Habit 2 - Personal Mission Statement

Before I proceed with Habit 3, I want to have a ‘first draft’ of my personal mission statement. When I started working with the exercises discussed in my last entry I realized this was no easy task that you whip out in half an hour. So I decided to give myself some time and read the chapter on Habit 2 in the “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People” book.

Covey confirms what I quickly realized:

A mission statement is not something you write overnight. It takes deep introspection, careful analysis, thoughtful expression, and often many rewrites to produce it in it’s final form. It may take you several weeks or even months before you feel really comfortable with it…

So, I’ve gotten started, and intend to spend a bit of time on this project each day, taking notes about ideas, thinking about my roles in life and what I want to achieve, and what I value most.

Covey discusses some things in the book that are not discussed on the audio tapes. He talks about ‘right brain’ thinking, and it’s importance in discovering our mission and values, and expanding our perspective. To me, when thinking about a complex problem, this kind of thinking is where the logic ends, and part of our brain is able to synthesize all the parts into a whole that captures the essence. He also discusses the visualization and affirmation as ways to instill new behaviors in ourselves, and notes that peak performers in sports and other fields are visualizers – they imagine the results, and often their actions, beforehand.

In the book he also spends a lot of time discussing the different ‘centers’ we can be driven by: family centered, work centered, money centered, pleasure centered, self-centered, friend centered. Most people are dominated by just a few of these centers, and it determines how they react to life. Then there is principle centered living, which leads to the highest degree of personal integrity, the most resilience to change, and the greatest potential for effectiveness in all areas of life. This is where a personal mission statement comes in.

Covey encourages you to begin by thinking about your roles in life, and to think about what your 2 or 3 most important goals (contributions and achievements) are in those roles, and what values should guide you. It may take time to discover the overarching principles and mission that guide and prioritize all the roles in your life. He also recommends starting a collection of notes, quotes, and ideas that we may want to use in your personal mission statement. And of course, most importantly, he recommends that you set aside some time to work on your personal mission statement.

Habit 2 - Exercises

This concluding segment on Habit 2 is where Covey invites us to think about our core values, what our roles in life are, and what our missions within these roles are.

Put yourself into a larger perspective, away from your daily concerns. Attend your own funeral. What would you like the eulogy to say? What would people say about your role as a worker, a neighbor, a spouse, a friend? How would you like them to describe your character? Doing this exercise can help give a sence of what you value, and what you want your life to be about.

Think about each of your roles in life. Take your professional life. What are you about in that area? What are the values that should guide you? What about your personal roles in your relatinships with others? What is important to you in those roles?

Think about your goals in each of these roles. You can break them in to lifelong, intermediate, and short term. A goal is the end you envision: how you want to end up in this particular role.

The key to an ability to change and adapt to circumstance is a deep core that is changeless. If is a sence of who you are, what your are about, and what you value that doesn’t change. This is integrity. It is knowing what ones mission is and acting proactively to move toward fulfilling that mission. This is why it important to develop a personal mission statement, and to consider each of our roles in doing this.

A mission statement has two elements: What is it I am about and what I value? The second part is goals. You need to have specific activities, or short term goals, that will enable you to reach your goals in each of your roles. All of which helps to fulfill the mission, and actualize the values within it.

If your actions are reactive, and not in alignment with these core values, there is an internal duplicity. This is what it means to have a lack of integrity.

Data about ourselves largely comes from those around us. We can get scripted by others. If you think about this, this is an opportunity to contribute greatly to others. If you can see the potential in another to live by the higher values that are within them, to affirm them, and hold that vision of them in your own mind rather than feeding their weakness, you are helping them. Imagine if holding the potential of others, and nurturing it, was part of your mission in life.

Habit 2 is thinking carefully though the process and having it vividly in mind. Visualizing it. How will you handle stress? Setbacks? Fatigue? Illness? Lack of cooperation? Will you behave reactively, lose your cool, and have your emotional life be controlled by the weaknesses of those around you and the world at large? How would you act instead if you were acting with integrity with respect you your deepest values, and in alignment with your mission?

