Learnings from "The 7 habits of highly effective people"

I just finished reading "The 7 habits of highly effective people", a best-seller by Stephen R. Covey, that has inspired me in many levels. I am sharing some of the learnings I got, mostly as a personal bookmark, but hopefully this post can be useful for the community.

Habit 1: Be Proactive

• It is not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us. There is a space between stimulus and response, and the key to our growth and happiness is how we use that space.
• While reactive people feel victimized and out of control, proactive people have the power to choose how to respond to any circumstances (i.e., smiling with bad weather).
• We must focus our efforts on the things we can do something about, and accept what we can't change (past events, weather,...).
• Try replacing victimized language (i.e., "There is nothing I can do", "I have to do it",...) with proactive language ("Let's see all the options", "I choose to do it",...).

Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind

• Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. Effective management without effective leadership is "like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic".
• Try visualizing what you want to be said of you in your funeral from your partner, relatives, co-workers, friends,.... You will find your ultimate definition of success.
• Write your Personal Mission Statement, a sort of Constitution summarizing what you want to be, to do, and the values and principles that govern your life. Here is mine:
  
  "Live in a way that, looking back from my deathbed, I have clear conscience, I have had a positive impact on thousands of people's lives, and I can say that this journey was fun and worth every minute"
• You can create specific mission statements for each role you have in your life: as a partner, parent, friend, co-worker,...
• Top performers visualize themselves in rich detail before important activities, such as a job interview, an important football match, a public keynote,... They create an internal "comfort zone", so that when they get into the situation it isn't foreign anymore.

Source: Christina O

Habit 3: Put first things first

• In the matrix above, we classify tasks by urgency and by importance (contribution to your mission and values). We tend to react to urgent matters but we must act (be proactive) on important matters.
• Q1 - Urgent and important. A.K.A. firefighting. If you spend too much time solving crises you will be stressed and burned out. Thinking preventively can reduce the frequency of crises.
• Q2 - Important but not urgent. This is the heart of effective personal management, where you spend time on things that can have an important impact on your personal and professional lives, but you never have time to do because you are busy with urgent things. Working out, acquiring new skills, family time, innovating processes at work,... they all fit in Q2.
• Q3 - Urgent but not important. Solving problems based on other people's priorities that are normally in conflict with your own. Here is where it becomes so important to say "no" to these tasks, that take time from Q2.
• Q4 - Not urgent and not important. These are non-demanding activities that are our refuge when we are burned out from crisis management.
• Ideally we should eliminate Q3 and Q4 activities, reduce Q1 through prevention and spend most of our time in Q2.
• Technique: Weekly planning:
      1. Think about the roles you have in your life. For example, I can be a husband, father, son, brother, friend, tech architect, agile coach and basketball referee. Include another one: "myself".
      2. For each one, reflect about your top 1-2 priorities (in Q2) that you want to act on during the following week. For example, as "myself" I want to workout and study Norwegian, as a father I want to organize my child's birthday party,...
      3. Put them all in your calendar and make sure you do them. These are your most important tasks for the week. Then you can fill the empty slots in your calendar with other less important tasks.

Habit 4: Think Win&Win

• With a Win/Win mentality, all parties feel good about the decision and feel committed to the action plan in a cooperative, non-competitive way.
• A balance between high courage (to confront) and consideration (to emphatically understand) in an environment of trust is essential.
• Win/Win mentality represents the believe that there is plenty of pie out there for everybody, in contrast with the scarcity mentality that stops people from collaborating.
• In most cases, it is better to have a "no-deal" when no Win/Win can be found.
• Win/Win Performance Agreement (example). The boss must make clear to the employees the requirements for the different rewards (promotions,...). Based on that, the employees must state in advance what they want to accomplish, and work together on a plan to achieve it. If the requirements are met, both will win. If not, the employee won't feel betrayed. With a Win/Win performance agreement between the boss and his/her subordinates, the employees can manage themselves, reducing overhead and increasing trust.
• Organizations cannot achieve cooperation between employees if their reward system encourages them to compete with each other.
• Competition makes sense in the market place, or against last year's performance or other teams with no need to cooperate.

Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood

• We have the tendency to fix things up with good advice (to prescribe); but often we don't take the time to deeply understand the problem first (to diagnose).
• Most people don't listen with the intent to understand, but with the intent to reply, reading their autobiography into other people's lives ("I know exactly how you feel, I went through the very same thing last year when...").
• Emphatic listening is a technique where you rephrase the content of what the other person said and reflect the feeling, all from a sincere desire to understand. Example: "I am done with this job" - "Oh, you sound frustrated about your job, tell me about it".
• Emphatic listening helps the other person to open up. Once you understand the situation in deep, then you can seek to help with advice (to be understood).
• Seeking to understand requires consideration; seeking to be understood takes courage.

Source: Chieformula

Habit 6: Synergize

• Synergy: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
• High trust and cooperation (see diagram above) produce the best results.
• The essence of synergy is to value the differences, to build on strengths and to compensate for weaknesses.
• We must recognize our own perceptual limitations and appreciate the rich resources available.
• If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary. We should celebrate when someone has a different point of view.

Habit 7: Sharpen the saw

• A man in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree. Someone asks him - "why don't you take a break and sharpen that saw? You would go a lot faster". He responds - "I don't have time. I'm too busy sawing".
• Habit 7 is taking time to sharpen our saw, by renewing the four dimensions of our nature, all of them from the Q2 quadrant:
• Physical: exercise, good nutrition, stress management.
• Mental: professional training, visualizing, planning, writing.
• Spiritual: value clarification and commitment, study and meditation.
• Social/Emotional: serve others, empathy, synergy, intrinsic security.