Habit 1: Be Proactive
Being proactive is the opposite of being reactive: your mood is not determined by how you slept, or whether you have a job, or whether your girlfriend or boyfriend is in a good mood, or whether or not your kids are behaving, or whether God seems to be on your side at the moment; it is determined by principles. Principles are how you treat other people, how to listen to people, how you build trust, how to seek win-win relationships, being genuinely happy when other people succeed, etc.. No matter what the world outside is like or what your mood is, you do these things. That is being proactive.
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Beginning with the end in mind is the habit of keeping your day to day focus on your whole life instead of on day to day things. What do you want people to say about you after your life is over? What kind of person do you want to have been. What is the legacy you want to leave? Habit 2 is the process of developing a clear answer to this question. This is your purpose in life. When you have a clear vision of your overall purpose in life, it is easy to solidly say "no" to some things and "yes" to others. It becomes easier to plan your year or this month or week or day. You constantly ask yourself: Does this align with what I ultimately want to do?
Habit 3: First Things First
The trick of this habit is to get a solid and deeply felt vision of the kind of person you want to be in your life (Habit 2). When you truly feel this, many things in your life will suddenly be NOT IMPORTANT: most TV shows, time spent complaining, gossiping, worrying, many invitations, phone calls, advertisements, it all becomes clutter and suddenly you have a lot more time! You take all this time and you start doing things that are IMPORTANT but NOT URGENT. These are things like building relationships, learning new things, building trust, planning your week, month, year, life; exercising, meditating, doing project work way before it is due, sowing seeds for tomorrow.
Habit 4: Think Win-Win
Thinking Win-Win means believing that there is more than enough to go around for everybody and that the purpose of the game is to find ways that everybody involved gets as much as they can. It means actively looking for ways that you can genuinely help others succeed, ways which are fun, profitable and beneficial for you.
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
This habit means not talking about yourself during a conversation. It means wanting to experience something new from the other person, wanting to discover a new way of seeing the world, wanting to truly stand in the other's shoes and feel their unique pain and their unique joy. ACTION ITEM: When you notice that someone is speaking with negative emotion, this means they need to be listened to and understood. It means that there is something under the surface that will poison relationships, projects and communication until it is identified and addressed. When someone says, "This is stupid" or "I hate school" they mean something else besides "this is stupid" and "I hate school". Use your listening skills (respond, rephrase, repeat) to find out what it is that they really mean.
Habit 6: Synergize
Synergizing means actively seeking out people who are different from you in order to learn from them and benefit from their strengths, and together make beautiful music that none of you could make alone. It means humbling yourself to realize that there are many ways to accomplish things, ways which you do not understand but which are effective than how you do things now.
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
Sharpening the Saw means continually keeping yourself physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually fit. It means regularly jogging, swimming, reading a wide spectrum of books, continually learning new things, relaxing, vacationing, praying, and meditating.
** Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey**
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