In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey distills timeless wisdom into seven lifelong practices for building a successful, fulfilling life. Rather than small, daily actions like brushing your teeth, these habits are patterns of thinking and acting that represent a broader approach to life. They are:
Collectively, Covey’s seven habits help you to examine and adjust your character, your motives, and how you see the world in order to become more effective both personally and professionally.
(Shortform note: In the evolution of self-help books, 7 Habits takes a character-focused approach to self-improvement—changing perspective and motivation in order to alter behavior—amid a sea of behavior-focused self-help classics like How to Win Friends and Influence People, which share practical tips to conduct yourself differently.)
Before we dive into the habits, let’s examine Covey’s approach and goal for readers who adopt the seven habits.
Covey writes that changing your behaviors and your life requires you to change your paradigms, or perspectives. Your perspectives impact how you interpret situations, and your interpretations dictate your behavior; thus, changing your perspective changes your behavior. Taking this a step further, your behaviors determine your outcomes, which collectively shape your life.
(Shortform note: Covey doesn’t specify how to change your perspectives. James Allen argues in As A Man Thinketh that problems arise from negative thinking, so you should think positively to improve your perspective and reality. Alternatively, in Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins asserts that changing your perspective requires reprogramming your neuro-associations—good or bad feelings linked to people and situations based on your past experiences.)
Covey distills his advice into habits in order to:
The seven habits aim to make you effective, which means that you target your efforts to get the most important things done, thus raising the quality of your accomplishments. (Shortform note: Covey’s emphasis on effectiveness was likely inspired by Peter F. Drucker, who argued in 1966 that success as a business leader requires effectiveness.)
According to Covey, a cornerstone of effective living is interdependence, which means that you can take care of your needs but you recognize that you can achieve more through collaboration. (Shortform note: While Covey focuses on developing interdependence as an individual, John C. Maxwell describes similar traits among successful leaders. In The 5 Levels of Leadership, Maxwell writes that the most effective leaders—those at Level 4 and Level 5—combine their leadership skills with their team members’ talents for collaborative greatness.)
Now, let’s dive into the habits. Habits 1-3 focus on personal effectiveness, while 4-6 stress effectiveness through collaboration. For clarity, we present each habit in the same format:
Take initiative (Covey labels this habit “be proactive”). In other words, change the problems that you can change and accept the ones you can’t.
According to Covey, Habit 1 lays the foundation for the subsequent habits because taking initiative is key to adopting new behaviors. Rather than being reactive (externally influenced) and allowing your environment or circumstances dictate how you feel and act, being proactive (initiative-taking) empowers you to choose your thoughts and actions.
(Shortform note: Taking initiative entails taking control of your actions and your responses to circumstances—and positive psychology researcher Shawn Achor asserts that feeling in control makes you happier, more motivated, less stressed, physically healthier, and better at communicating and problem-solving.)
For each of your concerns, determine which category it falls into, and act accordingly.
Determine who you want to be and what’s important to you, and keep these goals front-of-mind with a personal mission statement. (Shortform note: Goal-setting theory confirms that creating specific, challenging goals improves performance.)
Covey argues that you have to imagine the life you want before you can achieve it. Vividly envisioning your goal keeps you focused on your destination amid daily demands and distractions. (Shortform note: Robbins takes Covey’s point a step further, arguing that intensely focusing on your goals also works on a subconscious level by triggering a sort of radar in your brain that directs your attention to resources that can help you achieve those goals.)
Habit 2 is a two-part process:
Checklist of an Effective Personal Mission Statement
Personal mission statements are as unique as the people who write them. But, in First Things First, Covey lists several characteristics that every effective mission statement should have:
It recognizes and incorporates your unique talents.
It guides you to contribute to a higher purpose beyond yourself.
It addresses your physical, social, mental, and spiritual needs.
It balances your personal, family, work, and community roles.
It inspires you.
Prioritize your time and actions in order to live up to your personal mission statement. (Shortform note: To help you apply Covey’s advice, we’ve included organizational strategies later in this guide from the more detailed, systematic approach described in Getting Things Done.)