It’s important to imagine these things. If you’re living out of your history and memories, you are limiting yourself to past patterns. If you are living out of your imagination, the vision you have created about the ends you have in mind, you are living out of your potential.

The next chapter in the audio book begins Habit 3. I will not have a blog entry tomorrow, but instead will spend the time I would normally use for that working on these questions.

Habit 2 - Part 2

The ‘Ladder of Success’ is a great metaphor to understand the distinction between leadership and management. If you’ve worked hard at something, only to find that that wasn’t really what you wanted - you’ve succeeded in climbing the ladder, but you had the ladder leaning against the wrong wall.

What is that a failure in? Management or leadership? Clearly leadership. Leadership has to do with having the ladder leaning against the right wall. Management had to do with climbing the ladder efficiently. They are two different capacities entirely. A person can be well managed but poorly lead, or well lead but poorly managed.

Both leadership and management are extremely important, but leadership should always come first. You’ve got to know where you’re going before you discuss how you’re going to get there. If you’re going to train for a new job, you’ve got to make the best choices you can about what that job is before you manage yourself to train effectively.

What can hold us back is old, ineffective scripts. We get scripted over our lives by our parents and culture, and the pressure of our circumstances. The first principle, or habit, teaches us that we can rewrite the script, but until we do we live by the scripts we have.

If you’re serious about being the leader in your life and exercising your personal leadership capacities, beginning with the end in mind, and you recognize ineffective scripts that you are living by, you’ve got a problem. You need to acquire new scripts, use them, exercise them, and practice, practice, practice until you’ve got a new script.

Anwar Sadat

Covey talks about Anwar Sadat, who made an enormous contribution to bringing peace with Israel in the Camp David Accords. Sadat was born into an average Egyptian family, and reared in a culture of unyielding hatred toward Israel. He spent a lot of time in his younger years in prison, in solitary confinement. There he learned personal leadership, and how to vacate old scripts and write new ones for himself. He drew heavily upon his own religion, meditation, and prayer. He had a dark spot on his forehead that he got from spending so much time praying. He gained a high degree self-mastery, and this is the greatest success one can have. When he was released, he was happy to have his liberty, but a bit loathe to leave the place he had learned so much about personal leadership. But he continued his practice, and chose to not live by the scripts he had been given as a youth. He eventually became president. He recognized that the cultural script of hatred toward Israel was destructive for all parties involved, and used the foundation of independence and self-mastery he had built to achieve and victory of interdependence. It was a miracle in modern political history.

Habit 2 - Begin With the End In Mind

In this chapter Covey introduces the second habit. More importantly, he discusses the relationship of the first three habits to each other, and puts the first habit in context.

The first habit can be though of as recognizing that ‘you are the programmer’. The second habit is then, in this metaphor, acting as the programmer: ‘writing the program’. The third habit can be thought of as ‘live the program’ – that is living by the plan one has made for oneself based upon the one’s values.

Habit 1 is the habit of personal vision. It is the recognition that you are not just an animal reacting to stimulus, but that you have an internal power to choose on the basis of values. But note that is assumes you have values.

This is where habit 2 comes in. It is the habit of personal leadership. Leadership deals with direction and values. It’s like the top line of an organization. The habit if directing oneself in the direction of ones highest values.

Habit 3 is the habit of personal management. Putting first things first. and focusing on what is important. If you know what your values are, and what you’re goals are, you’ve still got to do it. You’ve got to organize yourself in your day to day life around these plans. Personal management is about accomplishing ones vision efficiently.

There is another way of thinking about the 3 habits:

Habit 1 - recognizing and acting as ‘the creator’
Habit 2 – making the ‘first creation’
Habit 3 – making the ‘second creation’

Everything that a human being brings to reality has two creations. The first is a mental creation. If must be clearly in mind before it can be created in the outside world. The second creation is the actual bringing of what was created in the mental world into the physical world.

