The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

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3 Sentence Summary

“Leadership is communicating others’ worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.” Stephen Covey’s timeless book on how to live a life rooted in principles will challenge you to think and act in service of others. More than just a guide on how to be effective, this book will become an instant companion for personal reflection in any stage of life.

5 Key Takeaways

1. It’s possible to disagree and both be right. Everybody views the world through their own unique paradigm.
2. Be proactive. Between stimulus and response, we have the ability to choose.
3. Private victories precede public victories. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.
4. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This requires learning how to listen.
5. Effective living requires balance between producing results and maintaining production capacity (the golden egg and the goose).

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Summary

Table of Contents

• Inside-Out
• The Seven Habits – An Overview
• Habit #1. Be Proactive
• Habit #2. Begin With The End In Mind
• Habit #3. Put First Things First
• Paradigms of Interdependence
• Habit #4. Think Win/Win
• Habit #5. Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood
• Habit #6. Synergize
• Habit #7. Sharpen The Saw

Inside-Out

• Conditioning affects our perceptions, or paradigms.
• Paradigms are the source of our attitudes and behaviors.
• We like to believe that we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not true. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or, as we are conditioned to see it.
• Sincere, clearheaded people see things differently, each looking through the unique lens of experience.
• The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.
• Our paradigms, correct or incorrect, are the sources of our attitudes and behaviors, and ultimately our relationships with others.

Principle-Centered Paradigm

• There exists principles that govern human effectiveness.
• Principles are deep, fundamental truths that have universal application.
• Principles are not values. A gang of thieves can share values, but they are in violation of fundamental principles.
• 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.

Be The Change You Want To See

• If you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy.
• If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathetic, consistent, loving parent.
• If you want to have trust, be more trustworthy.
• Private victories precede public victories.

The Seven Habits – An Overview

Habits

• Our character is a composite of our habits.
  • Sow a thought, reap an action
  • Sow an action, reap a habit
  • Sow a habit, reap a character
  • Sow a character, reap a destiny
• A habit is the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.

The Maturity Continuum

1. Dependence: The paradigm of you. You take care of me. I blame you for the results.
2. Independence: The paradigm of I. I can do it. I’m responsible. I am self-reliant.
3. Interdependence: The paradigm of we. We can do it. We can cooperate. We can accomplish something greater together.

Effectiveness Defined

• Effectiveness lies in the balance of producing the desired results and maintaining production capability (P/PC balance).
• Effectiveness is balancing the golden egg (production) with the health and welfare of the goose (production capability).
• It balances short term with long term.

Habit #1. Be Proactive: Principles of Personal Vision

• Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.
• Proactivity means that we are responsible for our own lives.
• Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.
• We can subordinate feelings to values.
• We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.
• Reactive people are often affected by their physical and social environment.
• Until a person can say “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.”
• It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.
• Things may hurt us physically or emotionally, but they do not need to damage our character or integrity.
• It is not what others do or even our own mistakes that hurt us the most; it is our response to those things.

Taking Initiative

• Initiative means recognizing our responsibility to make things happen.
• The difference between people who take initiative and those who don’t is literally the difference between night and day. +5000% difference in effectiveness.
• Act, or be acted upon.
• Combine creativity and resourcefulness to be proactive.
• Proactive is NOT pushy, aggressive or insensitive. Proactive people are smart, value driven, they read reality, and they know what’s needed.
• If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control – myself.

Listening To Our Language

• Our language is a very real indicator of the degree to which we see ourselves as proactive people.
• Reactive people use language to absolve themselves of responsibility.
• Reactive language becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Circle of Concern/Circle of Influence

• We can measure our degree of proactivity by examining where we focus our time and energy.
• Circle of Concern = Everything we care or worry about.
• There are many things that we cannot control in our Circle of Concern.
• The things that we can do something about reside in a smaller Circle of Influence.

• Proactive people focus their time and efforts on the Circle of Influence.
• Focus on the things that you can actually do something about.
• Positive and constructive energy causes your Circle of Influence to grow.
• By working on ourselves instead of worrying about conditions, we are able to influence the conditions.

• Reactive people focus on their 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 negative energy, and neglect for things that they can control, causes their Circle of Influence to shrink.
• Any time we think the problem is “out-there,” that thought is the problem.

