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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Powerful Lessons in Personal…

- - - - Not urgent but important - Quadrant 2
        relationship building
        finding new opportunities
        long term planning
        preventative activities
        personal growth
        recreation
        SHOULD BE MAXIMISED
      - Urgent not important - Quadrant 3
        interruptions
        emails calls meetings
        popular activities
        proximate pressing matters
        SHOULD BE MINIMISED AND DELEGATED
      - Urgent & Important - Quadrant 1,
        crisis,
        pressing problems,
        deadline driven projects
        SHOULD BE MINIMISED
      - Not urgent not important - Quadrant 4
        trivia busy work
        time wasters
        some calls and emails
        pleasant activities
        SHOULD BE IGNORED
    - - IDENTIFYING ROLES . The first task is to write down your key roles.
        eg.1. Individual 2. Spouse/Parent 3. Manager New Products 4. Manager Research 5. Manager Staff Dev. 6. Manager Administration 7. Chairman United Way
      - SCHEDULING . Now you can look at the week ahead with your goals in mind and schedule time to achieve them.
      - SELECTING GOALS . The next step is to think of one or two important results you feel you should accomplish in each role during the next seven days.
        
        At least some of these goals should reflect Quadrant II activities. Ideally, these weekly goals would be tied to the longer-term goals you have identified in conjunction with your personal mission statement
      - DAILY ADAPTING . With Quadrant II weekly organizing, daily planning becomes more a function of daily adapting, of prioritizing activities and responding to unanticipated events, relationships, and experiences in a meaningful way.
        
        Taking a few minutes each morning to review your schedule can put you in touch with the value-based decisions you made as you organized the week as well as unanticipated factors that may have come up. As you overview the day, you can see that your roles and goals provide a natural prioritization that grows out of your innate sense of balance. It is a softer, more right-brain prioritization that ultimately comes out of your sense of personal mission.
    - - 1: Gofer Delegation
        Gofer delegation means “Go for this, go for that, do this, do that, and tell me when it’s done.” Most people who are producers have a gofer delegation paradigm. Remember the machete wielders in the jungle? They are the producers. They roll up their sleeves and get the job done. If they are given a position of supervision or management, they still think like producers. They don’t know how to set up a full delegation so that another person is committed to achieve results. Because they are focused on methods, they become responsible for the results.
      - 2: Stewardship delegation
        Stewardship delegation involves clear, up-front mutual understanding and commitment regarding expectations in five areas.
        
        DESIRED RESULTS . Create a clear, mutual understanding of what needs to be accomplished, focusing on what, not how; results, not methods. Spend time. Be patient. Visualize the desired result. Have the person see it, describe it, make out a quality statement of what the results will look like, and by when they will be accomplished.
        
        GUIDELINES . Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate. These should be as few as possible to avoid methods delegation, but should include any formidable restrictions. You wouldn’t want a person to think he had considerable latitude as long as he accomplished the objectives, only to violate some long-standing traditional practice or value. That kills initiative and sends people back to the gofer’s creed: “Just tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.”
        
        RESOURCES . Identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational resources the person can draw on to accomplish the desired results.
        
        ACCOUNTABILITY . Set up the standards of performance that will be used in evaluating the results and the specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.
        
        CONSEQUENCES . Specify what will happen, both good and bad, as a result of the evaluation. This could include such things as financial rewards, psychic rewards, different job assignments, and natural consequences tied into the overall mission of an organization.
  - - - If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror—from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us—our view of ourselves is like the reflection in the crazy mirror room at the carnival.
      - the reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions.
      - There are 3 social maps - 3 theories of determinism widely accepted to explain the nature of man
        
        1: Genetic - its in your dna
        
        2: Psychic - your upbringing and childhood experience essentially laid out your personal tendencies and your character structure
        
        3: Environmental - your environment is responsible for your situation
        
        Each of these maps is based on the stimulus/response theory we most often think of in connection with Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. The basic idea is that we are conditioned to respond in a particular way to a particular stimulus.
    - - Between stimulus and response man has the freedom to choose
      - The deterministic map doesn't describe our abilities at all
    - - we are responsible for our own lives
      - our behavior is a function of our decisions not our conditions
      - we have the initiative and responsibility to make things happen
      - Proactive means to to behave based upon your own conscious choice based on values rather than a product of conditions based on feelings
      - Because we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are a function of conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us.
      - The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. 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.
      - No-one can hurt you without your consent - Eleanor Roosevelt
        They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them - Gandhi
      - I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday and going forward I can make different choices
      - It's not what happens to us but our response to what happens that hurts us. our difficult experiences forge our character and develop the internal powers and freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and inspire others to do so as well
      - there are three central values in life—the experiential, or that which happens to us; the creative, or that which we bring into existence; and the attitudinal, or our response in difficult circumstances such as terminal illness.
      - what matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.
    - - our basic nature is to act and not be acted upon, this enables to choose our response to circumstances and therefore create circumstances.
      - you must make things happen, use your resourcefulness and initiative
    - - the difference between people who take the initiative and those who don't is like day and night
      - You have the power to choose a positive response to your circumstances
    - - our language is a very real indicator of the degree to which we see ourselves
        
