Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 7 - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The main ideas from this information are about the book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. The speaker discusses the concept of a paradigm shift and how it can be life-changing. They explain the importance of having the right map or paradigm for success. The seven habits are broken into three types: personal leadership, interdependence, and sharpening the soul. The first habit is to be proactive and take responsibility for one's life. The second habit is to begin with the end in mind and have a clear vision of where one wants to go. The third habit is to prioritize and put first things first. The speaker gives examples and personal experiences to illustrate these habits. 🎶 Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Child podcast with me, your host Chiyo, and this week we're discussing The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a book by Stephen Carvey. This was my first love in the genre of self-help books. I thought it was an incredible book when I encountered it, and it really shifted my paradigm, and the concept of a paradigm shift was life-changing for me because I'd never come across it before, and Stephen Carvey puts it very, very well in his book. As he opens, he explains how, often without realizing it, we operate with a set of maps in our head. So a map is not an exact replica of the landscape in which we are navigating. Instead, it's a representation of the major landmarks, or the landmarks that the mapmaker thought that we might recognize, and we navigate around using that map in faith that the mapmaker got it right. So what happens sometimes is you have a map and you are in, for argument's sake, Johannesburg, but the map itself is a map of Chicago labeled Johannesburg. No matter how diligent you are in reading that map, you're not going to arrive where you think you're going to arrive. No matter how patient you are, no matter how proactive you are, you're not going to reach where you're wanting to go because the map itself is wrong, and that is how human interactions and sometimes interactions we have with the world happen. We think we're reading a particular map correctly. We think we're reading a particular map to somewhere specific, and yet that map is a map to somewhere else. I read somewhere that managers are the people who say, put the ladder against this wall. We're going up this way. The workers are the ones who are climbing up the ladder. The leader is the one who says, guys, the ladder is against the wrong wall. The importance of understanding the concept of a paradigm and a paradigm shift is so that you can be the person who says to yourself, do I have my ladder against the right wall? Do I have the right map for the place that I'm in? Do I have the right tools to which I can apply myself in order to achieve the best possible outcome? That was my greatest takeaway from Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that there is a concept of a paradigm, and a paradigm can be shifted. Once you're operating in the right paradigm, you apply the habits of an effective person, and you go to where the map is taking you, and the map is the right one for the place that you're in. Simple, but mind-blowing for me. Let's talk about the seven habits of highly effective people themselves. The book is broken into three types of habits. This is what most people don't say. Habit one, two, and three. Habit one is be proactive. Habit two is begin with the end in mind. Habit three is put first things first. Those three habits are about personal leadership. They're about private victory. They're about winning when nobody else can see. It's about you and your relationship with yourself. Then come habit number four, number five, and number six. Habit number four, think win-win, is an incredible habit for the workplace, but we'll get to that. Habit number five is think first to understand, and then to be understood. Habit six is synergize. Those three habits fall into the category of interdependence. You see, you start in a place of dependence. You develop the first three habits, which lead you to a place of independence. A lot of us think independence is the pinnacle of success, but no. The ability to work well with others for a common goal is the pinnacle of success. The ability to operate with others, and to operate within others to achieve a common goal, that is the height of success. That's where you go after independence. You go to interdependence, where you can stand next to somebody else, and you can synergize your powers to create double what you would have done, triple what you would have done, twenty times what you would have done. Then, if you imagine those habits in connected triangles, habit seven holds all of those habits together. Habit seven is sharpen your soul, and that is about making sure that the primary resource, you, is taken care of all the time, so that you're able to contribute meaningfully from habit one to habit six. Now, let's go through the habits themselves. Habit number one is be proactive. This is one of my favorite habits. The habit, we've talked about it in other podcasts in different contexts, but I like the way Stephen Covey puts it. To be proactive is to focus on and to take responsibility for the things that you can control in your life. It's understanding that you have the right and ability to choose how you respond to situations, to choose how you engage with life, to choose how you engage with the things that are thrown at you. See, a lot of people think they're responsible for their own life, but they're not. Pay attention to the way people speak. I actually heard this principle spoken in a different way by Stephen Furtick, the preacher. He said, as long as you're saying they are doing this, and they do this, and they do that, as long as that is how you are speaking, as long as that is the subconscious message and place from which you're operating, you, without realizing it, have completely disempowered yourself. You have completely cut off your ability to connect with the power to change the situation, because as long as it is they who are responsible over there, it is only they who can come and save you. In that paradigm, you have no power, and a disempowered question has never produced an empowered answer. Being proactive is about