To prioritize the tasks that will have the biggest positive impact on your life, Covey promotes a time management matrix originally designed by President Eisenhower that categorizes tasks based on their urgency and importance (meaning that they contribute to your goals, values, and personal mission statement). The matrix has four task categories, which Covey refers to as quadrants:
Develop Time Management Skills to Complement the Tools
Research suggests that this matrix is a useful tool, but it doesn’t develop all of the three skills necessary for effective time management, each of which is equally important:
Awareness that your available time is limited—the matrix doesn’t measure the accuracy of your time estimates for tasks, nor does it improve how you allocate your limited time.
Arrangement of your time through goal-setting, planning, and scheduling—the matrix is most effective in this category because it helps you prioritize the most important tasks to schedule accordingly.
Adaptation of your time while carrying out tasks, particularly when you’re interrupted and have to shift priorities—the matrix potentially improves adaptation by providing a system to gauge priorities on the fly if your work is interrupted with an urgent request.
Covey asserts that weekly planning is the most effective way to manage your time and achieve your goals: A weekly schedule is narrow enough to ensure important tasks get done promptly, and it’s broad enough to be flexible when things come up unexpectedly.
Follow these steps to create your weekly plan:
Prioritize and Get Things Done
Habit 3 takes a big-picture approach to time management, but the Getting Things Done (GTD) system offers more specific advice on how to gather, assess, organize, and address the relentless flow of emails and demands. The five steps of the GTD system are:
Capture every problem, idea, reminder, and to-do in a designated in-tray.
Clarify what you need to do with each item: throw it away, keep it for reference, delegate it, do it, schedule it, or save it to reconsider later.
Organize each item: File reference items and things to reconsider, hand off delegated items, write action items on a to-do list, and put scheduled items on a calendar.
Review your calendar and to-do list frequently; your calendar determines the structure of your days and weeks, while your to-do list tells you what to tackle between scheduled appointments.
Engage with the task; in other words, get it done.
Rather than creating a weekly schedule, as Covey recommends, the GTD system emphasizes a weekly review to update to-do lists and calendars and review scheduled appointments and priorities for the week ahead.
When tackling a problem or negotiation with someone, always strive to find a mutually beneficial solution.
While Habits 1-3 focus on personal effectiveness, Covey says that Habits 4-6 focus on building interdependent (or collaborative) success through strong relationships and effective interactions.
Habit 4 is the first step: Approach every interaction as an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial outcome, which Covey calls a “Win/Win” mindset.
(Shortform note: Although the idea of finding a mutually beneficial solution seems appealing, negotiation coach Jim Camp argues that win/win often pressures both parties to rush to any agreement rather than doing the haggling necessary to reach the best deal.)
Once you’ve adopted the right mindset and you sit down to negotiate or work together, how do you actually arrive at a mutually beneficial solution? Covey offers these tips:
When communicating with others, Covey urges you to try to understand their perspective before asking them to understand yours.
Covey points out that you can’t reach a mutually beneficial solution without first understanding the other person’s interests. This requires empathic listening, or striving to understand the other person’s perspectives by interpreting what they’re saying as well as how they feel. (Shortform note: Subsequent research has found that, beyond empathy, effective listening involves giving supportive, constructive responses.)
Covey suggests you practice empathic listening with these exercises:
Specific Strategies for Empathic Listening
Covey’s exercises allow you to practice empathic listening, but he doesn’t provide many specific strategies. Supplement Covey’s exercises with these practical strategies for empathic listening from the Crisis Prevention Center:
Signal that you're listening with your body language and gestures like nodding.
Withhold your judgments. You don’t have to agree with the other person, but you must release your opinions long enough to understand the other person’s perspective.
Paraphrase what you think the other person is saying, and ask them if you’re correct.
Embrace silence. Sometimes your presence is enough to make the other person feel supported.
Don’t cut the conversation short. Make sure the other person has expressed everything they wanted to say.