The second habit has to do with making plans, recognizing and creating ones values. A carpenters rule is to measure twice and cut ones. The second habit is about measuring. You’ve got to spend the effort to make sure the ‘first creation’, your plan, is what you really want and that you’ve thought everything through. Will your plan actually get you somewhere that is in alignment with your values? The third habit is about executing upon these plans in an efficient manner.

The first 3 habits are interrelated and inseparable. The form the basis for personal independence. Without all three one cannot have have a high degree of self-mastery.

The later 3 habits are people related habits. The are the habits of effectively working with people in an interdependent manner. But until you’ve got a high degree of self-mastery these habits are very difficult to put into practice. For example if you need to give somebody feedback, the best way may be to work first to understand where the other person is coming from, speak their language, make sure of your own motives. But you will have a very difficult time doing these things if you do not have a high degree of self-control. This is often why people hesitate to give feedback – they figure they’ll blow it. (And they probably will.) And so their Circle of Influence stays small. Personal independence is the very core of effective interdependence, and a person that has a high degree of independence will have the power to work in an effective way in these social situations.

Habit 1 - discussion

I'd like to take a moment to reflect upon this first of the 7 habits.

The idea of being proactive, being aware of the difference between things we can influence and those we cannot, and acting on those things which we can is simple. It's almost obvious. But is also easily to forget and hard to live by.

One critical thing that Covey does not address specifically is fear. He says that the reactive mind is driven by emotion, and I believe that the primary emotion that drives it is fear. It is fear of loss: loss of face, status, image, position, security. He says that the areas where is most difficult to be proactive are the areas where we have the most emotions – ‘emotional attachment’ I would say. To me the primary mechanism of this is fear. It seems to me that largely what it means to be a proactive person in these difficult areas is to not let fear control you, but to recognize it and act in spite of it. Covey does not say as much, but I suspect he would agree.

Covey suggests that being a proactive person is being a 'value-driven' person. That is acting not in reaction to circumstance, but acting in alignment with ones values and ones vision. This brings up the obvious questions 'what are my values?', 'what is my vision?'. Without these how can one live by them? How does one discover or create one's values? I do hope, and suspect, that Covey will address these questions in later chapters.

This 'habit' is very much in line with work that my mother does around 'consciousness' in organizations. (www.interoctave.com) I remember reading in materials related to her field about the concepts of 'self-observing' and 'self-remembering'. If I think about these in the context of Covey's first habit of proactivity, I see self observation as the process of being aware of reactive selves – our automatic responses, and when we are focusing our energy on things over which we have no control. Self remembering is keeping in mind what we are about, what our values are, and what our vision is, and consciously aligning our thoughts and actions to these.

Another question that arises for me in listening to Covey's discussion of proactivity 'how do we even know what our possibility's for action are?' Covey has used the metaphor of a map to discuss the power of a paradigm. If we don't even have the right map, we can't effectively get to where we are going. And in every area, the power of proactivity is limited if we don't even know what action is possible. It would be like driving around with the parking brake on, not having ever heard of parking brakes.

It seems to me this is where self-education comes in, and a commitment to developing ones abilities through experimentation and adaptation.

Habit 1 - Part 4

According to Covey, anytime you think the problem is ‘out there’, that thought is the problem. Because when you focus on some problem that you have no control over, where is your mind? It is being reactive. You’ve given up your power to control your response, your action, to what is out there. Then you are living a self-fulfilling prophecy. The evidence is there to support your conviction that the problem is ‘out there’.

It is when we work on the outside edge of our Circle of Influence that it gets larger and larger. Maybe we’ve taken the initiative in taking care of our bodies, exercising regularly, eating a healthy diet. Although at one time it was on the outside edge of what we could influence - that is was uncomfortable and required conscious effort - after a time it became habit. I have also heard this called the comfort zone. By becoming aware of things we have choice over, and exercising that choice, and adapting our approach, the domains in which we become comfortable increase. Our Circle of Influence expands.

You may not, and probably won’t, get what you want quickly. But you will keep making deposits to the ‘emotional bank accounts’ you have with those around you, and planting seeds that may grow into future opportunities. But you can’t keep pulling up the flowers to see how the roots are doing.

