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Seven Habits – Day 7 – Intro to Habit 1 – Be Proactive

07 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Uncategorized

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Be Proactive, BLM, coronavirus, covid-19, seven habits, stephen r covey

Habit 1 is ‘Be Proactive’. Most businesses look upon that as meaning ‘anticipate events and prepare accordingly’. That’s only part of it. That is a way of being Proactive, but that isn’t what Covey meant. Here’s my take based on study and attendance at many 7H courses over time.

In the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, this Habit was sub-titled, “The Principle of Personal Vision’ and it still is. But in later course workbooks the subtitle was changed to The Principal of Choice which I think better reflects the intent.

Be Proactive reflects the fact that as humans we have the ability to pause in the gap between stimulus (what happens to us) and our response (what we do about it). Stimuli can be prevailing circumstances or something that blindsides us. The advice is the same. But I get ahead of myself.

Being proactive requires that we recognise and utilise our ability to self-analyse, to understand ourselves and to use and change that knowledge for the better. Covey opined that we all tend to default to our social mirror, in that we reflect back to others what we think they want from us. He called that the Case of Mistaken Identity and the result of determinism, where we accept and take on characteristics of those we respect. Other psychologists call this Belong – Believe – Behave, where our desire to join a group is followed by unthinking adoption of its credo and then behaviour in accordance with that credo. Discuss the Nazi Party as an illustration.

Being Proactive essentially means overcoming that auto-response to social nurturing and deciding for ourselves what we want to be, do and have. And how we wish to live, and to be seen. In order to do that we must use our four endowments, which Covey identified as self-awareness, creative imagination, independent will and conscience. He suggests that in the gap between the aforementioned stimulus and response, then instead of just reacting instinctively, ‘the way we always have’ or according to influence, we utilise those endowments to choose our response. Or to use a Covey-ism, to act as if we are Response-Able.

When we do that we subordinate moods to our values, we do the right and better thing instead of the easiest or most convenient thing. We move towards principled living and effective success instead of just clearing the problem away only for it to come back again, harder.

Covey quotes something he said he read in a university library – I suspect he came up with it himself –  and says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and capacity to choose our response. And in that choice lies our growth and our happiness.”

How often have I wanted to snap back at something someone has said only to think, in that space, “Is this a victory worth winning at the expense of the relationship?” – and shut the hell up.

Do you have experiences where you wish you hadn’t hurriedly done something? If you’d been proactive you might not have transgressed, and what did happen, may not have. That is how powerful this Habit can be. It stops us making mistakes.

It also means we can constantly redirect our efforts away from the convenience of ‘now’ and towards the effectiveness and success of our future. Or, as Covey and others put it, sacrificing the present for a better future.

Effective people are consistently proactive. Not in terms of anticipating trends – even that is a reaction to the data that identifies that trend. No, they are proactive in that they take a moment to make better decisions.

Tomorrow, we look at where those choices should be directed.

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Seven Habits – Day 6 – Effectiveness Defined

06 Monday Jul 2020

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Uncategorized

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effectiveness, seven habits, stephen r covey

Anyone reading management and leadership articles and books will be familiar with Drucker’s Maxim, “Efficiency is doing things right: Effectiveness is doing the right things.” But all too often the experience of the led is that no-one is applying this common-sense approach to their lives. Perhaps if they read The Seven Habits they’d start to think differently.

Taking that Maxim as the title for the book, Covey explained that (in my words) success is all very good, but if you can’t replicate it then success is transient, a one-off. Effectiveness means being successful in such a way as to be able to repeat the feat with consistency. Effectiveness means that success is the result of careful and considered application of P/PC.

P is production, it’s the results. It is what we aim for, why we do what we do. In the working arena it’s about creating products, selling, marketing and making a profit so that the concern can benefit and make progress. ‘Production’ implies work, but production can just as easily be manifested through hobbies, contribution and, most important for ‘people’, relationships.

PC is Production Capability. It’s about maximising our ability, both in terms of skill and resources, to continue to produce the results we want. Looking back at the Maturity Continuum from yesterday, it’s the all-encompassing circle of Habit 7, of Sharpening the Saw, of personal and practical Renewal.

P/PC applies to individuals and it applies to organisations – the methods may differ but the principle remains sound (as do they all) – if the ‘entity’ does not take time for renewal, it atrophies. Thatis why we train our personnel. That is why we maintain our equipment. It all goes badly wrong when we do neither and just keep churning out David Allen’s Widgets. We get tired or bored, and/or the widget-cranking machine wears out, rusts and breaks, and suddenly we have no production capability.