Covey contends that collaborating (creating what he calls “synergy”) with another person enables you to achieve more than either of you could alone.
Covey believes that collaboration creates outcomes greater than the sum of the parts, as in 1+1 = 3 or more (for example, one singer plus another singer creates a harmony). This is possible because the relationship itself adds value by creating the opportunity for collaboration.
The mutually beneficial mindset from Habit 4 and empathic listening from Habit 5 foster trust and goodwill, which are necessary for effective communication and collaboration. Covey suggests that the collaborative process then strengthens the relationship, which benefits future collaborations. (Shortform note: Subsequent research has revealed that the connection between empathy, trust, and collaboration is neurological: When people feel trusted, their brains release higher levels of oxytocin, which makes them more trustworthy and trusting. As a result, in high-trust environments, people become more productive and collaborative.)
To effectively collaborate, Covey says you need “internal synergy.” In other words, be both analytical and intuitive, because life can be logical as well as emotional.
(Shortform note: To supplement Covey’s advice, which is fairly abstract, managers can use specific strategies to increase trust and promote collaboration on their teams. These tactics include encouraging relationship-building among teammates, giving people the freedom to choose how they work, and celebrating successes publicly and promptly.)
Covey’s final habit, self-renewal, maintains your well-being so that you can continue doing the work of Habits 1-6.
Covey asserts that keeping yourself mentally and physically healthy prevents burnout, supports productivity, and actually improves your overall efficiency and effectiveness, creating an upward spiral of growth. Self-renewal also helps you stay disciplined and focused on your goals and values.
(Shortform note: A key benefit that Covey overlooks is that self-renewal weakens the negative impacts of stress. This reframes the value of self-care: It doesn’t make you feel better by masking or distracting from your issues, but rather by helping you get through them.)
Covey advises practicing four aspects of self-renewal:
Focus on What’s Most Important
Minimalists have developed similar categories, not for the express purpose of self-renewal, but rather as a way to focus on the most important things in order to eliminate excess and live a simpler life. However, decluttering your life in these areas could also contribute to self-renewal. Minimalism authors Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus describe five key values (some of which overlap Covey’s four dimensions):
Health—Eat well and exercise.
Relationships—Drop unproductive relationships and invest in meaningful ones.
Passions—Pursue a mission-driven passion instead of career and status.
Growth—Make small, daily changes that contribute to substantial growth over time.
Contribute to others—Serve society and help others grow.
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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People distills common knowledge and oft-repeated wisdom—from classic philosophy to religious teachings—into seven lifelong practices for building a successful, fulfilling life. Rather than small, daily actions like brushing your teeth, these habits are patterns of thinking and acting that represent a broader approach to life. Collectively, the seven habits help you to identify and accomplish the things that are most important to you.
In this classic, Stephen R. Covey is credited with creating the “business self-help” genre with advice that draws on his business management expertise as well as his Mormon faith. The seven habits are applicable for both personal and professional growth—and that has played a large part in the book’s enduring success.
The seven habits are:
Covey (1932-2012) was an educator, management consultant, and prolific author of self-help, business, and leadership books. Covey’s drive to help others live effectively stemmed from his desire to live that way himself—and that set him apart from other self-help authors, according to his friend Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma.
In classes, books, and training courses, Covey spent his career educating people on business management, leadership skills, and personal improvement, and he accumulated a variety of accolades for his work.
Connect with FranklinCovey Co:
Publisher: Free Press, an independent publisher later acquired by Simon & Schuster.
Published in 1989, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was Covey’s breakout success. While some of his earlier books—including Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (1970) and The Divine Center (1982)—were geared toward a Mormon audience, 7 Habits gained traction by targeting a mainstream audience and exploring the intersection of Covey’s areas of interest: business, leadership, self-improvement, and how to lead a balanced life.
The 7 Habits became such a cultural force that it essentially evolved into its own brand. The book spawned a number of adaptations, including:
The book was also re-released for the 25th and 30th anniversaries. This guide refers to the 25th-anniversary edition.
