The 7 Herbs Of Highly Effective People

As for the actual presentation of the CD, I found it very annoying to go from two different presenters. First, there is a professional reader that summarizes the material and then there is Stephen Covey himself poorly recorded live that throws in a story here and there. It goes back and forth like this throughout. I should have read this book years ago, really a great start to thinking differently and turning ones life around in a more proactive manner. Great Narration of the Audio book. It had me anticipating where I had left off each day.

I'll be reading this again in the next couple of months. Pretty good if your at the beginning of your personal development. Very good and easy to understand.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

I enjoyed this book very much. I would definitely recommend this book to all my friends. It was an alright book but nothing miraculous. Simple points that are stretched out a little too much for me. It talks about how being effective first involves mastery of the self. After that has been attained, a person can successfully work with others.

Everything is created twice: Beginning with the end in mind means approaching any role you have in life with your values and directions clear. Whatever is at the center of your life will be the source of your security your sense of worth , guidance your source of direction in life , wisdom your perspective on life , and power your capacity to act and accomplish. Most people never take the time to align their values with their center. As a result, they have one or more of many possible alternative centers.

People can be spouse centered, family centered, money centered, work centered, pleasure centered, friend or enemy centered, church centered, or self centered.

Navigation menu

The principle center will put all these other centers in perspective. Covey puts it this way: The best way to make sure your life is aligned with your principles and the best way to track when you get off center is to write a personal mission statement. This principle is the same for families or organizations; as hokey as it might sound, an authentic mission statement is the first step in the process of being effective. You need to put in the time, thought, and effort in order to gain the right perspective, and in order to set yourself up for the next habit.

You can click here for some examples of personal mission statements, starting with a few from Ben Franklin. Habit 3 is the second creation — the physical realization of Habits 1 and 2. Most people never get beyond this level. This fourth level is where the author asks us to operate. He borrows the tool for this categorization from none other than Dwight Eisenhower:. An effective time manager spends as much time as possible in quadrant II, doing things that are important before they become urgent: The more time you spend in this quadrant, the less time you will have to spend in quadrant I.

In contrast, most people spend the majority of their time in quadrant I and III, doing urgent things that may or may not be important, and rarely allow you to be effective. Most of us try to get out of this vicious cycle by trying to be more disciplined; however, the author contends that your problem is probably not that you lack discipline.

More likely, it is simply that your priorities have not been rooted in your values. Write down a list of roles that you wish to devote time and energy to filling.

Some examples are your role as an individual for which you would devote time for self-improvement , your role as a family member spouse, son, mother, etc. Write down one or two goals for each role that you want to accomplish over the next week. Take things a step beyond where most people get with their use of scheduling, sit down and plan out your schedule a week at a time. This allows you to match your goals with the best time to accomplish them. For example, peak productivity for most people is between 2 — 5 hours after waking. Take a few minutes at the beginning of each day to review the schedule you put together and revisit the values that induced you to establish your goals for the day.

In real life, things change, so it is important to allow your schedule to be fluid and adaptable while keeping your focus on your values and priorities. Most people live in one of the following four alternative paradigms:. Try thinking about your relationships as an emotional bank account.

By proactively making deposits, you ensure that the emotional funds will be there when the time comes to make a withdrawal. You can find a more thorough presentation of this approach to effective negotiations in Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury. The essence of Getting to Yes is to separate the person from the problem, focus on interests instead of positions, invent options for mutual gain, and insist on objective criteria.

The key to this chapter is that in most difficult situations, the problem is the system, not the people. By approaching those situations with the question of how we can change the system in order to make it work for all involved, many difficult problems can be resolved. If you want to interact effectively with people and influence them, you must first understand them.

Again, Covey breaks things down into a step-by-step framework that makes your own behavior easier to understand. Here are his four levels of listening:. Needs stop motivating people once those needs are satisfied. Satisfy the need to be understood, and you can move on to being productive. This habit is powerful because it is always in your circle of influence to seek first to understand, then to be understood. What the author means by synergy is something that may be impossible to understand unless you have experienced it. You may have had an experience playing sports where the team just gelled and the plays started clicking like you were moving as one body.

You might have been in an emergency situation where a group of strangers came together to act with a degree of cooperation that seemed unprecedented.