Applying Proactivity

1. Listen to your language and that of those around you. Record how often you hear reactive phrases such as “If only,” “I can’t,” or “I have to.”
2. Identify an experience you might encounter in the near future where, based on past experience, you would probably behave reactively. Review the situation in the context of your Circle of Influence. How could you respond proactively?
3. Select a problem from your work or personal life that is frustrating to you. Determine whether it is a direct, indirect, or no control problem. Identify the first step you can take in your Circle of Influence to solve it and then take that step.
4. Try the above suggestions for 30 days. Then note the change in your Circle of Influence.

Habit #2. Begin With The End In Mind: Principles of Personal Leadership

• Begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined.
• By keeping that end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate the criteria you have defined as supremely important.
• To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination.
• We may be ver busy, we may be ver efficient, but we will only be truly effective when we begin with the end in mind.
• All things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation.
• Almost all world-class athletes and other peak performers are visualizers. They see it; they feel it; they experience it before they actually do it.

Management Vs. Leadership

• Management focuses on the bottom line results.
• Management is concerned with how best to accomplish certain things.
• Leadership deals with the top line.
• Leadership is concerned with determining the things we should accomplish.
• Leadership must come first if we want to be effective.
• Often parents get trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.
• We need to have leadership in our personal lives – clarifying our values – before we worry about managing efficiency – like setting and achieving goals.

A Personal Mission Statement

• A personal mission statement focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.
• At the center of our mission statement is our lens through which we see the world.
• Some people have alternative centers, like their spouse, their family, money, work, possessions, pleasure, friends, or self.
• The only solid center is one that is grounded on correct principles.
• By centering our lives on timeless, unchanging principles, we create a fundamental paradigm of effective living.

Writing A Personal Mission Statement

A personal mission statement isn’t something you write overnight. It takes deep introspection, careful analysis, thoughtful expression, and often many rewrites to produce it in final form. Use the following tips as a way to kickstart the process.

1. Visualize your funeral and write your eulogy.
2. Visualize your 25th and 50th wedding anniversary. Capture the essence of the family relationship you want to have created through your day-by-day investment.
3. Visualize your retirement. What contributions and achievements will you have made in your field? What are your plans for after retirement?
4. Identify roles and goals. Write down each area or capacity in which we have responsibility (e.g. individual, husband, father, businessman, etc) and the goals you have for each.

Habit #3. Put First Things First: Principles of Personal Management

• Effective management is putting first things first.
• Management is discipline, carrying it out.
• The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do.

Time Management

• Organize and execute around priorities.
• “Time management” is a misnomer. The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.
• Rather than focus on things and time, focus on preserving and enhancing relationships and on accomplishing results.

• Urgent matters are usually visible and require our immediate attention.
• Important matters have to do with results. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative and proactivity.
• Quadrant I consumes many people.
• Effective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because they’re not important.
• Quadrant II is the heart of effective personal management.
• Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded.

What It Takes To Say “No”

• Time for Quadrant II activities must come initially from Quadrants III and IV.
• To say “Yes” to Quadrant II means saying “No” to other activities, sometimes even things that appear to be urgent.
• The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.”
• You are always saying “No” to something.
• Most people have trouble identifying their priorities. As a result, they don’t know what they can comfortably say “No” to.
• Without a principle center and a personal mission statement, you don’t have the necessary foundation to stay disciplined on Quadrant II activities.

Quadrant II Organizer

A Quadrant II organizer will need to meet six important criteria:

1. Coherence: Between your mission statement, roles and goals, and priorities.
2. Balance: Across all of your roles and responsibilities.
3. Quadrant II Focus: You need a tool that encourages you to focus on Quadrant II. This is best accomplished by organizes your life on a weekly basis. The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
4. A “People” Dimension: Deal with people, not just schedules. Be effective, not just efficient.
5. Flexibility: Your planning tools should be your servant, never your master.
6. Portability: You should be able to carry it with you most of the time.

Four Key Activites

1. Identifying Roles: Write down all of your key roles for the week. For example, Individual, Husband, Father, Product Manager, Volunteer.
2. Select Goals: Write down two or three important results that should be accomplished in each role for the upcoming seven days. Some of these goals should reflect Quadrant II activities. Ideally, these short term goals would be tied to longer term goals you identified with your mission statement.
3. Scheduling: Block out time on your calendar to dedicate towards accomplishing each goal.
4. Daily Adapting: Take a few minutes each morning to review your schedule and apply reorganization and prioritization as needed.