Other Covey bestsellers include:
When 7 Habits was published at the close of the 1980s, its focus on self-reflection, personal improvement, and collaboration was well-timed to satisfy new needs and interests in both the business and self-help genres:
In the evolution of self-help books, 7 Habits takes a character-focused approach to self-improvement, amid a sea of behavior-focused self-help classics like How to Win Friends and Influence People. As an example, if you want to be a better listener, the behavior-centered (outward) approach would offer tips on attentive listening, while the character-focused (internal) approach would emphasize the importance of listening in relationships. (We’ll talk more about internal and external approaches in Chapter 1.)
Covey appears to be influenced by Peter F. Drucker, bestselling author of the 1966 classic The Effective Executive and the “father of management thinking”. Drucker believed that the root of a company’s success is its people, and he urged leaders to prioritize workers and relationships over output and profits. Drucker said that effectiveness required a set of repeated practices that progressively improved competence—and Covey’s seven habits are precisely that.
In the crowded self-help landscape, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has distinguished itself as an enduring classic. The book remains the fifth best-selling self-help book ever published more than 30 years after its publication, as it is a staple on the bookshelves of entrepreneurs and political leaders alike. Covey even counseled President Bill Clinton and more than 25 other national leaders on integrating the habits into their leadership.
Among the book’s many accolades, it:
The book’s two signature features—the distillation of common wisdom and the habits framework—are the primary objects of praise as well as criticism:
1) The common wisdom at the core of the seven habits (such as identifying what’s truly important in life) is universal enough to resonate with people from diverse regions, backgrounds, and cultures. Fans feel that the timeless, universal principles add credibility to Covey’s advice and ensure that it will still be applicable for years to come. On the other hand, some critics accuse Covey of merely repackaging established truths without offering new insights.
2) The habits create a framework for applying the universal principles. Some praise Covey for turning the common wisdom into practices, while others argue that the habits aren’t specific enough to be actionable. For example, the book goes into detail about the importance of changing your paradigms or thought patterns in order to solve problems in your life, but one reviewer notes that Covey doesn’t explain specifically how to change your paradigms. (Shortform note: Where possible, we’ve added more specific strategies to carry out his advice.)
Although 7 Habits is considered a business self-help book, it has two elements that distinguish it from most business books. First, Covey focuses heavily on developing personal character and living a life guided by principles. The book primarily focuses on the individual, intermittently explaining how the principles apply to organizations. Considering his inside-out philosophy of self-improvement, it’s only logical that his advice for business success would start not in the office, but in the mind.
Second, the text is sprinkled with mentions of God and faith (for instance, Covey notes that he believes that God is the source of “correct” universal principles). Covey acknowledges that his faith colors his interpretation and application of the habits, and, according to Clayton Christensen—fellow Mormon and business author—the seven habits are rooted in Mormon teachings. However, the principles that underlie the seven habits transcend any single religion; therefore, it is not necessary to believe in God in order to understand, agree with, or apply the seven habits.
As for the effectiveness of Covey’s habits, we must first define what it is to be an effective person. To Covey, living effectively means being aware of your guiding values, prioritizing things that help you live up to those values, and working efficiently and cooperatively with others. And, overall, the habits appear to achieve that—but the text relies more heavily on anecdotes, fables, and common sense than on scientific research (though studies have since emerged confirming his assertions, as we’ll discuss later).
Covey first lays out the habits’ approach and goal: His approach is character-driven (as opposed to behavior-focused) self-improvement, and his goal is interdependence, which balances self-sufficiency with cooperation and collaboration.
The habits, then, are organized to reflect this method and destination:
This guide aims to simplify and build on Covey’s advice to make it as useful as possible. For clarity, each chapter follows the same organization:
In places where Covey’s advice is limited or abstract, we’ve provided additional, specific tips. In several cases, we’ve drawn comparisons and added suggestions from Tony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within, which has many parallels with the concepts in Habits 1-3.
