The 7 Habits of Covey explained: Take your first step towards your life goal
In this article, we will discuss the bestselling title “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey ” and will try to put the ideas of Covey in a brief summary. We won’t be able to summarize all 7 habits here in this short article, but only the first 4. If you haven’t got your hands on the book yet, here you’ll get the idea of what’s waiting for you in this book, so read on, please-
The summary
In the book, Steven Covey described the success from absolutely different angles than we usually do. What we consider success, often comes at some price. We either compromise, or we confront and at the end what we get is not the real success, but the fragments of it. Covey clearly shows what we call success, is actually an illusion of success. To get real success, one needs to follow 7 basic rules, or as Covey called them, 7 habits we must form within ourselves. All these 7 habits are carefully selected and described in a detailed manner. Covey studied and analyzed the life of highly many successful and effective people and compiled these 7 habits based on his research. Let’s start.
- Be Proactive: Being proactive means working on the situation around you, instead of being the puppet of the situation. You must prevent incidents from being “happen to you,” and must make the incidents happen by your way, by your own terms. In simpler words, do not let the situation around yourself take control of your life – you must control the circumstances around you to shape your life in the way you want. Being proactive mean, you stop being dependent on the situation, on the people, on the happenings – rather you be independent.
- Begin with the End in Mind: It’s simply deciding or imagining the final goal of your life – and work every step in your life by keeping that goal in your mind. If you want to become a priest in your life and if that’s the final life-goal of yours, you must not do anything which can have even a slightest potential to prevent you from achieving that goal, no matter how little or non-significant that is. Once you decide your purpose in life, take every step, speak every word, do everything which will take you closer to your goal, not the opposite.
- Put first things first: You have to know what your priorities are in your life. Covey explained very clearly how the pseudo-important things cover the most of the list of priorities, and you just don’t get enough time to turn your attention towards some of the real priorities out there.
4.Think win-win: Till now all the 3 habits summarized above, were about your personal self. Only you can follow that 3 habits, nobody else can make you – or if you decide to pursue, nobody else can stop you. But this 4th one is not personal entirely; it’s interpersonal. You have to work with others to turn any situation into a win-win situation. But first, you need to work on the personal level to train your mind to work on this goal. Win-win is simply a deal where no party loses, everybody gets an equal or similar benefit, and everybody laughs. It’s mutual co-operation where you must not think about your own win only, but you must actively work on to make sure that the opposite person wins too.