After years of hearing about the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People“, I finally just finished reading it. My thought was that this book would be a great addition to my broader life planning process. I must admit that I was a little disappointed. OK, OK, stop swearing at me, let me explain a little further (I know this is considered by many to be *the* self-help bible). I think with all the hype, the “Over 15 million Sold” on the front cover, and looking forward to reading it for so long, my expectations were set too high. I was expecting some down-to-earth practical advice that I could include in my personal development methodology. What I found was that this book is great for people who are really looking for a major change in their lives. However, I’m a lot further along in that process that maybe some other readers are. Granted, there are some really good ideas that I plan to incorporate, but I had expected to come out with a lot more.
In general, there are four main areas within the book - the introduction, the first three habits, the next three habits, and the last habit. The introduction starts off with why Stephen Covey wrote the book in the first place. I really resonated with his discussion of needing to base your life decisions on timeless basic principles. This aligns well with my personal vision and values.
The first three habits are about getting yourself together. You need to get your mind into a place where you realize you are responsible for your life and your own personal development. My mind has been in this place for a long time (long enough to know everyone else in the neighborhood and be chairman of the home owner’s association).
You need to determine your personal mission (made up of personal vision and your values), and then come up with a plan for achieving it. This was an interesting chapter, as this aligns well with the initial step in my development process. One of the more interesting ideas was that people are ‘centered’ around something - their spouse, their work, possessions, money, etc. This impacts how you see the world. You need to recognize this and make sure this doesn’t cause your life to be out of balance. Another good idea is to break up your mission statement (e.g. personal vision and values) into your specific roles in life (e.g. father, husband, employee, etc). This was an area I struggled with when developing my personal vision. It was difficult to come up with one statement that captures all aspects of your life. Covey recommends identifying the top 2-3 things within each role that you must achieve to be successful. These are the goals you want to pursue.
After you get your goals in order, you need an implementation plan. One of the key ideas is the time management matrix, where activities are placed into 4 quadrants defined by how urgent and important they are. The idea is that you want to focus your time on things that are really important and less urgent. A suggestion is to map out several days worth of your time to determine which quadrant you are focused in. One area I felt was lacking was how to address broader goals in life. It seemed that most of the focus was on a weekly ‘to-do list’ kind of schedule. But there are broader goals in life that can’t be achieved in a week. This is a disconnect that I’ll need to resolve when I transition into the next phase of life strategy development.
The next three habits were about creating good relationships with other people. You really need to be part of the larger community and be a good person in order to be successful. There was a lot of good reading in here, but this only covers some of the life goals related to being a better father, husband, manager, etc. I’m not sure how you could use this method to achieve travel goals of visiting all National Parks, or going white water rafting. Overall though, this is a great chapter for working on relationships.
The last habit is about renewal - continuing to improve. Here Covey talks about the 4 dimensions of your nature - Physical, Mental, Spiritual, and Social/Emotional. Each of them needs to be addressed as you improve your life. He breaks down the Physical dimension into three areas that seem to be pretty common in the fitness world - endurance, flexibility, and strength. The Spiritual dimension is the area where you reflect on your life and spend time thinking about how to better improve yourself. When you spend time reading, or writing, doing puzzles, etc, you are working on the Mental dimension (Sudoku anyone?). He recommends that you spend a least 1 hour a day focused on the these three dimensions. The fourth dimension, Social/Emotional, is about giving back to others.
Overall, I had pretty high expectations for this book which weren’t met. I had thought it would focus more on the ‘how-to’ part of things, less on the ‘why’ and ‘what’. It is much more about describing principles, not practices (something stated in the book). Obviously this book has a lot of value, especially if you need a different way to look at your life. I’m going to take some of the ideas described above, and incorporate them into my Personal Development Methodology. Many of the ideas will apply later when I develop the implementation plan (e.g. the Time Management Matrix), but I’ll still use a few of them during this initial Goal-Setting Phase.