If we focus on things that are outside our sphere of influence, we are part of the problem, not part of the solution. We have given up our initiative and any power to take proactive action, because we’ve got to wait for the outside world to change before we will.

The greatest test lies in areas where we have a lot of emotional attachments, because the reactive mind is driven by emotion. For many, family is the highest test. It’s not the Dachau concentration camp (as in Viktor Frankl’s case) that presents life’s greatest challenges. It is the daily problems like dealing with a spoiled kid, and uncooperative coworker, or a traffic jam. This is where the muscles of proactivity are exercised.

Are you impatient? Don’t argue for your weakness or it will become yours. Live out of your imagination, not your memory. This is not easy, but it the way to become most effective in life.

Covey challenges us to try it out for 30 days. To work on things we have to control over. To notice when we are focusing on things that we do not have control over, and refocus our minds.

Habit 1 - Part 3

Circles of Influence vs. Concern

We all have things we are concerned about. We can call this our ‘Circle of Concern’. Our job, our health, our relationships are all within this circle. Habitual behaviors of our loved ones, the weather, these may also be of concern to us, but our ability to control or influence them is extremely limited, or non-existent. This is a key distinction.

Our ‘Circle of Influence’ is the subset of our ‘Circle of Concern’ that we can do something about. A proactive person recognizes this difference, and focuses on their Circle of Influence; They focus their energy where it will be productive. Focusing ones energy on things one has no power over is not productive.

There are many things in life to complain about. We can even think we are building a relationship with a coworker by commiserating about a supervisor, validating each other. But it’s a very shaky foundation to build a relationship on.

When we focus our energy on our Circle of Influence, this circle actually expands. Our opportunities for productive action actually increase. Focusing outside it can actually have the opposite effect, shrinking our Circle of Influence, diminishing our power.

The proactive person will recognize another persons weakness but not be consumed by them. If there is nothing he can do about it, why focus on it? Why not work with that persons strengths, making their weaknesses irrelevant. Or if talking with that person could help, then that is working within the Circle of Influence. It’s scary and threatening, but this is what Highly Effective people do. They act within their Circle of Influence even when it is uncomfortable. This enables their circle to grow.

Gophers and Proactivity

Covey relates the story of working for an organization that had a highly dynamic, creative, visionary president, but a dictatorial management style. He tried to make everyone around him is gopher. He alienated most people except for one, who was a highly proactive person. I took offence, but did not get offended. He recognized the presidents strengths and worked with them.

While his coworkers commiserated, ‘confessed the presidents sins’, this proactive man did not take it personally. He went a step beyond what was asked of him, anticipating the underlying purpose of the presidents orders. His Circle of Influence expanded, until he became a compliment to the president, and nothing in the organization could happen without him.

The nature of reactive people is to absolve themselves of responsibility. They find information to support their paradigm. But one can always find a reason in the world to blame. The weather, a coworkers or spouses attitude. Always.

A proactive person are always seizing initiative. Acting where they can. Anticipating. They are not just aggressive and assertive. They are not obnoxious. That would be taking withdrawals from the ‘emotional bank account’ one has with those around you.

Habit 1 - Part 2

Snake Bite


Covey tells the story of a cousin that chases a rattle snake to kill it, and he is bitten by it. Rather than taking care of the wound, and quickly sucking out the poison, he chases the snake to finish it off. The automatic response of wanting to ‘get back’ actually ended up doing more harm than the original bite.

Not magnifying the original hurt is a higher value than getting even. If he had been more proactive, and chosen to act upon this higher value rather than the automatic reaction of striking out in revenge, he would have suffered less.

The behavior of a reactive person can be understood in the model of stimulus and response. A person has a program in them, an external stimulus happens to them, and they respond.

The habit of personal vision on the other hand – being proactive – separates the stimulus from the response. It gives us an awareness of ourselves, and a freedom to choose.

Our greatest power in life is our freedom to choose. All other powers are energized by this one. The power to rise above mediocrity, to break out of the scripting of tendencies we have gotten from our parents, and the culture we live in all stem from the power to choose.

