Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey (6 page)

But is there a chance that efficiency is not the answer? Is getting more things done in less time going to make a difference -- or will it just increase the pace at which I react to the people and circumstances that seem to control my life?

Could there be something I need to see in a deeper, more fundamental way -- some paradigm within myself that affects the way I see my time, my life, and my own nature?

My marriage has gone flat. We don't fight or anything; we just don't love each other anymore.

We've gone to counseling; we've tried a number of things, but we just can't seem to rekindle the feeling we used to have.

The personality ethic tells me there must be some new book or some seminar where people get all their feelings out that would help my wife understand me better. Or maybe that it's useless, and only a new relationship will provide the love I need.

But is it possible that my spouse isn't the real problem? Could I be empowering my spouse's weaknesses and making my life a function of the way I'm treated?

Do I have some basic paradigm about my spouse, about marriage, about what love really is, that is feeding the problem?

Can you see how fundamentally the paradigms of the personality ethic affect the very way we see our problems as well as the way we attempt to solve them?

Whether people see it or not, many are becoming disillusioned with the empty promises of the personality ethic. As I travel around the country and work with organizations, I find that long-term
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thinking executives are simply turned off by psyche up psychology and "motivational" speakers who have nothing more to share than entertaining stories mingled with platitudes.

They want substance; they want process. They want more than aspirin and band-aids. They want to solve the chronic underlying problems and focus on the principles that bring long-term results.

Albert Einstein observed, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

As we look around us and within us and recognize the problems created as we live and interact within the personality ethic, we begin to realize that these are deep, fundamental problems that cannot be solved on the superficial level on which they were created.

We need a new level, a deeper level of thinking -- a paradigm based on the principles that accurately describe the territory of effective human being and interacting -- to solve these deep concerns.

This new level of thinking is what Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is about. It's a principle-centered, character-based, "Inside-Out" approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness.

"Inside-Out" means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self -- with your paradigms, your character, and your motives.

It says if you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character.

The Inside-Out approach says that Private Victories TM precede Public Victories TM, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

Inside-Out is a process -- a continuing process of renewal based on the natural laws that govern human growth and progress. It's an upward spiral of growth that leads to progressively higher forms of responsible independence and effective interdependence.

I have had the opportunity to work with many people -- wonderful people, talented people, people who deeply want to achieve happiness and success, people who are searching, people who are hurting.

I've worked with business executives, college students, church and civic groups, families and marriage partners. And in all of my experience, I have never seen lasting solutions to problems, lasting happiness and success, that came from the outside in.

What I have seen result from the outside-in paradigm is unhappy people who feel victimized and immobilized, who focus on the weaknesses of other people and the circumstances they feel are responsible for their own stagnant situation. I've seen unhappy marriages where each spouse wants the other to change, where each is confessing the other's "sins," where each is trying to shape up the other. I've seen labor management disputes where people spend tremendous amounts of time and energy trying to create legislation that would force people to act as though the foundation of trust were really there.

Members of our family have lived in three of the "hottest" spots on earth -- South Africa, Israel, and Ireland -- and I believe the source of the continuing problems in each of these places has been the dominant social paradigm of outside-in. Each involved group is convinced the problem is "out there"

and if "they" (meaning others) would "shape up" or suddenly "ship out" of existence, the problem would be solved.

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Inside-Out is a dramatic Paradigm Shift for most people, largely because of the powerful impact of conditioning and the current social paradigm of the personality ethic.

But from my own experience -- both personal and in working with thousands of other people -- and from careful examination of successful individuals and societies throughout history, I am persuaded that many of the principles embodied in the Seven Habits are already deep within us, in our conscience and our common sense. To recognize and develop them and to use them in meeting our deepest concerns, we need to think differently, to shift our paradigms to a new, deeper, "Inside-Out" level.

As we sincerely seek to understand and integrate these principles into our lives, I am convinced we will discover and rediscover the truth of T. S. Eliot's observation: We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

The Seven Habits -- An Overview

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

-- Aristotl

Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits. "Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny," the maxim goes.

Habits are powerful factors in our lives. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness or ineffectiveness.

As Horace Mann, the great educator, once said, "Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it everyday and soon it cannot be broken." I personally do not agree with the last part of his expression.

