7 Habits of Highly Effective People Takeaways

I loved learning this past week about the summary of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey. His 7 Habits are: 1. Be Proactive 2. Being with the end in mind 3. First things first 4. Think Win Win 5. Seek to Understand and seek to be understood 6. Create Synergy 7. Sharpen the Saw. I would like to focus on the part I liked best the week, habit #7 Habit # 7 is: Taking Time to Sharpen the Saw In other words, don’t get so busy sawing that you don’t realize you are using a blunt saw. Take the time on a regular basis to sharpen your saw in the physical, spiritual, mental and social or emotional dimensions. Supporting Ideas Sharpening the saw involves four separate dimensions 1. Physical exercise – Spending a minimum of 30 minutes per day exercising will vastly improve the quality of the remaining hours every day. Exercise on a regular basis will preserve and enhance your capacity to work and adapt and enjoy. Exercise is rarely ever urgent, you have to be proactive and set your own standard. You also find as you exercise, you will experience a paradigm shift of your own self image. 2. Spiritual – Renewing the spiritual dimension provides leadership to your life. It is highly related to Habit 2. The spiritual dimension is at the very core of your value system, drawing upon the sources that inspire and uplift you. People draw spiritual strength in many different ways. Rather than concentrating on how this should be done, the key principle is to make sure it is being refreshed frequently in your own life. Immersion in great literature or music can provide spiritual renewal for some people. So too can time spent alone communicating with nature. Everyone has different needs, and draw upon different wells of spiritual strength. This is a definite Quadrant 2 activity. It is rarely ever urgent - we usually have to make time for spiritual renewal on a regular basis. The idea is to take the time to draw on the leadership center of our lives. As we consider our battles in the larger context, we can draw renewed strength for the challenges at hand. A personal mission statement can be very important to spiritual renewal. We can take this time to recommit ourselves to our center and purpose in life. We can mentally live out events before they actually occur. We can achieve our private victories before our actions ever move into the public gaze. 3. The mental dimension – Formal education teaches the processes of mental development, study discipline, exploration of new subjects, analytical thought and expressive writing. Many people trade the classroom for the TV set as the basis of their thinking when they leave school. Habit 3 gave the basis for developing the self-discipline to ignore TV and instead develop serious study programs around new subjects. Television is a good servant but a poor master.

Mastery

What is your Mastery? I have been reading the book “Mastery” by George Leonard. The last couple weeks in my readings, I have pulled out a couple of thoughts that I really liked from George Leonard. Here are couple things that I enjoyed reading: “Are we getting ahead of ourselves when we hit plateaus? We have many flaws. We are working hard, doing the best we can to improve our skills. Ambition is always there but is tamed. We need to make progress. Are we dedicated in our process to get where we need to go? What is our truest happiness? It’s the time when all the crap goes away.” “Goals and contingencies, as I’ve said are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it feel it. To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them. To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.”

Be the Best you can Be

This week I have learned a lot about being successful as an entrepreneur. I really enjoyed an article by Jeff Sandefer that was called Are successful entrepreneurs born or made? A couple of things he mentioned about skills I really liked. He said “It helps to be born with an engaging personality,” the man who had built a fortune in rent houses added. “But that’s no substitute for knocking on door after door and every time you are turned down, having the courage to knock again. Sales is a matter of learning about human nature, yours and theirs, through trial and error.” A list of important skills soon followed: “The ability to find good salespeople and manage a sales force.” “Having a firm grasp of which numbers are important.” “Knowing how to put together an assembly line or service delivery process.” More skills were added to the list: • “Being able to communicate clearly.” • “Listening and questioning customers.” • “Being a problem solver; thinking.” • “Being curious enough to uncover and unravel the strategies of competitors.” I feel to be successful is exactly what he mentioned above. I want to take these thoughts and use in my future business plan. I also enjoyed in the video of Heroes Journey, speaker Jeff Sandefer, this week as well. He said “if you give up measuring your self to others, you will be successful.” He also said to be hero, you must deice to be a person who gets, rather than a person who says I can’t- you can!” I want to be a doer and stop having excuses in my life of why I can’t- I can do anything I put my mind to in my life and goals.

Setting Goals for the Future

This past week, I have finished the Book, The Ministry of Business. I learned so much in this book to help me really work on setting my life goals. I have really struggled the last couple years on setting goals. I know that I used to thrive on setting my goals on a monthly basis. Life threw several curve balls to my family and I, and I didn’t keep my eye on things that would help my family be stronger- which was my daily tasks, short term goals, long term goals and governing goals. This book helped me realize that I needed to set these goals back up in my life and remember who I am. I look forward to the changes I will have set in front of me and will meet or supersede them by leaps and bounds. The other point I enjoyed from this book was remembering to giving back. I will work on giving back to my community by finding ways to serve. I will find a cause I believe and love and will help make the cause successful. I can be a part of making a difference in the world and I look forward to finding the cause soon.