TrevorNelDailyOnline

...one bite at a time.

Or so the saying goes.

I have just come off the ladder from doing some maintainance work on the house... shirt splattered with white paint. Normally I leave this to someone else to do, but for some reason I have decided to do this task myself this year. Don't know what has come over me.

Here's the thing, I'm doing it in small, bite size chunks... and I found myself this morning get out the ladder as a HABIT (where've I heard that before?) and dusting off a section of fascia barge boards to do an hours painting when I return from our little walk/run around our village.

I had to smile... because it IS about HABIT, about being persistent, regular... breaking the task into bite size chunks. While at first it was a chore (almost breaking down a few times to let someone else do the job)... I now find myself 'admiring' my work... ;-) Strange things HABITS..!

Bibliography:

Covey, Stephen R. ‘THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE’ Pub. Simon and Schuster .

Points To Ponder

1. I am what I Do and Say.

2. Old bad habits can be replaced by new good habits.

3. I alone am responsible for the way I live my life.

4. I will act myself or be acted upon by someone else.

5. Integrity is an essential character and principle.

This is the habit of self-renewal which is a characteristic of all successful people.

On-going learning, exercise, health, relaxation... are all part of the four key areas of our life - physical, mental, emotional/social, spiritual - that have to be kept in balance.

Covey illustrates his point with the story of a woodman vigorously sawing away at a tree to meet his quota for the day.

An onlooker saw that he wasn’t making much progress and said, “Why don’t you stop and sharpen the saw?”

Replied the woodman, “I can’t, dummy, I’m too busy sawing!”

How much faster would he have finished the job if he had just stopped to sharpen (or refresh) his saw?

“Without this habit, the body becomes weak, the mind mechanical, the emotions raw, the spirit insensitive, and the person selfish.”

The point being... that renewal in any one of the key areas of your life, and the dimensions discussed by Covey, will have a positive impact on all the other areas of your life as well - because they are all so highly interrelated.

Covey concludes his great book with a personal note... “I believe that correct principles are natural laws, and that God, the Creator and Father of us all, is the source of them, and also the source of our conscience. To the degree to which we align ourselves with correct principles, divine endowments will be released within our nature in enabling us to fulfill the measure of our creation."

"In the words of Teihard de Chardin, ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual being. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.’ "

He quotes T.S Eliot as expressing his own opinion on personal discovery and conviction: “We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”

Isn’t GROWTH great?

This is the habit of creative cooperation... or team-work... where the end result is greater than the sum of its parts.

Synergy results from recognising that everyone is unique and “valuing differences by bringing different perspectives together in the spirit of mutual respect”.

Often such results are significantly better and very different from either of the original proposals. And everyone wins!

More tomorrow:

Covey regards this habit as the single most important principle he has learnt in the field of interpersonal relations. It is the habit of effective communication.

It is here where he points out that we all tend to see things from our own point of view, our own frame of reference (like the story of the man on the subway car).

He identifies that successful people have learnt to listen deeply to other people with complete empathy to get to understand their perspective.

But... they also make certain that they lay all their cards on the table - to be understood - to indicate the result they are looking for in the relationship. “When we really, deeply understand each other, we open the door to creative solutions and third alternatives.”

More tomorrow:

Win-Win is the habit of human interaction and cooperation between two or more people.

We continually enter into relationships such as marriage, games, business, committees and political parties, etc. These are all obviously interdependent realities, and yet most people approach these relationships with an independent mentality.

Covey uncovers six potential results of interaction. They are...

Win/Win;

Win/Lose;

Lose/Win;

Lose/Lose;

Win;

Win/Win... or No Deal.

Win/Win is based on the desire to seek mutual benefit for the players in the relationship.

It is based on an abundance mentality which comes from a belief that there is enough to “go around” for everybody.

This result is founded upon the essential character of INTEGRITY - I want you to win and I want to win.

The vast majority of people go through life with a scarcity mentality where they believe that everything comes to them at the expense of others. So they always look to “pull-one-over” the others they relate to.

Their counterparts are those kindly souls who lack the courage to go for the ultimate solution - Win/Win... or No Deal - and they generally end up with the Lose/Win scraps and personal dissatisfaction at the deal.