P/PC is a balance. It is not emphasis on either. It’s making sure that what we want to do is done, but also that we remain capable of doing it. There may be times when the balance is slightly out of kilter: carefully monitoring the well-being of the person or thing is essential if it is to remain effective, but too much training time affects productivity. Too little does the same! Being successful, consistently, requires careful consideration and application of both.

That’s pretty much it for the foundational understanding, the ‘Three Rs’ that we need to know if we are to fully appreciate the 7 Habits.

Finally, Covey suggests that the best way to learn is to teach. That is part of my motivation – I understand the Habits and myself better through teaching them. You can do the same. Take a moment to review the articles written so far and try to bring the content up in conversation, thus training others in a different/better/alternative way of thinking about their own effectiveness. If someone seems a bit overly-reliant on help, suggest they consider becoming less dependent. If someone sees things one way, see if you can help them see an alternative, even if they don’t agree with it. If someone has an issue, as k them how they see the issue, not just what it is. If something isn’t working, ask whether the problem is being looked at properly. And if someone does need a good telling off, consider instead whether the problem is one relating to knowledge (training/philosophy), skill (training) or desire (attitude/motivation) – the response is best if it addresses the right issue.

Tomorrow, coincidentally the 7th of July, we look at Habit 1 – Be Proactive.

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If only Stephen Covey had been available in 2016.

11 Friday Oct 2019

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in General

≈ Comments Off on If only Stephen Covey had been available in 2016.

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Bill Clinton, brexit, Habits, stephen r covey

In his great book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’, Covey split the Habits into three areas. The first and third were very personal and I shan’t repeat them here, but Habits 4, 5 and 6 covered the way we work with others once we have (in Habits 1-3) mastered ourselves.

The Habits were:

Habit 4 – Think Win-Win.

Habit 5 – Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood.

Habit 6 – Synergise.

For this article, I’ll focus on 4 and 5.

In 2016, the British electorate shocked the establishment and, much to their shock and chagrin, decided to leave the European Union. What happened next is still causing problems three and a half years later and is the direct result of a failure to execute on those Habits.

First of all, and bear in mind this is my take on things and you can juggle around your own interpretations, the two sides went into Win-Lose and Lose-Win. The EU decided (and have been caught saying out loud) that Britain must be punished for deciding to leave. The UK, in the form of a Remain-biased Cabinet, decided they should bend over backwards to avoid further offending their future pension pots neighbours. The result was an agreement, hated by most, that meant the UK ‘pretended’ it had left, while subserviently making itself subject to all EU rules without having any say in how they were formed.

Secondly, then PM Teresa May failed to seek to understand that as all parties were responsible and accountable to the electorate that had decided to leave, she should have started a cross-party consultation in order to achieve that end. In failing to do that she alienated practically everyone.

At the same time, perhaps the EU could have considered this as an opportunistic challenge, rather than as a punitive exercise, and started the negotiations with that approach.

In other words – if both sides had approached the exercise with an attitude of ‘what can we do about this that brings the best of everything to both partners’ then perhaps we’d all be less combative about the whole thing. But that required Statesmanship of the type not clearly seen since Churchill, and that’s no longer evident, anywhere.

But here’s an additional thought. In Think Win-Win, Covey – an expert with no political objective – opined that one option, one that takes more courage even than Win-Win, is

Win-Win or No Deal.

In other words, if we can’t agree, let’s agree to disagree, agreeably. And then have No Deal, after which, as we both identify what does and doesn’t work for both of us, we can slowly come back to the table with a still friendly, open-minded, constructive attitude borne of the desire to be better, again. No Deal isn’t a weapon to be used as a threat. It is a position that recognises there are challenges, and that if both sides can’t meet that challenge in a way that suits both, to not do the deal.

If the EU/UK had done that, perhaps we would have gone, sooner, to WTO rules, be well on the way to a new, better, respectful and synergistic trade deal that is still as far away from being agreed as it was in June 2016

President Clinton used Covey for counsel, as did many other heads of state. Many leaders have read the Seven Habits and yet still fail to consider just how useful it is in dealing with ‘life’.

I think this stuff ought to be taught in MP/MEP School……..

It’s good to be back.

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