Additionally, we’ve used more descriptive terms meant to be easier to understand and remember than Covey’s, and we’ve noted those changes.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People distills timeless wisdom into seven lifelong practices for building a successful, fulfilling life. Collectively, the seven habits help you to identify and accomplish the things that are most important to you.
Before we dive into the habits, let’s examine Covey’s approach and goal for readers who adopt the seven habits.
Covey writes that in order to improve your behaviors, yourself, and your life, you must first examine and shift your paradigms, which are the lenses through which you see the world. Your paradigms, or perspectives, shape how you interpret your situations and surroundings, and your interpretations dictate your behavior; thus, changing your perspective changes your behavior. Taking this a step further, your behaviors determine your outcomes, which collectively shape your life.
Consider this example of how perspectives, interpretations, behaviors, and results are intertwined:
Perspective #1: A supervisor believes that people act primarily for their own gain.
Interpretation #1: She notices that her subordinates seldom take the initiative to start tasks, and she assumes (per her perspective) that this is because employees slack off given the opportunity.
Behavior #1: She micromanages her team in order to keep everyone on task.
Result #1: Her micromanaging actually causes the people on her team to hesitate to initiate tasks, because she interferes so much that they don’t feel that they have the freedom to act independently.
Now, imagine the supervisor in this scenario takes a different perspective.
Perspective #2: The supervisor shifts her perspective to believe that people are intrinsically motivated to do a good job.
Interpretation #2: When she sees her team members taking an unexpected approach to a task, she assumes they’re being innovative—not slacking off—because her perspective dictates that they are invested in the team’s collective success.
Behavior #2: She gives employees freedom to work independently and checks in periodically to provide support.
Result #2: Her subordinates are empowered to tackle each project with their best effort, even if they approach things differently than their supervisor would. Additionally, this freedom shows the workers that their supervisor has confidence in them, which motivates them to work hard and perform.
Covey explains that everyone has a patchwork of perspectives that are influenced by a lifetime of exposure to the world—family, education, work, religion, friends, and culture. Ironically, although our perspectives determine all of our thoughts, actions, and emotions, we are so accustomed to them—like a fish to water—that we seldom even realize that they exist, let alone question their accuracy. For example, your political beliefs are a lens through which you view events and people. Think of the last time that you responded emotionally to a president’s speech (whether positive or negative); how much did you pause to question why you felt that way, and what perspectives colored your interpretation of that speech?
Awaken the Giant Within: Perspectives Stem From Your Subconscious
Whether internally or externally focused, self-improvement ultimately focuses on changing behaviors—and that leads to an inevitable question: Why do we do what we do? While Covey attributes it to perspectives, Tony Robbins argues that subconscious associations and thought patterns drive your actions.
Robbins essentially attributes your behavior to two factors:
Neuro-associations—These are the negative and positive associations embedded in your brain wiring, based on your past experiences (for example, if you felt happy while listening to a particular song, you’ll then associate that song with pleasure). Every action and inaction is motivated by a subconscious urge to avoid things that trigger negative associations and seek things that trigger positive ones. (Later, we’ll detail Robbins’s step-by-step strategy for reprogramming your neuro-associations.)
Master System—This is your internal operating system, which controls how you interpret the world and what you think, feel, and do in response. It comprises five elements: your present mental and emotional state, your habitual self-talk, your values, your beliefs about relationships, and the thoughts and memories that reinforce your beliefs. According to Robbins, you can change each of these five elements to collectively alter your Master System.
Covey’s suggestion to shift your perspective in order to change your life is based on what he calls a “Character Ethic,” which we’ll call the internal approach. The internal approach focuses on shifting your perspective to support the behaviors you want to adopt; he posits that this is the only way to make lasting behavioral changes.
By contrast, a “Personality Ethic,” which we’ll call the external approach, emphasizes skills and practices that affect your public image, attitudes, and behaviors. According to Covey, this method offers quick-fix solutions—how to be more charming, make people like you, and influence people to do what you want. However, these tricks don’t address fundamental internal traits, and so they generally only work temporarily. Covey argues that if you lack the internal foundation, quick-fix tactics eventually start looking insincere to other people and stop working.
