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.