        the language of reactive people absolves them of all responsibility
        
        comes from determinism and it is all about transferring responsibility
        
        being not able to choose your response
      - a serious problem with reactive language is that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy
      - People become reinforced in the paradigm that they are determined, and they produce evidence to support the belief. They feel increasingly victimized and out of control, not in charge of their life or their destiny. They blame outside forces—other
      - Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return.
      - A way to become self aware is to look at where we focus our time and energy
        
        we all have a circle of concern - some things we have no control over and some things we can
        
        the latter group is our circle of influence
        
        Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.
        
        Reactive people, on the other hand, focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increased feelings of victimization. The negative energy generated by that focus, combined with neglect in areas they could do something about, causes their Circle of Influence to shrink.
    - - Direct: problems involving our own behavior
        
        solved by working on habits - within circle of influence - private victories of habits 1 - 3
      - Indirect: problems involving other peoples behavior
        
        solved by changing our methods of influence - public victories - habits 4 - 6
      - No control: Problems we can do nothing about such as our past or situational realities
        
        involve taking the responsibility to change the line on the bottom on our face—to smile, to genuinely and peacefully accept these problems and learn to live with them, even though we don’t like them.
        
        Alcoholics Anonymous prayer, “Lord, give me the courage to change the things which can and ought to be changed, the serenity to accept the things which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
    - - It is inspiring to realize that in choosing our response to circumstance, we powerfully affect our circumstance. When we change one part of the chemical formula, we change the nature of the results.
      - It’s the nature of reactive people to absolve themselves of responsibility. It’s so much safer to say, “I am not responsible.” If I say “I am responsible,” I might have to say, “I am irresponsible.” It would be very hard for me to say that I have the power to choose my response and that the response I have chosen has resulted in my involvement in a negative, collusive environment, especially if for years I have absolved myself of responsibility for results in the name of someone else’s weaknesses.
    - - 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.
      - The circle of concern is filled with the haves
        
        Ill be happy when i have my house paid off
        
        if only i had a more patient husband
        
        if i had a degree
        
        if i had better kids - etc.
      - The circle of influence is filled with the be's
        
        i can be more patient
        
        i can be more wise
        
        i can be loving etc.
      - Anytime we think the problem is out there that thought is the problem. we allow what's out there to control us
    - - While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. They are out in the Circle of Concern.
      - Our behavior is governed by principles. 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.”
      - The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it. This literally turns a failure into a success. “Success,” said IBM founder T. J. Watson, “is on the far side of failure.”
      - It is not what others do or even our own mistakes that hurt us the most; it is our response to those things. Chasing after the poisonous snake that bites us will only drive the poison through our entire system. It is far better to take measures immediately to get the poison out.
      - Our response to any mistake affects the quality of the next moment. It is important immediately admit and correct our mistakes so that they have no power over that next moment and we are empowered again
    - - At the very heart of our Circle of Influence is our ability to make and keep commitments and promises. The commitments we make to ourselves and to others, and our integrity to those commitments, is the essence and clearest manifestation of our proactivity.
      - It is here that we find two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise—and keep it. Or we can set a goal—and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods.
      - 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 tomove us in a balanced way toward increasing effectiveness in our lives.
    - - fOR 30 days work only in your Circle of Influence. Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
      - We are responsible for our own effectiveness, our own happiness and most of our circumstances
  - - - “Begin with the end in mind” is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation, to all things.
      - The carpenter’s rule is “measure twice, cut once.” You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you’ve thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind.
      - To the extent to which we understand the principle of two creations and accept the responsibility for both, we act within and enlarge the borders of our Circle of Influence. To the extent to which we do not operate in harmony with this principle and do not take charge of the first creation, we diminish it.
    - - Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people’s agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.
      - Put another way, Habit 1 says, “You are the creator.” Habit 2 is the first creation.
    - - “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
      - I’m convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.
      - leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We’re into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.
    - - the best way to begin with the end in mind is to create a personal mission statement
      - A personal mission statement is 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.
      - 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.
      - Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
      - These four factors—security, guidance, wisdom, and power—are interdependent. Security and clear guidance bring true wisdom, and wisdom becomes the spark or catalyst to release and direct power. When these four factors are present together, harmonized and enlivened by each other, they create the great force of a noble personality, a balanced character, a beautifully integrated individual.
      - Identifying your center
        
        The ideal, of course, is to create one clear center from which you consistently derive a high degree of security, guidance, wisdom, and power, empowering your proactivity and giving congruency and harmony to every part of your life.
        