• You can’t think efficiency with people. Be effective with people and efficient with things.
• People are more important than things. For this reason, you need spontaneity. You sometimes need to subordinate schedules to people.

Delegation

• We accomplish all that we do through delegation.
• Delegate to time = efficiency
• Delegate to people = effectiveness
• Effectively delegating to others is perhaps the single most powerful high-leverage activity there is.
• A manager achieves much higher leverage than an individual producer through effective delegation.
• Gofer delegation = Do this and tell me when it’s done. Focuses on micro-managing how it’s done. This is ineffective.
• Stewardship delegation = Focused on results instead of methods. Let’s the other person choose their method, but gives them ownership over the results. Much more effective.

5 Areas of expectations

1. Desired Results: Create a clear, mutual understanding of what needs to be accomplished, focusing on what, not how; results, not methods.
2. Guidelines: Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate. As few as possible, but include any formidable restrictions.
3. Resources: Identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational resources the person can use to accomplish the desired result.
4. Accountability: Set up the standards of performance that will be used in evaluation the results and the specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.
5. Consequences: Specify what will happen, both good and bad, as a result of the evaluation.

Paradigms of Interdependence

• Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.
• You need to invest more than you withdraw from the “Emotional Bank Account” to have productive relationships. This is even more important with people you interact with more frequently than others.

Six Major Deposits

1. Understand the Individual: You need to understand what constitutes a “deposit” to the other person. What are their interests and priorities?
2. Attend to the Little Things: Little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. In relationships, the big things are the little things.
3. Keep Commitments: Cultivate the habit of always keeping the promises you make. Doing so builds bridges of trust.
4. Clarify Expectations: The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals.
5. Show Personal Integrity: Integrity is conforming reality to our words – in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. Be loyal to those not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present.
6. Apologize Sincerely When You Make A Withdrawal: Sincere apologies make deposits; repeated apologies interpreted as insincere make withdrawals.

Habit #4. Think Win/Win: Principles of Interpersonal Leadership

• Anything less than Win/Win in an interdependent reality is a poor second best that will have impact in the long-term relationship.
• If you can’t reach a true Win/Win, you’re very often better off to go for No Deal.

Character

1. Integrity: Built using Habits 1, 2, and 3. We need integrity to know what constitutes a Win.
2. Maturity: The balance between courage and consideration.
3. Abundance Mentality: There is plenty out there for everybody. It results in sharing of prestige, of recognition, of profits, of decision making.

Relationships

• Focus on your Circle of Influence and make deposits into the Emotional Bank Account through genuine courtesy, respect, and appreciation.
• An agreement means very little in letter without the character and relationship base to sustain it in spirit.
• Investing in the relationship makes Win/Win possible.

Agreements

• Partnership agreements shift the paradigm from positioning to being partners in success.
• Five explicit elements:
  1. Desired results (not methods)
  2. Guidelines
  3. Resources
  4. Accountability
  5. Consequences
• It is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them.

Systems

• You cannot talk Win/Win but reward Win/Lose in your organization.
• The reward system must align with Win/Win goals and values.
• Cooperation in the workplace is as important to free enterprise as competition in the marketplace.
• The spirit of Win/Win cannot survive in an environment of competition and contests.
• The training system, the planning system, the communication system, the budgeting system, the information system, the compensation system – all have to be based on the principle of Win/Win.
• So often the problem is in the system, not in the people.

Processes

1. 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.
2. Identify the key issues and concerns (not positions) involved.
3. Determine what results would constitute a fully acceptable solution.
4. Identify possible new options to achieve those results.

📖 See Getting to Yes for similar concepts on principled negotiation.

Habit #5. Seek First to Understand, Then To Be Understood: Principles of Empathic Communication

• How often do we diagnose before we prescribe in communication?
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.
• Communication is the most important skill in life.
• The key is to genuinely seek the welfare of the individual, to listen with empathy, to let the person get to the problem and the solution at his own pace and time.
• It isn’t even always necessary to talk in order to empathize.
• These listening skills will not be effective unless they come from a sincere desire to understand.