that mindset. It's understanding that circumstances, conditions, and conditioning for behavior happens, but also realizing that despite this, you can choose your behavior. You can choose how to react. You can choose what to do. You can choose what to focus on. You can choose to focus on your sphere of control versus the sphere of concern. So, in the book, Stephen Covey calls it a circle of influence and a circle of concern. A circle of influence is the things over which you have power and control, health, children, problems at work. The circle of concern is the things over which you have no control, national debt, the economy, terrorism, the weather. It is typical of people who are reactive to focus on the circle of concern and complain about it incessantly rather than to focus on the circle of influence and ask themselves, what can I do? You will notice that a proactive person uses proactive language. I can, I will, I prefer, I can't. While a person who is entirely reactive uses I can't, I have to, if only. If you pause for a second and apply your mind to this, you will recognize these speech patterns either in yourself or in others. It's amazing how some of these things happen all around us and we only truly recognize them when someone points them out and this is the value of books. The second habit is a habit of personal vision and I have talked about vision ad nauseam. Habit number two is begin with the end in mind. This one is based on the idea, Stephen Covey calls it imagination. I've spoken about this before and I've called it biblical. I also call it a scientific thing, a behavioral thing. I've explained how the reticular activating system of your brain works and why you need to give it marching orders so that it can filter things. Filter the things that you see in a way that directs you to the goal. You need to give yourself a direction. When I talked about atomic habits last week, I talked about how the habits are the system that gets you to where you're going but you still need to know where it is you're going. It's amazing how many people have an unclear vision of exactly where they want to go and as a result their efforts to get there are dear my car and that is inevitable because you don't actually know where you're going. So you go from here to there and you're swept in the wind because your directional focus is not clear. Your habits and systems are pointing you in whatever direction they can but they're not directed by you proactively because you don't know where you're going. So when habit number two says begin with the end of mind, it is saying the ability to envision with your mind, the ability to see with your eyes that this is the thing that I would like to do is so fundamental because things are created twice. First in your mind and then second in the physical world. The physical creation follows the mental just as a building follows a blueprint. If you do not make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default. It's about connecting with the things that matter to you, with the values that are fundamental to you. It's about understanding what your moral, personal, ethical guidelines and priorities have said to you your happiest life should look like. And once you have that vision, you can begin creating the systems and the habits that will take you there. But you need to understand first where you're going and so after being proactive, understanding that it is up to you, you then take up the habit of understanding where you're going. You then begin with the end in mind. You form the habit of personal vision. After the habit of personal vision comes the habit of personal management. Now you know where you're going. What now? Now you learn to prioritize. Habit number three is putting first things first. I remember struggling at work and this I struggled at work with my email. My email was incessant. So I'm responsible for compliance. I'm responsible for compliance in the general scheme. So it's regulatory from different regulators. It is statutory from various acts and it is operational. Over and above that I'm responsible for legal things. I'm responsible for company sectarial. I'm responsible for problem solving. And the result of those things sitting together under the same person is that my email is wild. It is a freaking jungle. And what I wasn't doing when I started the job was proactively managing my mailbox. What was happening was things would come in and according to the urgency assigned to that item by the person sending it, I would then run to deal with it or not run to deal with it. But the result is I wasn't putting things that should be first first. And I started to find myself frustrated. I started to find my stakeholders frustrated because even though I was producing results, it wasn't necessarily the results I needed to be producing. And I remember I had three days after I went to a training session to learn how to use my Outlook properly because that's what they could do to help me. They thought maybe if we can empower you to use your Outlook and all the tools in your Outlook to help filter out things to help, you know, the usual stuff, then we can get the desired outcome. But what I got from that training instead was it was up to me to manage how I prioritize the work that I'm doing. If I know what the end goal is, it's my job to align the things that are that are coming in in line with that strategic end goal. And I must prioritize those things in that way. And I actually learned instead of learning purely to manage a tool, I learned to manage people. I learned to say, no, this is not going to work for me. Thank you. I understand that this is important. But I also understand that it is less urgent than this, which is also equally important. So I'm going to deal with this first. And it allowed me to breathe and it allowed the people who were talking to me to breathe. And in the end, everyone was more at peace because they knew exactly how things were going to work. I was then able to create a system that tells people, if you send me this, then this is what's going to happen. If you send me that, then this is what's going to happen. If you send me this, then this is how it's what's going to happen. And when I did that, all of a sudden, there was lots of breathing space for me and for my team for us to do the thing that we know how to do best, problem solve and problem solve