        A PRINCIPLE CENTER By centering our lives on correct principles, we create a solid foundation for development of the four life-support factors.
        
        Principles are deep, fundamental truths, classic truths, generic common denominators. They are tightly interwoven threads running with exactness, consistency, beauty, and strength through the fabric of life.
        
        As a principle-centered person, you see things differently. And because you see things differently, you think differently, you act differently. Because you have a high degree of security, guidance, wisdom, and power that flows from a solid, unchanging core, you have the foundation of a highly proactive and highly effective life.
        
        1: First, you are not being acted upon by other people or circumstances. You are proactively choosing what you determine to be the best alternative. You make your decision consciously and knowledgeably
        
        2: Second, you know your decision is most effective because it is based on principles with predictable long-term results.
        
        3: Third, what you choose to do contributes to your ultimate values in life. Staying at work to get the edge on someone at the office is an entirely different evening in your life from staying because you value your boss’s effectiveness and you genuinely want to contribute to the company’s welfare. The experiences you have as you carry out your decisions take on quality and meaning in the context of your life as a whole.
        
        4: Fourth, you can communicate to your wife and your boss within the strong networks you’ve created in your interdependent relationships. Because you are independent, you can be effectively interdependent. You might decide to delegate what is delegable and come in early the next morning to do the rest.
        
        5: And finally, you’ll feel comfortable about your decision. Whatever you choose to do, you can focus on it and enjoy it.
    - - a good affirmation should be
      - personal, positive, visual, present tense, emotional
      - eg. It is deeply satisfying (emotional) that I (personal) respond (present tense) with wisdon love firmness and self control (positive) when my children misbehave.
- - - - Personality Ethic—personality growth, communication skill training, and education in the field of influence strategies and positive thinking—are sometimes essential for success but these are secondary not primary traits
      - Must focus on character development - and build the foundation - To focus on technique is like cramming your way through school. You sometimes get by, perhaps even get good grades, but if you don’t pay the price day in and day out, you never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop an educated mind.
      - As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.”
    - - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People embody many of the fundamental principles of human effectiveness. These habits are basic; they are primary. They represent the internalization of correct principles upon which enduring happiness and success are based.
      - before we can really understand these Seven Habits, we need to understand our own “paradigms” and how to make a “paradigm shift.”
      - Paradigms are maps - we have 2 kinds
        
        1: maps of the way things are - REALITIES
        
        2: Maps of the way things should be - VALUES
        
        99% of the time we don't question their accuracy
        50% of the time we are not even aware that we have them
      - Conditioning of a lifetime will powerfully affect our perceptions
      - This brings into focus one of the basic flaws of the Personality Ethic. To try to change outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow.
      - Everyone tends to think that they are objective - this is not true - we see the world not as it is but as we are or as we are conditioned to see it.
    - - Paradigm shifts move us from one way of seeing the world to another. And those shifts create powerful change. Our paradigms, correct or incorrect, are the sources of our attitudes and behaviors, and ultimately our relationships with others.
      - If we want to make relatively minor changes in out lives we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors, but if we want to make significant quantum changes we need to work on our basic paradigms.
    - - Paradigms are inseparable from the human character - being is seeing in the human dimension.
        what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We can’t go very far to change without simultaneously changing our being and vice versa.
    - - The Character Ethic is based on the fundamental idea that there are principles that govern human effectiveness—natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably “there” as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension.
        
        eg: Fairness, equality, human dignity, service or contribution, potential,
        
        Principles are not practices. A practice is a specific activity or action. A practice that works in one circumstance will not necessarily work in another, as parents who have tried to raise a second child exactly like they did the first can readily attest.
        
        While practices are situationally specific, principles are deep, fundamental truths that have universal application. They apply to individuals, to marriages, to families, to private and public organizations of every kind. When these truths are internalized into habits, they empower people to create a wide variety of practices to deal with different situations.
        
        Principles are not values. A gang of thieves can share values, but they are in violation of the fundamental principles we’re talking about. Principles are the territory. Values are maps. When we value correct principles, we have truth—a knowledge of things as they are.
        
        Principles are guidelines for human conduct that are proven to have enduring, permanent value. They’re fundamental. They’re essentially unarguable because they are self-evident.
    - - The Personality Ethic is illusory and deceptive. And trying to get high quality results with its techniques and quick fixes is just about as effective as trying to get to some place in Chicago using a map of Detroit.
      - In all of life, there are sequential stages of growth and development. A child learns to turn over, to sit up, to crawl, and then to walk and run. Each step is important and each one takes time. No step can be skipped.
    - - Whether people see it or not, many are becoming disillusioned with the empty promises of the Personality Ethic.
      - 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.
    - - The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them - Albert Einstein
      - 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 The 7 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 with the self first with your paradigms 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 precede public victories, 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.
  - - - it is the intersection of knowledge skill and desire
        