The stimulus/response model is the dominant paradigm in the world today. There is not much support for the paradigm of proactivity. We typically see our ‘programming’ coming from 3 places:

1 – Genetic determinism
2 – Early childhood ‘psychic’ determinism
3 – Environment – the people and situations in our lives.

Covey does not dispute that these things are strong influences. But do they determine us? Indeed they do if we let them. And if we buy into these explanations for our behavior and reactions, they become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The exciting thing about proactivity is that it is like a muscle. It can be exercised to become very strong. The first step is just noticing that you have a choice. Do you really want to develop your potential? Start exercising your freedom. Act on the basis of your values, not on the basis of your conditions or feelings.

If you tell yourself you are not responsible, that you can’t help it, etc. You are psychologically safe. But if you tell yourself that you do have responsibility, you’ve got two choices: handle things irresponsibly, or handle them responsibly.

Listen to the language you and others use to. If someone says “He makes me mad”, this is reactive language. Responsability is transferred. And so is power over ones response.

I think this really goes to the question of free will. Do you believe you have it? Or another way to think about this is that if your behavior is ‘programmed’, do you have the ability to reprogram yourself? Is this the ability that Covey is talking about?

Habit 1 - Be Proactive

Habit one, proactivity, is the foundation of all other habits. It is a habit of personal vision – the paradigm you have of yourself.

One way to understand proactivity is to contrast it with reactivity. Do you feel better when the weather is great? Become friendlier and more productive? This is being reactive to the weather. A proactive person on the other hand is driven by their values, and chooses to be friendly and productive no matter what the weather.

There is also the social environment. Do you feel better when people treat you better? Become defensive or protective when you’re not? This is being reactive to ones social environment. A proactive person responds based on their values, not their feelings.

Most people are driven by circumstances and their environment. It’s an uncommon ability, but highly effective people, at their very foundation, are not driven by those things. They choose how to react based on their values - their vision for themselves.

Man’s Search For Meaning

Covey recommends reading Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. (I have just ordered it.) Frankl was a jewish psychiatrist who was in the Nazi concentration camps, who wrote of his experiences and insights. Over time he came to realize that he was proactive, though he didn’t call it that. He realized that he had the power to choose his response to his situation. Over time he became to have more freedom than his captors (though less liberty, as this is a property of circumstance)

Covey made one comment that I though was very profound, though he not expand on it : Our responses to our circumstances SHAPE our circumstances. Slowly, imperceptibly. But profoundly none the less.

It is our power to choose how we act, regardless of our circumstances, that is really our ONLY point of power that we possess. Otherwise we are like a cork in a river, being tossed this way and that by circumstance, being reactive to the current. It's is hard to choose a different reaction, especially if we have had years and years of explaining our miseries and failures by our circumstances, but it a choice available to us.

We must choose. Are we proactive? Are we fundamentally responsible for how we behave and act in life?

What is a Habit?

Habits are an internalized principal. A principal is a rule by which we guide our behavior. For a business it might by to value to customer. For an individual it might be orderlilness, or productiveness.

Habits have 3 elements that overlap to form a habit:

1) Knowledge. We know what to do.
2) Skills. We know how do it. We have the actual skills to do what we have the knowledge to do.
3) Attitude. We know why to do it. This is what makes us WANT to behave according to the principal.

It takes all three of these things. For example it a man wants to develop his relationship with his wife, he may read a book to understand intellectually how to do it, and he may understand the why, but until he has actually developed the skill through practice and seen it reinforced it has not become a habit.

“Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it every day, and soon it cannot be broken” – Horace Mann

Covey agrees with the first part but not the second. I myself am not so sure that habits can be broken completely, but I do believe that new habits can be developed, that can mitigate or even override old habits. Neural pathways and mental patterns don’t whither quickly, but over years of neglect, they may become faint.

Habits are continually reinforced by some kind of payoff – a satisfaction of some kind whether it by physical or psychological. We may even consciously see that a habit is not fruitful, or even destructive, but the payoff keeps it in place.