Adopting personality improvements without first establishing the necessary character traits is like building a house in reverse order. If you try to focus on window dressing and decorating without first pouring a solid foundation, the house will inevitably crumble. Covey’s approach in the book, therefore, is to focus on internal traits in Part 2, and only then develop skills to improve your external relationships in Part 3.
Internal and External Approaches Today
When 7 Habits was published in 1989, Covey saw the self-improvement book market as suffused with externally focused guides. He might be pleased to see a wealth of best-selling self-improvement books available today that are internally focused. For example:
Grit discusses the character trait of grit, the combination of passion and perseverance, as a major contributor to success.
Likewise, Mindset discusses the benefit of a growth mindset, the belief that your abilities are not fixed and can grow with practice and effort.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck approaches self-fulfillment internally, by encouraging you to care less about things that don’t matter and don’t make you happy.
Habit formation books like Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit give a fundamental, psychology-rooted approach to developing good habits.
However, quick fixes through the external approach are still in high demand.
The 48 Laws of Power lists dozens of principles on influencing and manipulating people.
How to Win Friends and Influence People remains a perennial bestseller.
The 4-Hour Workweek describes a process for achieving financial freedom and the lifestyle of a “four-hour workweek” through building a business, without much discussion of the character traits that might lead to success.
Since your perspectives are foundational to how you see yourself, others, and the world around you, Covey says changing them is a multistep process:
Since our perspectives define how we see the world, we generally don’t notice or evaluate them—we’re focused on the picture through the frame, not the frame itself. Therefore, the first step to changing your perspectives is to become aware of your starting point.
(Shortform note: Robbins explains why awareness of the problem is half the battle to self-improvement. We subconsciously adopt values (such as freedom or success) and beliefs (for instance, you can do anything you put your mind to)—two of the five elements of your operating system. If those values and beliefs cause disempowering behaviors, ignorance of them can sabotage Herculean efforts at self-improvement.)
Covey doesn’t specify how to become aware of your perspectives, but he suggests that:
As you embark on this introspection, it’s important to know that not all methods of self-reflection lead to an accurate self-awareness. Research shows that “why”-centered introspection (such as, “Why did I miss my deadline?”) often causes you to draw wrong, unproductive conclusions (like, “I’m undisciplined and incompetent”).
By contrast, “what” questions (like, “What caused me to miss my deadline?”) lead to more constructive, accurate insights (such as, “I overcommitted and underestimated how much time I would need to complete the assignment”).
Disruptive Information Leads to Perspective Changes
Encountering contradictory information is the first step in scientific paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn describes them in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where Covey picked up the term “paradigm shift.” According to Kuhn, paradigm shifts are a multi-step process:
Research uncovers an anomaly—something that doesn’t align with the current paradigm.
The anomaly leads to a crisis, as scientists are unable to resolve the discrepancy. During the period of crisis, some scientists attempt to dismiss the anomaly in order to maintain the current paradigm, while others take the anomaly as a sign to reject the old paradigm and set out to find a more accurate one.
Eventually, the crisis gives way to a revolution, in which the old paradigm is replaced with a new one in a paradigm shift.
Once you’ve recognized where you’re coming from, you have to determine where you’re going. Covey argues that becoming effective requires you to center your perspectives in universal principles. Universal principles include traits that are universally admired, such as fairness, integrity, honesty, growth, and patience.
(Shortform note: Covey seems to endorse adopting all of the universal principles—but other self-help and business authors suggest zeroing in on a handful of core values that matter most to you. The idea is that it’s more practical to focus on a few key principles when you’re solving problems and making decisions. As Brene Brown explains in Dare to Lead, if you have too many values, they lose their meaning.)
Covey posits that, while your perspectives dictate your actions, principles determine the consequences of your actions. As such, the most effective way of living is to align your paradigms with principles, because otherwise your actions will conflict with universal principles and lead to negative consequences—for instance, being dishonest (violating the principle of honesty) could damage your relationships or get you fired.