        1: Knowledge - the theoretical paradigm the what to do and the why
        
        2: skill is the how to do
        
        3: desire is the motivation the want to do
        
        in order to make something a habit in our lives we have to have all 3
    - - 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.
      - 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.
      - 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.
      - Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won’t be good leaders or team players. They’re not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality.
    - - Effectiveness lies in the balance—what I call the P/PC Balance. P stands for production of desired results, the golden eggs. PC stands for production capability, the ability or asset that produces the golden eggs.
    - - 1: Physical
      - 2: financial
      - 3: human
      - Need to apply the P/PC balance in all aspects
    - - When people fail to respect the P/PC Balance in their use of physical assets in organizations, they decrease organizational effectiveness and often leave others with dying geese.
      - P/PC balance is particularly important as it applies to human assets of an organization the customers and the employees
      - Treat your employees as you would want them to treat your best customers
      - To maintain the P/PC Balance, the balance between the golden egg (production) and the health and welfare of the goose (production capability) is often a difficult judgment call. But I suggest it is the very essence of effectiveness. It balances short term with long term. It balances going for the grade and paying the price to get an education. It balances the desire to have a room clean and the building of a relationship in which the child is internally committed to do it—cheerfully, willingly, without external supervision.
- - - - The Physical Dimension
        
        The physical dimension involves caring effectively for our physical body—eating the right kinds of foods, getting sufficient rest and relaxation, and exercising on a regular basis.
      - The Spiritual Dimension
        
        The spiritual dimension is your core, your center, your commitment to your value system. It’s a very private area of life and a supremely important one. It draws upon the sources that inspire and uplift you and tie you to the timeless truths of all humanity. And people do it very, very differently
        
        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
      - The Social/Emotional Dimension
        
        Renewing our social/emotional dimension does not take time in the same sense that renewing the other dimensions does. We can do it in our normal everyday interactions with other people. But it definitely requires exercise. We may have to push ourselves because many of us have not achieved the level of Private Victory and the skills of Public Victory necessary for Habits 4, 5, and 6 to come naturally to us in all our interactions.
        
        I believe that a life of integrity is the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that says that self-esteem is primarily a matter of mind set, of attitude—that you can psych yourself into peace of mind.
        
        Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.
      - The Mental Dimension
        
        It is extremely valuable to train the mind to stand apart and examine its own program. That, to me, is the definition of a liberal education —the ability to examine the programs of life against larger questions and purposes and other paradigms. Training, without such education, narrows and closes the mind so that the assumptions underlying the training are never examined. That’s why it is so valuable to read broadly and to expose yourself to great minds.
        
        n the words of Phillips Brooks: Some day, in the years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now… Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process.
    - - This is 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.
    - - Most people are a function of the social mirror, scripted by the opinions, the perceptions, the paradigms of the people around them. As interdependent people, you and I come from a paradigm which includes the realization that we are a part of that social mirror.
      - We can choose to reflect back to others a clear, undistorted vision of themselves. We can affirm their proactive nature and treat them as responsible people. We can help script them as principle-centered, value-based, independent, worthwhile individuals. And, with the Abundance Mentality, we realize that giving a positive reflection to others in no way diminishes us. It increases us because it increases the opportunities for effective interaction with other proactive people.
    - - The self-renewal process must include balanced renewal in all four dimensions of our nature: the physical, the spiritual, the mental, and the social/emotional.
      - Although renewal in each dimension is important, it only becomes optimally effective as we deal with all four dimensions in a wise and balanced way. To neglect any one area negatively impacts the rest.
      - In an organization, the physical dimension is expressed in economic terms. The mental or psychological dimension deals with the recognition, development, and use of talent. The social/emotional dimension has to do with human relations, with how people are treated. And the spiritual dimension deals with finding meaning through purpose or contribution and through organizational integrity.
        
        When an organization neglects any one or more of these areas, it negatively impacts the entire organization. The creative energies that could result in tremendous, positive synergy are instead used to fight against the organization and become restraining forces to growth and productivity.
    - - Balanced renewal is optimally synergetic. The things you do to sharpen the saw in any one dimension have positive impact in other dimensions because they are so highly interrelated. Your physical health affects your mental health; your spiritual strength affects your social/emotional strength. As you improve in one dimension, you increase your ability in other dimensions as well.
      - The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People create optimum synergy among these dimensions. Renewal in any dimension increases your ability to live at least one of the Seven Habits. And although the habits are sequential, improvement in one habit synergetically increases your ability to live the rest.
      - The Daily Private Victory—a minimum of one hour a day in renewal of the physical, spiritual, and mental dimensions—is the key to the development of the Seven Habits and it’s completely within your Circle of Influence. It is the Quadrant II focus time necessary to integrate these habits into your life, to become principle-centered.
    - - Renewal is the principle—and the process—that empowers us to move on an upward spiral of growth and change, of continuous improvement.
      - To make meaningful and consistent progress along that spiral, we need to consider one other aspect of renewal as it applies to the unique human endowment that directs this upward movement—our conscience. In the words of Madame de Staël, “The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it: but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.”
- - - - 1. Understanding the Individual
        
        Our tendency is to project out of our own autobiographies what we think other people want or need. We project our intentions on the behavior of others. We interpret what constitutes a deposit based on our own needs and desires, either now or when we were at a similar age or stage in life. If they don’t interpret our effort as a deposit, our tendency is to take it as a rejection of our well intentioned effort and to give up.
        
