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Tag Archives: sharpen the saw

Seven Habits – Day 17 – Habit 7 and Conclusion

17 Friday Jul 2020

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Seven Habits – Day 17 – Habit 7 and Conclusion

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covid-19, Donald Trump, habit 7, renewal, seven habits, sharpen the saw, stephen r covey

Habit 7 is the Habit of Renewal, hence the epithet ‘Sharpen the Saw’. It is a metaphor for ensuring you’re sharp enough to keep working, rather then getting and staying blunt through poor and excessive focus on the P of th P/PC Balance discussed in week 1. How do we sharpen ourselves then?

Most importantly, we need to do so in all four human dimensions.

Physical. You achieve and maintain a healthy weight so that you aren’t dulled by excess. You eat wisely. You exercise to help the body act optimally and for as long as needed (endurance, strength and flexibility). You get enough sleep and try not to poison the body – the only tool through which you channel everything about you.

Mental. You read in your field, and more broadly where possible, so as to improve your intellectual capacity to apply different ideas, and to be creative. You make sure that you aren’t made redundant during what Covey later called the ‘professional half-life’ of about two years, that period being the point at which, untrained, your competence halves.

Social-Emotional. You maintain and improve relationships, both with others and yourself. Your self-esteem is important, provided it doesn’t grow into a huge ego. This is arguably the easiest part of you to renew because you are doing it constantly as you live your life around other people.

Spiritual. You discover your personal values and reflect on how to live in their accord. You ensure you find meaning. Even if that isn’t in work, you seek out and discover that which fills your heart – passions, hobbies and above all, service to others.

Renewal is in Quadrant B/2 – it is important but never urgent, so you have to act upon it. You have to plan your weeks so that you get the renewal done – with the exception of the social dimension that happens all around and all the time, the rest of it is down to you to arrange.

Try to synergise. Train at work, using work’s resources (physical, mental, social). Exercise with friends and family (physical, social, spiritual). Go on a nature walk and reflect upon your mission (social-emotional, physical, spiritual). The possibilities are many, and all serve you and your ability to live a principled, productive lifestyle.

Renew – stay relevant, happy, productive and ‘on purpose’.

That’s the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People down from 340+ pages to about 14. I have really edited down a synergistic, whole-life approach to the life you design because you want what’s in it.

Now I really encourage you to go get a copy and read for yourself the wisdom that Stephen Covey himself edited down from 200 years of what he called ‘the wisdom literature’. You would see that it isn’t just a list of to-dos, as many books can be. There is an intellectually compelling completeness to what Covey wrote. You start with learning about a Paradigm and then realise that you’re reading a book where you end up noticing that how you see each Habit affects how/if you apply it. You realise that everything you do well is in your Circle of Influence if you want it to be there – or it stays outside that Circle and just bothers your conscience. And you realise that you have the capacity to act, because you are aware that you can. If you want.

Be careful, though. Through reading and applying this material you might just get what you want. I did.

Good luck.

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Do you treat yourself like you do your car?

08 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Character and Competence, Discipline, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Do you treat yourself like you do your car?

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FranklinCovey, internet, MOT Certificate, sharpen the saw, Stephen R Covey"

Does anyone else think their car feels cleaner, faster and snappier as you drive away from a passed MOT inspection? Or is it just me?

By the same token, how do you feel when you leave the dentist after a clean and polish? Or when you’ve filed all your paperwork?

The reason for all this contentment is because your essential maintenance is finally complete and you feel that you have a fresh start available to you. Despite the fact that most of us consider ‘maintenance’ to be in the pile of ‘things I HAVE to do but which don’t achieve anything meaningful’, our brains recognise that completion of those things is an enabler to carrying out of more important things. Our brains are cleverer than we are.

Think about it. How well could we do what is important if we didn’t, at some point, carry out the foundational ‘unimportant’ admin and saw-sharpening that supports us? How well could we write and research if we didn’t maintain our computers? How could we get around if we didn’t maintain our transportation? How could we charge clients if our billing records weren’t up to snuff?

How embarrassing is it when your pen runs out of ink just at the signature stage of a contractual negotiation?

Maintenance is a way of ensuring effectiveness at the front end, folks.

That goes as much for ‘you’ as it does your ‘stuff’. It’s all very well you accepting this advice and setting about checking your pens for ink, your pencils for lead and your car’s service schedule for late oil changes, but what about you?

Your body needs to be properly maintained constantly if it is to enable success and effectiveness in all of your roles. Eat too much and you slow down while your body digests it. Poison it with alcohol or excessive caffeine and you make it jump before it plummets again. Fail to exercise and the lubricants clog and congeal and eventually need changing. If they CAN be changed.

Your brain needs to be fed and nurtured, too. That doesn’t solely mean intellectual data input, it also means that stuff which calms the neurons, like music and (paradoxically) silence in nature. Although from a work perspective, keeping up to speed with practice and protocol changes is a necessary activity if we aren’t to become redundant in an intangible way – or worse, a tangible, ‘go-work-somewhere-else’ kind of way.

Take a few minutes today to find out if there is anything you need to know or do to improve your relevancy at work, and to ensure that the only tool through which you do everything – your body – will remain capable of serving you for longer. Like until you are 101, not up to ‘65 and knackered’ There are plenty of apps, books and facilities providing advice and equipment for these purposes.

You can also ignore all three of those and just take the odd moment to sit quietly and enjoy the silence.

Keep your saw sharp. It’s a cutting edge philosophy.

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