To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground†is this writer’s favorite quotation from revered author Stephen Covey, whose famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, sold more than 20 million copies and continues to sell even to this day. Covey died last July, leaving his readers with numerous insights, inspiring words and quotable quotes on business and life. Named and praised as one of the business world’s most creative thinkers, Covey has written other bestsellers including First Things First, Principle-Centered Leadership, and The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness. In honor of Covey’s brilliance and timeless thinking, Commonness shares the following list of “Coveyisms†— timeless, helpful, decisive principles of life, as captured in the little book, The Wisdom and Teachings of Stephen R. Covey.
ACCOUNTABILITY. It is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another thing to admit it. People will forgive mistakes, because mistakes are usually of the mind, mistakes of judgment. But people will not easily forgive the mistakes of the heart — the ill intentions, the bad motives, the prideful, justifying cover-up of the first mistake. And, if you can, never use the word “promise†unless you are prepared to pay whatever the price to keep it.
CHOICE. Every human being has four endowments — self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give you the ultimate human freedom: the power to choose, to respond, and to change. Independent will is your capacity to act. It gives you the power to transcend your paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite your scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.
CONTRIBUTION. Deep within you is an inner longing to live a life of greatness and contribution — to really matter, to make a difference. You can consciously decide to leave behind a life of mediocrity or to live a life of greatness — at home, at work, and in the community. You can also look at the weaknesses of others with compassion, not accusation. It’s not what they’re doing or should be doing that’s the issue; the issue is your own chosen response to the situation and what you should be doing.
COURAGE. Where you have no control over a problem, your responsibility is to change the bottom line on your face — to smile, to genuinely and peacefully accept the problem and learn to live with it, even though you don’t like it. In this way, you do not empower the problem to control you. And when you have relationship issues, the only real way to strengthen or repair a strained friendship or bonding is on a one-to-one basis — to go to that person to make reconciliation, to talk the matter over, to apologize, to forgive, or whatever it might take.
EFFECTIVENESS. Highly effective people share seven habits. Habit 1 is “You’re the programmer†while Habit 2 is “Write the program.†Habits 3 and 4 tell us to “Run the program†and “Live the program.†Habit 7 is the paradigm of continuous improvement of the whole person; it stands for education, learning, and recommitment. “Live, love, laugh, leave a legacy†are habits you should capture and nurture.
EMPATHY. If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.†The key here is empathic listening, which is listening with intent to understand. It’s seeking first to really understand. It is getting inside another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way the other person sees the world, you understand his paradigm, and you understand how he feels.
INTEGRITY. Wisdom is the child of integrity — being integrated around principles. And integrity is the child of humility and courage. Humility is the mother of all virtues because humility acknowledges that there are natural laws or principles that govern the universe. Pride teaches that you are in charge. Humility teaches you to understand and live by principles, because it ultimately governs the consequences of your actions. If humility is the mother, courage is the father of wisdom. Because to truly live by these principles when they are contrary to social mores, norms and values take enormous change. You likewise need to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage — pleasantly, smilingly, unapologetically — to say “no†to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes†burning inside.
LEADERSHIP. In this topsy-turvy world, one can often confuse efficiency with effectiveness, expediency with priority, imitation with innovation, cosmetics with character, or pretense with competence. You can buy a person’s hand, but you can’t buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm and his loyalty are. You can buy his back, but you can’t buy his brain. That’s where his creativity, his ingenuity, and his resourcefulness are.
LEARNING. The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct it, and learn from it. This literally turns a failure into success. Educate and obey your conscience too by studying literature that inspires you the most. Then obey it. Little by little, as you obey it, you will get more education. After which, more and more light will come.
LOVE. The laws of love essentially amount to accepting people as they are, listening to them with understanding, respecting their feelings, and patiently and caringly building relationships, where the little things are the big things.
POTENTIAL. You are more than your grievances, your position, your ideology, your team, your company, or your party. You are not a victim of the past. You are a whole person, a unique individual, capable of shaping your own destiny. Your most important financial asset is your own capacity to learn, not just earn.
SELF-DISCIPLINE. Discipline derives from the word “disciple†— disciple to a philosophy, disciple to a set of principles, disciple to a set of values, disciple to an overriding purpose, to a super ordinate goal or a person who represents that goal.
Most people equate discipline with an absence of freedom. In fact, the opposite is true and only the disciplined are truly free. The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions.
SYNERGY. Involve people in the problem, immerse them in it, so that they soak it in and feel it is their problem as well and therefore become an important part of the solution. It’s exciting when you truly hear divergent views and start to see how to bring them together for a solution nobody ever thought of before. Of course, the barriers are defensiveness, territoriality, the not-invented-here syndrome.
TRUST. When there is high trust, communication is easy, effortless, instantaneous. If you make a mistake, it hardly matters. People know you. So if you want to be trusted, be trustworthy.
TRUTH. Correct principles are like compasses: they are always pointing the way. And if you know how to read them, you won’t get lost, confused, or fooled by conflicting voices and values. You must look at the lens through which you see the world, as well as the world you see, for the lens shapes how you interpret the world.
VISION. In building a house, before you turn a shovel of earth you plan almost to the last detail the entire house in your mind, and this is reduced to a blueprint. Therefore, you raise the question: Why should you not also create each day or each week or each year in your mind before you live them in fact? And keep in mind that if the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step you take gets you to the wrong place faster.
WIN-WIN. Most people tend to think in terms of dichotomies: strong or weak, hardball or softball, win or lose. But that kind of thinking is fundamentally flawed. It’s based on power and position more than principle. Win-win is based on the paradigm that there is plenty for everybody, that one person’s success is not achieved at the expense or exclusion of the success of others. Win-win is not a personality technique. Win-win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. It’s a total philosophy of human interaction. It comes from a character of integrity, maturity, and the Abundance Mentality. It grows out of high-trust relationships.
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E-mail bongosorio@yahoo.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions and suggestions. Thank you for communication.