        Really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit. You simply don’t know what constitutes a deposit to another person until you understand that individual.
      - 4.- Clarifying Expectations
        
        The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals. Whether we are dealing with the question of who does what at work, how you communicate with your daughter when you tell her to clean her room, or who feeds the fish and takes out the garbage, we can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment, and withdrawals of trust.
      - 5.- Showing Personal Integrity
        
        Personal Integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits. Lack of integrity can undermine almost any other effort to create high trust accounts. People can seek to understand, remember the little things, keep their promises, clarify and fulfill expectations, and still fail to build reserves of trust if they are inwardly duplicitous.
      - 3.- Keeping Commitments
        
        Keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal. In fact, there’s probably not a more massive withdrawal than to make a promise that’s important to someone and then not to come through. The next time a promise is made, they won’t believe it. People tend to build their hopes around promises, particularly promises about their basic livelihood.
      - 6.- The Laws of Love and the Laws of Life
        
        When we make deposits of unconditional love, when we live the primary laws of love, we encourage others to live the primary laws of life. In other words, when we truly love others without condition, without strings, we help them feel secure and safe and validated and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity.
      - 2.- Attending to the Little Things .
        
        The little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Small discourtesies, little unkindnesses, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships, the little things are the big things
    - - I suggest that in an interdependent situation, every P problem is a PC opportunity—a chance to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that significantly affect interdependent production.
      - When parents see their children’s problems as opportunities to build the relationship instead of as negative, burdensome irritations, it totally changes the nature of parent-child interaction. Parents become more willing, even excited, about deeply understanding and helping their children. When a child comes to them with a problem, instead of thinking, “Oh, no! Not another problem!” their paradigm is, “Here is a great opportunity for me to really help my child and to invest in our relationship.”
  - - - 1: Win / Win
        
        Win/Win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win/Win means that agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial, mutually satisfying
      - 2: Win / Lose
        
        In leadership style, Win/Lose is the authoritarian approach: “I get my way; you don’t get yours.” Win/Lose people are prone to use position, power, credentials, possessions, or personality to get their way
      - Lose / Win
        
        Lose/Win is worse than Win/Lose because it has no standards—no demands, no expectations, no vision. People who think Lose/Win are usually quick to please or appease. They seek strength from popularity or acceptance. They have little courage to express their own feelings and convictions and are easily intimidated by the ego strength of others.
      - 4: Lose / Lose
        
        When two Win/Lose people get together—that is, when two determined, stubborn, ego-invested individuals interact—the result will be Lose/Lose. Both will lose. Both will become vindictive and want to “get back” or “get even,” blind to the fact that murder is suicide, that revenge is a two-edged sword.
      - 5: Win
        
        Another common alternative is simply to think 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. When there is no sense of contest or competition, Win is probably the most common approach in everyday negotiation. A person with the Win mentality thinks in terms of securing his own ends—and leaving it to others to secure theirs.
      - 6: Win or No Deal
        
        If these individuals had not come up with a synergistic solution—one that was agreeable to both—they could have gone for an even higher expression of Win/Win—Win/Win or No Deal.
        
        No Deal basically means that if we can’t find a solution that would benefit us both, we agree to disagree agreeably—No Deal. No expectations have been created, no performance contracts established. I don’t hire you or we don’t take on a particular assignment together because it’s obvious that our values or our goals are going in opposite directions. It is so much better to realize this up front instead of downstream when expectations have been created and both parties have been disillusioned.
    - - Think Win/Win is the habit of interpersonal leadership. It involves the exercise of each of the unique human endowments—self awareness, imagination, conscience, and independent will—in our relationships with others.
      - CHARACTER
        
        INTEGRITY
        
        We’ve already defined integrity as the value we place on ourselves. Habits 1, 2, and 3 help us develop and maintain integrity. As we clearly identify our values and proactively organize and execute around those values on a daily basis, we develop self awareness and independent will by making and keeping meaningful promises and commitments.
        
        MATURITY
        
        Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration
        
        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.
        
        ABUNDANCE MENTALITY
        
        The third character trait essential to Win/Win is the Abundance Mentality, the paradigm that there is plenty out there for everybody. Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the Scarcity Mentality. They see life as having only so much, as though there were only one pie out there. And if someone were to get a big piece of the pie, it would mean less for everybody else. The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life.
      - AGREEMENTS
        
        From relationships flow the agreements that give definition and direction to Win/Win. They are sometimes called performance agreements or partnership agreements, shifting the paradigm of productive interaction from vertical to horizontal, from hovering supervision to self-supervision, from positioning to being partners in success.
        