To overcome a habit is a process that requires commitment. Covey makes the analogy to the Apollo mission. Most of the energy was expended in the first few minutes as it broke free from the pull of gravity, but once outside of the trap of the Earth’s pull, there was enormous freedom.

Often the most difficult part of changing a habit is deciding to do it, and sticking with it for the first few days and weeks. After that, you are not free yet, but the strength of the pull becomes less and less. I have noticed this with habits that I have broken. In the beginning I must use much conscious effort, and just force myself to stay with my intention no matter how much parts of me object and offer up plenty of reasons not to change the habit. But I gets easier with time as those voices are ignored.

I have also notice that the ‘Why’, that is the attitude aspect of a habit, is often the missing element in trying to change my habits. If I don’t truly belive that I will benefit, or that the benefits of a new habit outweigh the benefits of the old, then it is hard to get myself to try.

The Maturity Continuum

Covey talks about what he calls the ‘maturity continuum’ – the levels of dependency that demonstrate the relationship of the 7 habits. They are:

Dependency: needing others to get what you want. This is the lowest level where we all begin at birth.
Independency: Relying upon oneself to get what one wants and needs.
Interdependency: Relying upon cooperation with others to get what I want and help others get what they want.

The first three habits are all about independence, and really are about ones personal character. Character is like the 90% of an iceberg that lays below the water, and the remaining 10% is personality.

The second three habits are about interdependence. This is where the great victories in life are created. But without a foundation of personal character, the fruits of interdependence will be limited. Without self-mastery, one cannot work cooperatively with others. Covey notes that when he reflects on failures in his public life, he can usually trace them back to a private failure: hypocrisy, flakiness, irresponsibility, pride, etc.

Paradigm Shifts

The key to major improvements comes from shifting our paradigm. If you want to make minor changes, change your behavior or your attitude. If you want to make major changes, you need to shift the way you look at things.

Stephen Covey gives several examples to illustrate this point. If you are looking for a building in New York, but you’ve got a map of Detroit (but don’t know it), you’ve got several options. You can change you behavior and try harder, drive faster, etc. You can change you attitude and be more relaxed and optimistic about finding the building. But those will ultimately fail. If your map is wrong, you are almost certainly going to fail.

Sometimes our paradigms are DEAD WRONG, like in this map example, and they severely limit our effectiveness in life. What paradigms do you have of the people in your life? How does that affect your relationships with them?

If some kids were being rambunctious and disrespectful of other passengers, and their father was ignoring them, what would you feel, what would you do? You might be upset, and might be rude in return to the children and complain to the father. But what if you knew that their mother had just passed away that morning, and both were distraught and didn’t know what to do with themselves? Your behavior and attitude would naturally change as a result of your changing paradigm, without effort to change your attitude or behavior.

Attitude and behavior are consequences of how we perceive the world. Working on our attitude and behavior are desirable things, but can only get us so far.

There is a fundamental resistance to paradigm shifting – especially if our security lies in something outside ourselves like credentials, possessions, reputation, etc. If we can generate security from deep within, we can learn new paradigms. That is, if we are not vulnerable deep down, we can afford to be vulnerable on the ‘surface’ of our lives, and take risks with seeing the world in a different way.

A way to do this is to build our security on timeless values, and to have a changeless core. Covey gives the example IBM, which held as its values the respect for individual dignity, excellence, and service.

So what limiting paradigms do I hold, that affect my behavior and attitudes? This is one of the limitations of the human mind, and is not something that I can see by simply asking this question of myself. To me, the word IS the way that I see it. Think about the absurdity of answering this question with something like ‘I believe that I am not good at math, but this is not actually true.’ It’s a tautology that I cannon see the errors in the way I see things.

