7 Habits of Highly Effective People

For the next 8 posts, I will be concentrating on sharing with all of you the principles of living effectively. I have come across several people recently and it's quite sad for me to see them aimless, lost and confuse not knowing what to do or how to improve on their lifestyle and personality.

So I was thinking to myself, "What if I could help? What if by just sharing the basics of being an effective person helps them to be better?" I was very fortunate to be able to attend this course, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People training in my previous company. Honestly, when I first went for the training, I wasn't too excited about it as the training was hogging up my whole precious weekend and PLUS I had to drive all the way downtown for the training.

But you know what? After the training, I began to realized that the things I learned could help me to be a better person from who I am now. I can feel the changes within me. The way I see things, the way I handle them and so on. So as boring as these next 8 posts may be, I hope you bear with me and do take time to digest them. After doing so, It would have a possibility that you too would change to be someone better. :)

Introduction:

DEVELOPING A HABIT

A habit is defined as the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire. Knowledge is understanding what to do and why to do it; skill is knowing how to do it; desire is the motivation or wanting to do it. To make habits, we need to develop all three components.



These three components are learned rather than inherited, our habits are our second nature , not our first. We are not our current habits; hence, we should avoid defining ourselves in terms of our habits, characteristics and reactive tendencies. Habits of effectiveness can be learned, habits of ineffectiveness, unlearned.


CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY

The relationship between character and personality can be illustrated with an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg (personality) is what people first see. Although image, techniques and skills can influence your outward success, the weight of real effectiveness lies in good character.



Some of you may know, some of you may experience before; sometimes we as mere humans would judge on someone based on their outer appearance. What you see outside of a person does not determine his/her character. I for an instance always have this bad first impression people. People use to think of the first sight of seeing me that I'm some sort of a bad person, someone lack of education or some Ah Beng off the streets.

Until they start talking to me, until they get to know me, they would later then realized how wrong they are of their assumptions towards my character. I am a walking testimonial of the phrase "Don't judge a book by its covers". One person's true self could never bee seen just like the iceberg picture above.

Don't be too quick on judging others as we are all equal, we're all humans. We are not perfect. Every one's the same. What gives some people extra right to judge another fellow human?

The answer is NONE!

We do not have the right to judge another person as everyone is unique in their own different ways. We're created differently, we walked a different path of life each.

THE MATURITY CONTINUUM

The maturity continuum shows the relationships among the Seven Habits, Public Victory and Private Victory and the stages of interdependent progression.



Private Victory: We experience the Private Victory when we learn self-mastery and self-discipline.

Public Victory: We reap the Public Victory when we build deep, lasting, highly effective relationships with other people.

I would go through with you in the next coming entries about each habits and ways to achieve both public and private victory through these habits. Once both of these victories had been taken, you would experience what the experts call "Paradigm Shift"


What is a Paradigm Shift?

A Paradigm Shift is when a significant change happens - usually from one fundamental view to a different view. In most cases, some type of major discontinuity occurs as well.

Thomas Kuhn wrote about Paradigm Shift during the early 1960s, and explained how "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" caused "one conceptual world view to be replaced by another view."

In laymen terms, Paradigm Shift is a popular, or perhaps, not so popular shift or transformation of the way we Humans perceive events, people, environment, and life altogether. It can be a national or international shift, and could have dramatic effects -- whether positive or negative -- on the way we live our lives today and in the future.