I know they can be broken. Habits can be learned and unlearned. But I also know it isn't a quick fix.

It involves a process and a tremendous commitment.

Those of us who watched the lunar voyage of Apollo 11 were transfixed as we saw the first men walk on the moon and return to earth. Superlatives such as "fantastic" and "incredible" were inadequate to describe those eventful days. But to get there, those astronauts literally had to break out of the tremendous gravity pull of the earth. More energy was spent in the first few minutes of lift-off, in the first few miles of travel, than was used over the next several days to travel half a million miles.

Habits, too, have tremendous gravity pull -- more than most people realize or would admit.

Breaking deeply imbedded habitual tendencies such as procrastination, impatience, criticalness, or selfishness that violate basic principles of human effectiveness involves more than a little willpower and a few minor changes in our lives. "Lift off" takes a tremendous effort, but once we break out of the gravity pull, our freedom takes on a whole new dimension.

Like any natural force, gravity pull can work with us or against us. The gravity pull of some of our habits may currently be keeping us from going where we want to go. But it is also gravity pull that keeps our world together, that keeps the planets in their orbits and our universe in order. It is a powerful force, and if we use it effectively, we can use the gravity pull of habit to create the cohesiveness and order necessary to establish effectiveness in our lives.

"Habits" Defined

For our purposes, we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.

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.

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I may be ineffective in my interactions with my work associates, my spouse, or my children because I constantly tell them what I think, but I never really listen to them. Unless I search out correct principles of human interaction, I may not even know I need to listen.

Even if I do know that in order to interact effectively with others I really need to listen to them, I may not have the skill. I may not know how to really listen deeply to another human being.

But knowing I need to listen and knowing how to listen is not enough. Unless I want to listen, unless I have the desire, it won't be a habit in my life. Creating a habit requires work in all three dimensions.

The being/seeing change is an upward process -- being changing, seeing, which in turn changes being, and so forth, as we move in an upward spiral of growth. By working on knowledge, skill, and desire, we can break through to new levels of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as we break with old paradigms that may have been a source of pseudo-security for years.

It's sometimes a painful process. It's a change that has to be motivated by a higher purpose, by the willingness to subordinate what you think you want now for what you want later. But this process produces happiness, "the object and design of our existence." Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.

The Seven Habits are not a set of separate or piecemeal psyche-up formulas. In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. They move us progressively on a Maturity Continuum from dependence to interdependence.

We each begin life as an infant, totally dependent on others. We are directed, nurtured, and sustained by others. Without this nurturing, we would only live for a few hours or a few days at the most.

Then gradually, over the ensuing months and years, we become more and more independent --

physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially -- until eventually we can essentially take care of ourselves, becoming inner-directed and self-reliant.

As we continue to grow and mature, we become increasingly aware that all of nature is interdependent, that there is an ecological system that governs nature, including society. We further discover that the higher reaches of our nature have to do with our relationships with others -- that human life also is interdependent.

Our growth from infancy to adulthood is in accordance with natural law. And there are many dimensions to growth. Reaching our full physical maturity, for example, does not necessarily assure us of simultaneous emotional or mental maturity. On the other hand, a person's physical dependence does not mean that he or she is mentally or emotionally immature.

On the maturity continuum, dependence is the paradigm of you -- you take care of me; you come through for me; you didn't come through; I blame you for the results.

Independence is the paradigm of I -- I can do it; I am responsible; I am self-reliant; I can choose.

Interdependence is the paradigm of we -- we can do it: we can cooperate; we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together.

Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own effort. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.

If I were physically dependent -- paralyzed or disabled or limited in some physical way -- I would need you to help me. If I were emotionally dependent, my sense of worth and security would come from your opinion of me. If you didn't like me, it could be devastating. If I were intellectually
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dependent, I would count on you to do my thinking for me, to think through the issues and problems of my life.

If I were independent, physically, I could pretty well make it on my own. Mentally, I could think my own thoughts, I could move from one level of abstraction to another. I could think creatively and analytically and organize and express my thoughts in understandable ways. Emotionally, I would be validated from within. I would be inner directed. My sense of worth would not be a function of being liked or treated well.

It's easy to see that independence is much more mature than dependence. Independence is a major achievement in and of itself. But independence is not supreme.