        In the Win/Win agreement, the following five elements are made very explicit:
        
        Desired results (not methods) identify what is to be done and when.
        
        Guidelines specify the parameters (principles, policies, etc.) within which results are to be accomplished.
        
        Resources identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational support available to help accomplish the results.
        
        Accountability sets up the standards of performance and the time of evaluation.
        
        Consequences specify—good and bad, natural and logical—what does and will happen as a result of the evaluation.
      - RELATIONSHIPS
        
        From the foundation of character, we build and maintain Win/Win relationships. The trust, the Emotional Bank Account, is the essence of Win/Win. Without trust, the best we can do is compromise; without trust, we lack the credibility for open, mutual learning and communication and real creativity.
        
        But if our Emotional Bank Account is high, credibility is no longer an issue. Enough deposits have been made so that you know and I know that we deeply respect each other. We’re focused on the issues, not on personalities or positions
        
        Win/Win is a principle people can validate in their own lives, you will be able to bring most people to a realization that they will win more of what they want by going for what you both want.
      - Win/Win Performance Agreements
        
        Creating Win/Win performance agreements requires vital paradigm shifts. The focus is on results, not methods. Most of us tend to supervise methods. We use the gofer delegation discussed in Habit 3, the methods management I used with Sandra when I asked her to take pictures of our son as he was water skiing. But Win/Win agreements focus on results, releasing tremendous individual human potential and creating greater synergy, building PC in the process instead of focusing exclusively on P.
        
        With Win/Win accountability, people evaluate themselves. The traditional evaluation games people play are awkward and emotionally exhausting. In Win/Win, people evaluate themselves,
        using the criteria that they themselves helped to create up front. And if you set it up correctly, people can do that. With a Win/Win delegation agreement, even a seven-year-old boy can tell for himself how well he’s keeping the yard “green and clean.”
        
        In Win/Win performance agreements, consequences become the natural or logical result of performance rather than a reward or punishment arbitrarily handed out by the person in charge
        
        There are basically four kinds of consequences (rewards and penalties) that management or parents can control—financial, psychic, opportunity, and responsibility. Financial consequences include such things as income, stock options, allowances, or penalties. Psychic or psychological consequences include recognition, approval, respect, credibility, or the loss of them. Unless people are in a survival mode, psychic compensation is often more motivating than financial compensation. Opportunity includes training, development, perks, and other benefits. Responsibility has to do with scope and authority, either of which can be enlarged or diminished. Win/Win agreements specify consequences in one or more of those areas and the people involved know it up front. So you don’t play games. Everything is clear from the beginning.
        
        In addition to these logical, personal consequences, it is also important to clearly identify what the natural organizational consequences are. For example, what will happen if I’m late to work, if I refuse to cooperate with others, if I don’t develop good Win/Win performance agreements with my subordinates, if I don’t hold them accountable for desired results, or if I don’t promote their professional growth and career development?
        
        Systems
        
        Win/Win can only survive in an organization when the systems support it. If you talk Win/Win but reward Win/Lose, you’ve got a losing program on your hands.
        
        You basically get what you reward. If you want to achieve the goals and reflect the values in your mission statement, then you need to align the reward system with these goals and values. If it isn’t aligned systematically, you won’t be walking your talk. You’ll be in the situation of the manager I mentioned earlier who talked cooperation but practiced competition by creating a “Race to Bermuda” contest
        
        Focus on interests and not positions-
        to invent options for mutual gain, and to insist on objective criteria—some external standard or principle that both parties can buy into.
        
        4 step process
        
        Second, identify the key issues and concerns (not positions) involved.
        
        Third, determine what results would constitute a fully acceptable solution.
        
        First, see the problem from the other point of view. Really seek to understand and to give expression to the needs and concerns of the other party as well as or better than they can themselves
        
        fourth, identify possible new options to achieve those results.
  - - - “Seek first to understand” involves a very deep shift in paradigm. We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives.
      - We’re filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography. We want to be understood. Our conversations become collective monologues, and we never really understand what’s going on inside another human being.
      - When another person speaks, we’re usually “listening” at one of four levels. We may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all. We may practicepretending. “Yeah. Uh-huh. Right.” We may practice selective listening, hearing only certain parts of the conversation. We often do this when we’re listening to the constant chatter of a preschool child. Or we may even practice attentive listening, paying attention and focusing energy on the words that are being said. But very few of us ever practice the fifth level, the highest form of listening,empathic listening.
      - When I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand. It’s an entirely different paradigm.
    - - Although it’s risky and hard, seek first to understand, or diagnose before you prescribe, is a correct principle manifest in many areas of life.
      - It’s the mark of all true professionals. It’s critical for the optometrist, it’s critical for the physician. You wouldn’t have any confidence in a doctor’s prescription unless you had confidence in the diagnosis.
      - This principle is also true in sales. An effective sales person first seeks to understand the needs, the concerns, the situation of the customer. The amateur salesman sells products; the professional sells solutions to needs and problems. It’s a totally different approach. The professional learns how to diagnose, how to understand. He also learns how to relate people’s needs to his products and services. And he has to have the integrity to say, “My product or service will not meet that need” if it will not.
    - - Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways.
        