Empathic Listening

• Listen with the intent to understand, not with the intent to reply.
• We all just want to be understood.
• 10% of our communication is represented by the words we say, 30% by our sounds, and 60% by our body language.
• Empathic listening is listening with more than just your ears, but your eyes and your heart as well.
• Empathic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with.
• Satisfied needs do not motivate. Only unsatisfied needs motivate. Apart from physical survival, the greatest human need is psychological survival – to be understood and affirmed.
• Empathic listening is risky. In order to have influence, you have to be influenced.

Four Stages of Empathic Listening

1. Mimic Content: This is the skill taught in “active” or “reflective” listening. It’s the least effective, but a good start to train yourself to actually listen to what is being said.
2. Rephrase the Content: This is only slightly more effective. But it trains you to not only listen, but start to synthesize what they’re trying to say.
3. Reflect Feeling: Not paying as much attention to what’s being said as to the way they feel about what they’re saying.
4. Rephrase the Content AND Reflect the Feeling: As you authentically seek to understand, you give the other person psychological air.

Be Understood

• Win/Win requires consideration (listening) and courage (being understood).
• Use ethos (integrity/competency), pathos (feelings), and logos (logic), in that order, to create compelling presentations.
• You cannot go straight to the logical side of your argument without first addressing pathos and ethos.
• An effective presentation empathizes with the audience. You need to first get inside their head and describe the alternative he is in favor of better than he can himself.
• When you can present your own ideas clearly, specifically, visually, and most important, contextually – in the context of a deep understanding of their paradigms and concerns – you significantly increase the credibility of your ideas.

Habit #6. Synergize: Principles of Creative Cooperation

• Synergy is the essence of principle-centered leadership.
• Synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

• 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. The mental, emotional, and psychological differences between people.
• The key to valuing those differences is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are.
• 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.
• Unless we value the differences in our perceptions, unless we value each other and give credence to the possibility that we’re both right, that life is not always a dichotomous either/or, that there are almost always third alternatives, we will never be able to transcend the limits of that conditioning.
• Synergy works. It is the crowning achievement of all the previous habits. It is teamwork, team building, the development of unity and creativity with other human beings.
• When someone disagrees with you, you can say, “Good! You see it differently.” You don’t have to agree with them; you can simply affirm them. And you can seek to understand.

Habit #7. Sharpen The Saw: Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal

• Habit 7 is personal PC. It’s preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have – you.
• “Sharpen the saw” basically means exercising all four dimensions of our nature, regularly and consistently in wise and balanced ways.
• To neglect any one area negatively impacts the rest.
• We must be proactive about it. Sharpening the saw is a Quadrant II activity.
• This is true for organizations just as much as it is for individuals. You need balance across economics, talent development, human relations, and purpose.

The Physical Dimension

• Eating the right kinds of foods, getting sufficient rest and relaxation, and exercising on a regular basis.
• Most of us think we don’t have enough time to exercise. What a distorted paradigm! We don’t have time not to.
• A good exercise program is one that you can do in your own home and one that will build your body in three areas: endurance, flexibility, and strength.

The Spiritual Dimension

• Renewing the spiritual dimension provides leadership to your life. It’s highly related to Habit #2.
• When we take time to draw on the leadership center of our lives, what life is ultimately all about, it spreads like an umbrella over everything else.
• If you settle the issues that inwardly conflict, if you know what you’re about, then you’ll find that public victories will flow naturally.

The Mental Dimension

• Many of us let our minds atrophy after our formal education. We don’t do any serious reading, we don’t explore new subjects in real depth, we don’t write in a way that expresses ourselves in distilled, clear, and concise language. Instead, we spend time watching TV.
• It is extremely valuable to train the mind to stand apart and examine its own program.
• There’s no better way to inform and expand your mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
• You can get into the best minds that are now or that have ever been in the world.
• Writing is another way to sharpen the mental saw. It affects our ability to think clearly, to reason accurately , and to be understood effectively.
• Organizing and planning represent other forms of mental renewal associated with Habits 2 and 3.

The Social/Emotional Dimension

• A life of integrity is the most fundamental source of personal worth.
• Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.
• There is intrinsic security that comes from service, from helping other people in a meaningful way.
• There is intrinsic security that comes as a result of effective interdependent living. In knowing that Win/Win solutions do exist.

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• Tribal Leadership
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• Extreme Ownership
• Getting To Yes
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These are the posts I’ve written that build upon some of the key ideas presented in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

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• Begin with the end in mind
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