Summary of Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The Seven Habits - An Overview

Our character is a collection of our habits, and habits have a powerful role in our lives. Habits consist of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge allows us to know what to do, skill gives us the ability to know how to do it, and desire is the motivation to do it.

The Seven Habits move us through the following stages:

1. Dependence: the paradigm under which we are born, relying upon others to take care of us.

2. Independence: the paradigm under which we can make our own decisions and take care of ourselves.

3. Interdependence: the paradigm under which we cooperate to achieve something that cannot be achieved independently.

Much of the success literature today tends to value independence, encouraging people to become liberated and do their own thing. The reality is that we are interdependent, and the independent model is not optimal for use in an interdependent environment that requires leaders and team players.

To make the choice to become interdependent, one first must be independent, since dependent people have not yet developed the character for interdependence. Therefore, the first three habits focus on self-mastery, that is, achieving the private victories required to move from dependence to independence. The first three habits are:

    * Habit 1: Be Proactive
    * Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
    * Habit 3: Put First Things First

Habits 4, 5, and 6 then address interdependence:

    * Habit 4: Think Win/Win
    * Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
    * Habit 6: Synergize

Finally, the seventh habit is one of renewal and continual improvement, that is, of building one's personal production capability. To be effective, one must find the proper balance between actually producing and improving one's capability to produce. Covey illustrates this point with the fable of the goose and the golden egg.

In the fable, a poor farmer's goose began laying a solid gold egg every day, and the farmer soon became rich. He also became greedy and figured that the goose must have many golden eggs within her. In order to obtain all of the eggs immediately, he killed the goose. Upon cutting it open he discovered that it was not full of golden eggs. The lesson is that if one attempts to maximize immediate production with no regard to the production capability, the capability will be lost. Effectiveness is a function of both production and the capacity to produce.

SUMMARY OF THE SEVEN HABITS

Habit 1:  Be Proactive

• Highly effective people take the initiative. They are proactive.
• They do not impose limits on themselves that prevent them from acting.
• They recognize that they have the freedom to determine the kind of character they will have.
• They may not be able to control their circumstances, but they can decide how to make the best  use of those circumstances.

Habit 2:  Begin with the End in Mind

• Effectiveness is not just a matter of reaching a goal but rather of achieving the right goal.
• Imagine ourselves sitting in the back of the room at our funeral. Imagine what people could honestly say about us based on the way we are now.
• Do we like what we hear? Is that how we want to be remembered?
• If not, we must change it. We must take hold of our life.
• We can begin by drafting a personal mission statement that outlines our goals and describes the kind of person we want to be.

Habit 3:  Put First Things First

• We should never  let our most important priorities fall victim to the least important.
• We spend our time reacting to urgent circumstances and emergencies, and never invest the necessary effort to develop the ability to prevent emergencies in the first place.
• We confuse the important with the urgent. The urgent is easy to see. The important is harder to discern.
• We must spend more time on  planning, avoiding pitfalls, developing relationships, cultivating opportunities and recharging ourselves.
• We must focus on “important but not urgent” activities.

Habit 4:  Think Win/Win

• Highly effective people strive for win/win transactions.
• They try to ensure that all the parties are better off in the end.
• They know that any other kind of transaction is destructive, because it produces losers and, therefore, enemies and bad feelings, such as animosity, defeat and hostility.
• A Win-Win  mindset can help us multiply our allies.

Habit 5:  Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

• To develop win/win relationships, we must find out what the other parties want, and what winning means to them.
• We must  always try to understand what the other people want and need before we begin to outline our own objectives.
• We must  not object, argue or oppose what we hear.
• We must listen carefully, and think about it.
• We must try to put ourselves in the other party’s shoes.

Habit 6:  Synergize

Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, one often can solve conflicts and find a better solution than would have been obtained through either person's own solution.

• Effective synergy depends on communication.
• We often don’t listen, reflect and respond but, instead, we hear and react reflexively.
• Our reactions may be defensive, authoritarian or passive.
• We may oppose or go along — but we do not actively cooperate.
• Cooperation and communication are the two legs of a synergistic relationship.

Habit 7:  Sharpen the Saw

Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.

• We must take care of our bodies with a program of exercise that combines endurance, flexibility and strength.
• We must nourish our souls with prayer, meditation, or perhaps by reading great literature or listening to great music.
• Mental repair may mean changing bad habits, such as the habit of watching television.
• We must work to develop our heart, our emotional connections and our engagement with other people.

Recommended Reading

Covey, Stephen R., The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People