        we probe—we ask questions from our own frame of reference
        
        we advise—we give counsel based on our own experience
        
        We evaluate—we either agree or disagree;
        
        we try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on our own motives and behavior
        
        Can you see how limited we are when we try to understand another person on the basis of words alone, especially when we’re looking at that person through our own glasses? Can you see how limiting our autobiographical responses are to a person who is genuinely trying to get us to understand his autobiography?
        
        You will never be able to truly step inside another person, to see the world as he sees it, until you develop the pure desire, the strength of personal character, and the positive Emotional Bank Account, as well as the empathic listening skills to do it.
    - - The second stage of empathic listening is to rephrase the content. It’s a little more effective, but it’s still limited to the verbal communication.
      - The third stage brings your right brain into operation. You reflect feeling.
      - The first and least effective is to mimic content. This is the skill taught in “active” or “reflective” listening. Without the character and relationship base, it is often insulting to people and causes them to close up. It is, however, a first stage skill because it at least causes you to listen to what’s being said.
      - Now you’re not paying as much attention to what he’s saying as you are to the way he feels about what he’s saying. The fourth stage includes both the second and the third. You rephrase the content and reflect the feeling.
        
        For example:
        
        “Boy, Dad, I’ve had it! School is for the birds!”
        
        “You’re really frustrated about school.”
        
        Frustration is the feeling; school is the content. You’re using both sides of your brain to understand both sides of his communication.
    - - Ethos is your personal credibility, the faith people have in your integrity and competency. It’s the trust that you inspire, your Emotional Bank Account.
      - Pathosis the empathic side—it’s the feeling. It means that you are in alignment with the emotional thrust of another person’s communication.
      - Logos is the logic, the reasoning part of the presentation.
      - Notice the sequence: ethos, pathos, logos—your character, and your relationships, and then the logic of your presentation. This represents another major paradigm shift. Most people, in making presentations, go straight to the logos, the left brain logic, of their ideas. They try to convince other people of the validity of that logic without first taking ethos and pathos into consideration.
  - - - The highest forms of synergy focus the four unique human endowments, the motive of Win/Win, and the skills of empathic communication on the toughest challenges we face in life. What results is almost miraculous. We create new alternatives—something that wasn’t there before.
      - Synergy is the essence of principle-centered leadership. It is the essence of principle-centered parenting. It catalyzes, unifies, and unleashes the greatest powers within people. All the habits we have covered prepare us to create the miracle of synergy.
      - What is synergy? Simply defined, it means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part
    - - When you communicate synergistically, you are simply opening your mind and heart and expressions to new possibilities, new alternatives, new options. It may seem as if you are casting aside Habit 2 (to begin with the end in mind); but, in fact, you’re doing the opposite—you’re fulfilling it. You’re not sure when you engage in synergistic communication how things will work out or what the end will look like, but you do have an inward sense of excitement and security and adventure, believing that it will be significantly better than it was before. And that is the end that you have in mind.
      - You begin with the belief that parties involved will gain more insight, and that the excitement of that mutual learning and insight will create a momentum toward more and more insights, learnings, and growth.
    - - As a teacher, I have come to believe that many truly great classes teeter on the very edge of chaos. Synergy tests whether teachers and students are really open to the principle of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
    - - Once people have experienced real synergy, they are never quite the same again. They know the possibility of having other such mind-expanding adventures in the future
    - - Synergy is exciting. Creativity is exciting. It’s phenomenal what openness and communication can produce. The possibilities of truly significant gain, of significant improvement are so real that it’s worth the risk such openness entails.
      - TRUST AND LEVELS OF COMMUNICATION
        
        The lowest level of communication coming out of low-trust situations would be characterized by defensiveness, protectiveness, and often legalistic language, which covers all the bases and spells out qualifiers and the escape clauses in the event things go sour. Such communication produces only Win/Lose or Lose/Lose. It isn’t effective—there’s no P/PC balance—and it creates further reasons to defend and protect
        
        The middle position is respectful communication. This is the level where fairly mature people interact. They have respect for each other, but they want to avoid the possibility of ugly confrontations, so they communicate politely but not empathically. They might understand each other intellectually, but they really don’t deeply look at the paradigms and assumptions underlying their own positions and become open to new possibilities.
        