efficiently. And this is why putting first things first might not seem like a big thing, but it is a defining thing in self mastery, especially for people who are either knowingly or unknowingly people pleasers. Because the pressure to do the thing that someone else is telling you is urgent is so high sometimes that it can derail you from doing the things that are in fact urgent and important and must actually be prioritized. Habits one and two come together in habit number three. Habit number three is the day in and the day out, the moment by moment. This is where you choose whether to run in support of your goal to be fit, understanding that your health is your primary responsibility. You heard habit one, two and three in that one sentence, I hope. Right. So first things are those things that you find most worthy of your time, according to your value system. If you put first things first, you're organizing and managing time and events according to the personal priorities that you established by beginning with the end in mind. So that's habit one, two and three, which is those are the that's the triangle of self mastery. At this point, you have established independence, you have established the ability to survive as a unique organism on your own going towards a certain goal. That is a place of power. But there's a place that is even more powerful. But in order to get to the place that is even more powerful, you must first pass through the place of learning to be independent. Then here we go into triangle number two, interdependence. How do you take your independent self and partner it with other independent people in order to create wins all round in order to compound your power and your influence all round to achieve the desired outcome? Habit number four is think win win. I cannot tell you how powerful think win win has been for me professionally, perhaps because I always have to negotiate things. But this is the thing. When we're taught to negotiate, when we're taught to engage, when we're taught to seek a particular outcome, we are very often taught that it is win lose, or lose win. In other words, if if I win in this negotiation, that person has lost or if I lose in this negotiation, that person has won. But there is a there are two more options. There is lose lose, where you both come out with nothing. And there's win win where you both come out with something. The best of the four is not win lose. The best of the four is win win, where you come out with your win, the other person comes out with a win, and you both come out with the desired outcome and a relationship preserved, or perhaps even a relationship grown. Now think win win is not about being nice. A lot of people confuse being nice with being effective. Those two things have nothing to do with each other. Think win win is not a quick fix technique, either. It's a character based code for human interaction and collaboration. See, a lot of us base our self worth on comparisons and competition, because that's what we've been taught. We think about succeeding in terms of someone else failing. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. Life becomes a zero sum game. There is only so much pie to go around, we think. And if you get a big piece, there's less for me. It's not fair. I'm going to make sure you don't get any more. We all play the game. But this is the problem. We play the game because this is all we know. Whereas win win sees life as a cooperative arena, and not a competitive one. And I have found entering situations where relationships are acutely contentious, where people have been fighting for years, that really there's a person on the other side, who is just as frustrated as the person who has sent me, and they're tired of fighting. And what they want is a fruitful outcome. And if you can work out what they want, and you can work out how what you want, and how those two things can come together in such a way that everyone benefits at minimum cost, you will be amazed how many rooms you will walk out of knowing that you've won something. And the more wins you have, the more success you have. And the more wins you have in a win-win manner, the greater your circle of influence grows. To go for win-win, you don't need to be soft. You only need to be empathetic and you have to be confident. You have to have the ability to be considerate and sensitive, but also brave. Win-win is one of the hardest habits to create because it goes against everything that we've been taught. We have been taught to win. We have been taught to walk out with the gold medal. But win-win says to you, can you both walk out with the medal, having both achieved what you came in to do, or to a reasonable extent, having both achieved what you came in to do. If you try applying this to a lot of work situations, you will be amazed at how quickly situations diffuse. If you try applying this to talking to a toddler, you'll be amazed how quickly situations diffuse that could have escalated into a tantrum. I can't speak for teenagers. I hear they're a different breed. But apply it to your friendships. Apply it to debates. Apply it to situations in which you're frustrated and wanting to fight. And you will be surprised at how much you can get done, how many times you can move people in the direction that you seek, purely because you've also made an effort to hear where they're coming from and to move in that direction. And this segues quite nicely into habit number five. And habit number five is the habit of empathetic communication. You see, if you are not able to hear the other person, you have no way of creating a win-win situation. Communication. God, you know, this is such a cliche, but the problem with cliches is not that they're not true, right? They are actually true. It's just that they're one version of the story. Communication is the most important life skill. You spent years learning how to read, write, and speak, but what about listening, right? According to Stephen, what training did you have that enabled you to listen so you could really deeply understand another human being? Probably none, right, according to him. If you're like most people, you probably seek first to be understood. You want to get your point across. And in so doing, unintentionally or otherwise, you may ignore the other person completely, pretend that you're listening, selectively hear only certain parts of