So how does one shift ones paradigm? Perhaps observation and gathering ‘evidence’ help. I know people tend to look for evidence to support things they already believe, and I'm no exception. Part of a paradigm is the mental ‘filter’ we use – that is, the parts of reality that we habitually see. If I tell you to look around the place where you are and make mental note of everything that is red, then ask you to close your eyes and recall everything you saw that is green, you would have a difficult time. Part of what defines a paradigm shift is learning new habits for what we habitually pay attention to. Perhaps consciously gathering evidence that supports the new one can help. I will just have to wait to see what Covey says about this.

As for having core unchanging values from which to derive our security, this is where I have admiration for people that know their values, and strive to hold themselves to them. I know Covey is a Mormon, so I suspect he, like many others, gets their values from their religion. Where did I get my values? Parents and peers probably. I was not raised in a religious household, and I sometimes regret that I was not raised in some ethical/value framework like that. I am thankful though that I appear to have absorbed the values of being reliable to others, striving to be fair, and continually learning.

I hope that Covey expands on these concepts more in later chapters, because I feel that these are very important concepts.

P-PC Balances

Here Covey focuses on the 'deposits' and 'withdraws' that one can make in relationships, and briefly discusses 5:

1) Little kindnesses & courtesies
2) Keeping promises - and making them only when you know you can keep them
3) Violation an Expectation - many are implicit; make them explicit
4) Life of personal duplicity - By loyal to those not in your presence
5) Apologize sincerely

He also gives an example of a Clam Chowder restaurant business than started watering down it's chowder. Short term profits went up, but long term they went down as the asset of the relationship with the customer was plundered. Customers are the most important asset of a business.

I'm my life I could do a much better job of (1). I believe I am good at keeping promises (2), not violating expectations (3) and not being duplicitous. I make an effort to apologize when it is warranted, but I could do a better job on this. I could have offered an appology in many instances where I was only partly at fault, but could have acknowledged my role. I could also apoligize more often on the occasions I am judgemental or condecending.

Effectiveness – The goose and the Golden Egg

Stephen Covey begins with the Aesop’s fable of the Goose and the Golden Egg. He sees the story as a metaphor for many things in life. In business, it is a metaphor for Production (the eggs) and Production Capability (the Goose). In finance, it is a metaphor for Assets and Interest. It can also be a metaphor for Treatment and Prevention in the context of health and relationships.

Most importantly he sees the fable as a caution not to neglect your assets.

He sees assets as being physical, financial, and human. The physical assets are things that continually produce for you, whether they are usable goods, or intangibles like housing. Financial assets are those such as bank deposits, or businesses that generate income.

The most important asset to Covey, and I agree, is the human asset. Humans are the only ones able to do anything with the other asset types. Relationships are a particularly important form of human asset that require continual ‘deposits’ into an ‘emotional bank account’ in the form of courtesy, kindness, and fairness.

Introduction

I am currently listening to the audio version of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey. You can purchase it on Amazon.com at:

7 Habits on CD

In the introduction to the CD, Stephen Covey encourages the listener to teach what we are learning to others, for it will encourage us to deeply internalize the material, and bring a higher level of commitment to it. With my current fascination with blogging, I realized that a blog would be a good way to discuss and teach what I am learning as I progress through the CD.

I think Mr. Covey’s observation is accurate. I have found that teaching and writing about a subject brings a much deeper understanding. I think I first observed this when I was tutoring calculus to a friend. I realized that I was left with a much more profound understanding after I was finished explaining it to my friend. To teach is to require the concepts to be crystal clear in one's mind. The same is true of writing.

At first I was just going to make private notes, and then I realized that making my notes public I would be holding myself to a higher level of accountablity for making a good effort. I have participated in online discussion groups where I spent many hours expressing and defending my views in writing. I was able to broaden and clarify my views in the process. Sometimes, to my great surprise, my views were transformed when I realized that I could not defend them or that they were incoherent, or I had adopted them from my family or peers without much conscious consideration. On occastion I adopted a point of view closer to that of someone with whom I had been in strong disagreement with.

My intention is to write a blog entry for each audio chapter on the CD. I will attempt to summarize what the materal meant to me and what the core ideas are that I took away. I will also at times offer my own opinions about what Covey has to say, or consider examples of how it is relevant in my own life.