        Respectful communication works in independent situations and even in interdependent situations, but the creative possibilities are not opened up. In interdependent situations compromise is the position usually taken. Compromise means that 1 + 1 = 1½. Both give and take. The communication isn’t defensive or protective or angry or manipulative; it is honest and genuine and respectful. But it isn’t creative or synergistic. It produces a low form of Win/Win.
        
        Synergy means that 1 + 1 may equal 8, 16, or even 1,600. The synergistic position of high trust produces solutions better than any originally proposed, and all parties know it. Furthermore, they genuinely enjoy the creative enterprise. A miniculture is formed to satisfy in and of itself. Even if it is short lived, the P/PC balance is there.
      - FISHING FOR A 3RD ALTERNATIVE
        
        They synergize. They communicate back and forth until they come up with a solution they both feel good about. It’s better than the solutions either of them originally proposed. It’s better than compromise. It’s a synergistic solution that builds P and PC.
        
        the high Emotional Bank Account, thinking Win/Win, and seeking first to understand—creates the ideal environment for synergy.
        Buddhism calls this “the middle way.” Middle in this sense does not mean compromise; it means higher, like the apex of the triangle.
    - - The problem is that highly dependent people are trying to succeed in an interdependent reality. They’re either dependent on borrowing strength from position power and they go for Win/Lose, or they’re dependent on being popular with others and they go for Lose/Win. They may talk Win/Win technique, but they don’t really want to listen; they want to manipulate. And synergy can’t thrive in that environment.
      - Insecure people think that all reality should be amenable to their paradigms. They have a high need to clone others, to mold them over into their own thinking. They don’t realize that the very strength of the relationship is in having another point of view. Sameness is not oneness; uniformity is not unity. Unity, or oneness, is complementariness, not sameness. Sameness is uncreative… and boring. The essence of synergy is to value the differences
      - I’ve come to believe that the key to interpersonal synergy is intrapersonal synergy, that is synergy within ourselves. The heart of intrapersonal synergy is embodied in the principles in the first three habits, which give the internal security sufficient to handle the risks of being open and vulnerable. By internalizing those principles, we develop the abundance mentality of Win/Win and the authenticity ofHabit 5.
      - One of the very practical results of being principle-centered is that it makes us whole—truly integrated. People who are scripted deeply in logical, verbal, left-brain thinking will discover how totally inadequate that thinking is in solving problems which require a great deal of creativity. They become aware and begin to open up a new script inside their right brain. It’s not that the right brain wasn’t there; it just lay dormant. The muscles had not been developed, or perhaps they had atrophied after early childhood because of the heavy left-brain emphasis of formal education or social scripting.
      - When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative, and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working. In other words, there is psychic synergy taking place in our own head. And this tool is best suited to the reality of what life is, because life is not just logical—it is also EMOTIONAL
    - - 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
      - If I think I see the world as it is, why would I want to value the differences? Why would I even want to bother with someone who’s “off track”? My paradigm is that I am objective; I see the world as it is. Everyone else is buried by the minutiae, but I see the larger picture. That’s why they call me a supervisor—I have super vision.
      - If that’s my paradigm, then I will never be effectively interdependent, or even effectively independent, for that matter. I will be limited by the paradigms of my own conditioning.
      - The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings. That person values the differences because those differences add to his knowledge, to his understanding of reality. When we’re left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data.
      - If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary. It’s not going to do me any good at all to communicate with someone else who sees only the old woman also. I don’t want to talk, to communicate, with someone who agrees with me; I want to communicate with you because you see it differently. I value that difference.
    - - In an interdependent situation, synergy is particularly powerful in dealing with negative forces that work against growth and change.
      - Sociologist Kurt Lewin developed a “Force Field Analysis” model in which he described any current level of performance or being as a state of equilibrium between the driving forces that encourage upward movement and the restraining forces that discourage it.
      - Driving forces generally are positive, reasonable, logical, conscious, and economic. In juxtaposition, restraining forces are often negative, emotional, illogical, unconscious, and social/psychological. Both sets of forces are very real and must be taken into account in dealing with change.
    - - 4: Clarifying expectations
        imagine the difficulty you might encounter if you and your boss had different assumptions regarding whose role it was to create your job description.
        The cause of almost all relationship problems is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals
      - 5: Showing personal integrity
        personal integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits.
        Lack of integrity can undermine almost any other effort to create high trust accounts. People can seek to understand remember the little things keep their promises clarify and fulfill their expectations and still fail to build reserves of trust if they are inwardly duplicitous.
      - 3: Keeping commitments
        keeping a commitment or a promise is a mojor deposit, breaking one is a major withdrawal.
      - 6: Apologising sincerely when you make a withfrawal
      - 2: Attending to the little things
        the little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. small discourtesies little unkindness's little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships the little things are the big things
      - 1: Understanding the individual
        really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make and is the key to every other deposit