the compass. There has to be reasonable amount of resources available as we contend with our aspirations or else one will face stress and frustrations hindering one in their pursuits therefore some self analysis and planning is required. “Our struggle to put first things first can be characterized by the contrast between two powerful tools that direct us: the clock and the compass. The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, activities what we do with, and how we manage our time. The compass represents our vision, values, principals, mission, conscious, direction—what we feel is important and how we lead our lives.” (Covey 20) As Covey illustrates with the clock, time is a very important part of our lives. We live by schedules...
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...would like the eulogist to say about you. This should reveal exactly what matters most to you in your life. Use this frame of reference to make all your day-to-day decisions so that you are working toward your most meaningful 2 life goals. The Seven Habits From “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic” by Stephen R. Covey, Simon and Schuster, 1989 3. 4. PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST. To manage our lives effectively, we must keep our mission in mind, understand what’s important as well as urgent, and maintain a balance between what we produce each day and our ability to produce in the future. Think of the former as putting out fires and the latter as personal development. THINK WIN/WIN. Agreements or solutions among people can be mutually beneficial if all parties cooperate and begin with a belief in the “third alternative”: a better way that hasn’t been thought of 3 yet. The Seven Habits From “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic” by Stephen R. Covey, Simon and Schuster, 1989 5. SEEK FIRST OT BE UNDERSTANDING, THEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD. Most people don’t listen. Not really. They listen long enough to devise a solution to the speaker’s problem or a rejoinder to what’s being said. Then they dive into the conversation. You’ll be more...
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...would like the eulogist to say about you. This should reveal exactly what matters most to you in your life. Use this frame of reference to make all your day-to-day decisions so that you are working toward your most meaningful 2 life goals. The Seven Habits From “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic” by Stephen R. Covey, Simon and Schuster, 1989 3. 4. PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST. To manage our lives effectively, we must keep our mission in mind, understand what’s important as well as urgent, and maintain a balance between what we produce each day and our ability to produce in the future. Think of the former as putting out fires and the latter as personal development. THINK WIN/WIN. Agreements or solutions among people can be mutually beneficial if all parties cooperate and begin with a belief in the “third alternative”: a better way that hasn’t been thought of 3 yet. The Seven Habits From “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic” by Stephen R. Covey, Simon and Schuster, 1989 5. SEEK FIRST OT BE UNDERSTANDING, THEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD. Most people don’t listen. Not really. They listen long enough to devise a solution to the speaker’s problem or a rejoinder to what’s being said. Then they dive into the conversation. You’ll be more...
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...How to Manage Your Time Tisha Wingate ITT Technical Institute How to Manage Your Time During a person’s life, the need to prioritize their time at one point or another is a necessity. Having deadlines with work, children’s after-school activities, family life and/or illnesses, and going back to school; all of these situations call for a better scheduling of time. This paper will be focusing on managing time to go back to school for most adults using Stephen Covey’s articles about time management. As adults, having a set routine to get through the day is very helpful. However, when adding college into the mix, everything can feel out of kilter and overwhelming. If a day-to-day or a monthly calendar/schedule was at a person’s fingertips, and it was setup to show all aspects of their life’s responsibilities, much of the stress could disappear. Stephen Covey was a world-renowned author of time management in today’s world. During his life, he wrote numerous articles and books that covered how to schedule a person’s time to assist in making the most of every minute in their life count properly. His book entitled The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, if one follows will help turn completely disorganized and overwhelmed people into a fully-functional-know- what-I-am-doing organized and on-top-of-each-situation person. Starting with the most important habit, Be Proactive, which means to be prepared for the unseen and being able to adjust to what life throws at a person....
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...The principles that Covey believes that companies need to concentrate on in order to develop leaders include empowerment, trust, trustworthiness, integrity, and personal growth. Leaders need to create cultures in their companies that recognize these basic principles. In Covey's model, leadership is broken down into three basic functions. First, there is path finding. In this role, a leader develops and articulates a vision for the future and gets people excited about it. The second activity is aligning. This means that the leader ensures that a company's organization, systems, and processes are consistent with, and contribute to, the leader's vision and the company's mission. The third activity is empowering. This means that the leader gives the people in the organization the power and resources to accomplish their portion of the organization's mission. This will unleash hidden talents, energy, and creativity. Covey trains leaders for companies in a variety of ways. These include books, on-site workshops, seminars, and training events at his institute for leadership in Utah. Covey also encourages follow-up training and assessment. Many companies have credited Covey and his training for helping them to develop leaders for the future. Goals and The 7 Habits As in any aspect in life, it is beneficial to have a goal in mind before undertaking it. From the simplest task of setting your feet on the ground in the morning to the monumental task of mapping out a strategy for...
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...character and produce our effectiveness or our in effectiveness. In the words of Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” I identify here seven habits shared by all truly effective people. Fortunately, for those of us not born effective (no one is), these habits can be learned. Furthermore, the collective experience of the ages shows us that acquiring them will give you the character to succeed. Some years ago, I decided to read all the success literature published in the United States since its beginning in 1776 - hundreds of books, articles, and essays on self-improvement and popular psychology. I noticed a startling thing: Almost all the writings that helped build our country in its first 150 years or so identified character as the foundation of success. The literature of what we might call “The Character Ethic” helped Americans cultivate integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is a prime example. Compared with the early success literature, the writings of the last 50 years seem superficial to me - filled with social image consciousness, techniques, and quick fixes. There, the solutions derive not from the Character Ethic, but the Personality Ethic: Success is a function of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, of skills that lubricate the process of human interaction. I don’t say these skills are unimportant. But they...
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...People . Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People® ( Remember Covey’s habits are protected intellectual property) 0 Index Page 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 14 17 17 Habits defined Defining a habit Paradigms and Principals The Private Victory Habit 1- Be proactive Habit 2- Begin with the end in mind Habit 3- Put first things first Time quadrants The Public Victory Habit 5- Seek first to understand then to be understood Habit 6- Synergy Habit 7 - Sharpen the saw Habit 8 – Finding your voice Quotes that support the habits The ABC of using the habits Reading Recommendations Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People® ( Remember Covey’s habits are protected intellectual property) 1 Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Habit 1: Be Proactive Take responsibility for your life. Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind Define your mission and goals in life. Habit 3: Put First Things First Prioritise, and do the most important things first. Habit 4: Think Win-Win Have an everyone-can-win attitude. Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood Listen to people sincerely. Habit 6: Synergize Work together to achieve more. Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw Renew yourself regularly. Habit 8: Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs. To deal with people in a way that will communicate to them their worth and potential so clearly they will come to see it in themselves...
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