the conversation, and attentively focus on only the words that are being said, but miss the meaning entirely. How profound is that? But why does this happen? Because we listen with the intention to reply and not to understand. And the trouble with listening with the intention to reply is you're not collecting enough information to create a win-win. There is so much power in hearing what a person is bothered by, because you might be surprised to learn that it is a thing that you can give in return for the thing that you are seeking, but you have no way of knowing if you do not actually listen to what they're saying. Pay attention. You see, a lot of us, a lot of us go into a room, gung-ho, guns blazing, wanting to make our point. By all means, make your point. But in order to truly be powerful, you need to make your point and also hear the other point, so you can synthesize that information and have the ability to propose a win-win situation. So habit number six then becomes synergize. So all the habits segue neatly into each other. To put it simply, synergy means two heads are better than one. It means the power of two can create double, triple, or more of an outcome. Synergizing is the habit of creative cooperation. It is teamwork. It's open-mindedness. It's the adventure of finding new solutions to old problems, because you've put your mind together with another person's mind. You see, once you learn to stand on your own, you then have the ability to stand next to somebody else who can stand on their own and produce remarkable results. When people begin to interact genuinely and they're open to each other's influence, they begin to gain new insight. I thought of this just this past weekend. I sat with a friend, two friends, who are also, who are leaders in their space, in the C-suite, et cetera. And I am always amazed how sitting with women like that, or sitting with other mothers, or sitting with other sports people, will teach me something that I don't know but that they do. So when you're listening to them, when you're understanding that this person has their space over there and I have my space over here, and you listen to what's happening in their space, you learn things that can grow you in your own space and vice versa. When you synergize, you create less, you suffocate ego, you want to put away the ego, and you want to sit next to the people who are doing things and thinking in ways that are similar to yours. And you want to put together your powers to amplify each one of you's powers. When you value the difference, you see, a lot of people think that in order for the world to just work, everyone must think like they do. Many people mistake uniformity for unity and sameness for oneness. No. Differences are strengths, right? Differences make life interesting. And when you're able to identify a difference, perhaps even a strength in someone else that is a weakness in you, and you're able to identify a weakness in them that is a strength in you, what it means is that the two of you together working on something means that you guys are more powerful, that you're able to produce a result in a shorter time, that you're able to troubleshoot and resolve much, much better than you otherwise would have. That is what synergy is. Now, those two triangles now created by your independence and your first triangle of habits, habit 1, 2, and 3, and the second triangle created by the interdependence habits, habit 4, 5, and 6, are contained in habit number 7. And habit number 7 is sharpen your soul. Habit number 7, in short, is the principle of self-renewal. You see, there's a story that he tells in the book, Stephen, of a man who is attempting to cut down a tree. And he hacks at this tree and hacks at this tree with his axe. And a person is watching him, four hours later, still going at this. And he says to him, hold on, your axe is blunt. Why don't you sharpen it first and then cut the tree? No, no, no, no, no. I don't have time. I do not have time. I must get this tree cut down immediately. And what that person misses is if they stop for 30 minutes to sharpen the axe, right, they will be able to cut down that tree in half the time. It's obvious when you tell the story like this. And yet many, many times people forfeit the things on which their health is based because they're in a hurry to do something else. They're in a hurry to sort out something else. If you can just, if I can just push through to this outcome, even though I feel completely ill and I'm not going to the doctor, then I will have won something. But in truth, you have compromised the foundation on which everything else is built. Steven of Diary of a CEO once gave an excellent example, I thought, of how if he was putting items on a table, and he puts family success, he puts financial success, he puts friendships, he puts everything on this little table. And he says, all of this stuff is sitting safely here. But the table on which they're sitting is my health. And if my health is not intact, if I'm not in a good place mentally and physically, then these things all fall to the ground. And that's what Steven Covey recognizes by encouraging us to sharpen the sword. Take care of yourself. Take care of your mental health. You need you need therapy, go to therapy, right? You need a doctor, something's not working quite right in your body, go to the doctor, drink water, exercise, move a little very often, eat nutritiously as much as possible. When you indulge, indulge consciously. And the foundation on which every other habit is based will be secure. And what you build will be spectacular, but you will also be able to enjoy it. I hope that you found this useful. This, like I said, was my first love in this genre of books. And it is such a basic book with basic principles that have been around and I use basic in the English sense and not in the in the slang sense that has been around for 25 odd, maybe 30 years. This book has sold over 40 million copies because it is sensible and it makes sense and it speaks to a change of ideology, a change of mental map that each one of us can relate to. Thank you very much for joining me. If you like this episode of the pod, please share with a friend. Otherwise, let's grow together. Let's find this holistic personal and professional success. Thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate you. I appreciate your time. Have a great week.