Implement Personal Change with Lessons from Stephen Covey Featured
- Written By Anne Ollswang
It’s the 25th anniversary of the publication of Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.” If you haven’t read Covey’s book, this is a good time to pick up a copy and learn how personal change can translate into professional success.
The 7 Habits are:
1 Be Proactive
2 Begin with the End in Mind
3 Put First Things First
4 Think Win-Win
5 Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
6 Synergize
7 Sharpen the Saw
The first three habits deal with moving from being dependent to independent. This leads to personal change and independence. Everything is built on the formation of a strong set of core values. The book takes you through the process of writing a mission statement that includes your moral, ethical, centered values so that it expresses your true core values. The statement itself serves as a reminder of the values. This core will be the foundation for making every decision in your personal and professional life. The mission statement and examination of your values cannot be taken lightly.
The habits are designed to be learned and internalized and implemented in order. Covey calls it the “inside-out” approach. You must master inner change before you can apply your new, independent skills to an interdependent situation such as marriage, family, or business. If you attempt to move to Habits 4-6 without completely adopting 1-3, you will not be able to successfully achieve the desired results. You also will struggle with the concepts that move towards interdependence.
The Habits that deal with interdependence focus on communication based on your core values, empathic listening and communication, and cooperation. All of these lead towards the goal of becoming an effective leader and manager or husband and father or basically a steady, value based role in whatever relationships you have.
The 7th Habit is about renewal. It encourages you to take the time to renew yourself physically, mentally, spiritually, and social/emotionally.
When I read this book, I appreciated the personal examples that Covey offered for each concept. While he titled the book “The 7 Habits…” each habit contains multiple principles and skills. Each one takes a lot of effort and understanding. It is overly complicated because of the multiple parts of each habit. I was pretty discouraged during my reading.
The 7 Habits are definitely Christian based and will yield great results for those devoted to learning them. Personally, I feel that I have taken away some very important nuggets of information that I can use in my life to improve myself personally and professionally. I don’t think I will be “highly effective” according to Covey’s standards. I will definitely benefit by using the general ideas of each Habit, but implementation of each skill or idea is beyond me.
I recommend reading the book and making notes about the things that interest you and that you feel apply to your life. Reflect on the changes you wish to make and what parts of the book can help you to achieve these changes. If you don’t become “highly effective,” you will at least become more effective than you were at the start.