More tomorrow:

Everyone is aware that 80% of what we achieve comes from 20% of what we do (Pareto’s law).

So why do we spend 80% of our time doing things that give us very little return?

“We should give less attention to activities that are urgent but unimportant and devote more time to those things that are important but not necessarily urgent.”

As Goethe said “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”

Successful people begin each day with a clear understanding of where they are going.

They have a plan. They understand their purpose in life and their specific aim for whatever project they have committed to.

Covey has noticed that “effective people realise that things are created mentally before they are created physically”.

He recommends that people begin this habit by creating a personal mission statement which can be used as a frame of reference for making decisions.

He supplies a superb formula - in his book - for clarifying your true values in life and setting priorities before selecting your goals and going about your work.

Ineffective people are caught up in the values and goals set by other people and corporate cultures.

This is why so many people who finally hit the top of the ladder in their organisations are still not fulfilled. They’ve been working someone else’s goals and not their own. They recognise that they have been managers all their life and not leaders.

Set your own plan and values and help others to achieve theirs without compromising yours.

Following up on Steven Covey's 7 Habits... here's the lead-in to Habit No. 1 :

In understanding these 7 habits, it is important to notice that they can only be developed in the strict step by step sequential order as follows...

The first three habits are designed to establish a foundation of character, that will lead you from the need to feel dependent on others, to that of independence.

The next three habits will establish a platform for developing quality relationships with others and lead to an understanding of the benefit of interdependence - mutual co-operation with the rest of society for the good of everybody.

The seventh habit is one of ensuring that you continually refresh and renew yourself and your ideas in a process of continual growth or lifelong learning.


Habit 1. Be Proactive

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This is the habit of personal responsibility.

The successful person begins by recognising that we, alone, are each responsible for our own lives. “Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.”

These people do not blame their past for the circumstances they currently find themselves in.

They do not blame others, politicians, the economy, the weather, their adversaries, etc., for their current situation in life.

Proactive people understand that we each have the ability to choose our response to any given situation (Covey expands the word responsibility to read response/ability).

We can CHOOSE to respond positively or react negatively to any event that affects us.

Proactive people take the initiative to make things happen.

These people know that it is basic human nature to act or be acted upon by someone or something else.

They also focus on the opportunities or things they can do something about - (ie. their circle of influence) - and they tend to minimise problems, general worldly concerns, and circumstances over which they have no control.

“The more we exercise our freedom to choose our response, the more proactive we become.”

More tomorrow:

I thought it was a good time for me to revisit my notes on Steven Covey's book - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

'It is important to note that habits are simply patterns of behavior that result from three overlapping components:

...knowledge - the what/why to do;

...skill - the how to do; and...

...desire/attitude - the want to do.

The exciting point is that all three of these components are learned rather than inherited.

In other words, our bad habits - or our habits of ineffectiveness - those that we really don’t like - can be unlearned. And... new effective habits can be learned to replace the old.

In his research, Covey has recognised that successful people weave habits of effectiveness into their lives daily.

He identifies that these people have developed the habit of doing the things that the unsuccessful don’t like to do.

They don’t necessarily like doing these tasks either, but they subordinate their personal dislikes to the strength of a greater mission or purpose.

And... they do this by developing 7 Key Habits which allow them to control their lives with disciplined efficiency in accordance with pure and simple fundamental principles.'

More on Monday... :-)

Phew... where has the time gone. Some may think that I was traumatised by the tragic Beslan event to comment no longer... well no, I can't blame that for me not posting every week day to this site... as much as man's inhumanity to man upsets me massively.

No, it was quite simple, I had a couple of days of tech problems which kept me from accessing this blogger site... and in that time I developed 'new habits' which took my focus away from this activity. The challenge of always keeping one's self busy with ongoing projects.

HABITS... that's all it takes to develop consistency of purpose... is to convert what you really WANT to do into a HABIT. So, with apologies, I have managed to get back into this site... and will now have to force myself to maintation this activity for at least 21 days before it entrenches itself once again as a HABIT... a good habit at that.