Kant: Moral Principles Are Universally True
Whereas Covey argues that consequences measure how principled your actions are, German philosopher Immanuel Kant judges an action’s morality based on the motivation and whether the behavior would be universally appropriate. He calls this standard the Categorical Imperative.
First, your act can only be considered moral if your motivation is to fulfill your duty to live morally. As long as your motivation is to abide by this duty, the act is moral regardless of whether it is something you want to do, something you don’t want to do, something that benefits you and others, or something that ends poorly. This view accounts for bad luck, in contrast to Covey’s basis on actual consequences (more on the flaws in his argument below).
Second, you must consider whether you’d want everyone to act the same way in a similar situation. For example, if you want to write part of your child’s paper to ensure they pass the class, consider what it’d be like if every parent did this. In that world, would it still make sense for you to do your child’s work? (Probably not, because the teachers would catch on.)
Covey argues that principles shape the objective reality, while your perspectives shape your interpretation of that reality—he uses a recurring analogy of paradigms as maps, and objective reality as the terrain itself. You use the map to navigate the terrain, but if your map isn’t to scale (as in, if your perspective is not aligned with reality-defining principles) then you’ll face the consequences caused by that disparity.
Principled Living Doesn’t Guarantee Positive Results
In his argument for principle-centered paradigms, Covey focuses on how universal principles govern human behavior and societal functioning. This essentially says that principled living means acting in a way that’s in line with others’ norms and expectations. It makes sense that Covey would present this as the ideal because, as we’ll discuss, his seven habits are designed to foster collaboration and cooperation.
However, this argument is reductionist and glosses over numerous possibilities:
Laws and policies may not hold up—and may even actively punish—principles like honesty and human dignity, especially under oppressive regimes. In those cases, a person could act based on principles and still face grave consequences. For example, a Chinese journalist named Zhang Zhan was arrested for reporting truthfully on the COVID-19 pandemic from Wuhan and scrutinizing the government’s response. Another example: Under Hitler’s reign, non-Jews could be persecuted for helping Jews.
Cultural norms sometimes contradict universal principles. For instance, the consequences will probably be worse if you are honest and tell your mother-in-law that you hate her cooking than if you simply lie about it.
Sometimes you can do everything right and still face bad luck. For example, you can be the model employee—constantly displaying principles like honesty and integrity—and still face layoffs or get fired by a tyrannical boss.
If you believe Covey’s assertion but fall into one of these exceptions, you’re likely to misdiagnose the issue: Did you follow the wrong principle? Did you have the right principle but didn’t follow it closely enough?
Granted, noticing your paradigms is the first step to changing them—but what do you do next? Covey doesn’t specify the steps to changing your paradigm, but some of his self-improvement peers have offered suggestions.
Prescription #1: Change Your Thoughts
In the early self-help classic As A Man Thinketh, author James Allen also emphasizes the importance of addressing the cause of your problems, rather than trying to fix the symptoms. And at the root of your problems, he argues, are your thoughts: When you think negatively, your words and actions are negative, and that elicits negative reactions from others, creating a vicious cycle. By contrast, when you think positive thoughts, you radiate and receive positivity in a virtuous cycle.
In order to take control of your thoughts, Allen suggests reflecting on your past experiences and then tracing them back to the seedling thoughts that created those realities. This exercise helps you see how your thoughts shape your life, which motivates you to think more positively. With that motivation, make an effort to notice your thoughts and try to keep them positive. Over time, positive thinking will become a habit.
Prescription #2: Reprogram Your Neuro-Associations
Nearly a century after Allen published his advice, Tony Robbins took this concept to a more cellular level. In Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins argues that at the root of all your actions and decisions are neuro-associations that link certain experiences with pain and others with pleasure. For example, if you have a happy memory of listening to a particular song, you subconsciously associate that song with pleasure; if you were unhappy—even if for a reason unrelated to the song—you connect that song with pain. Using these neuro-associations as a guide, your brain directs you to make choices that replicate pleasurable associations and avoid painful ones.
To change these neuro-associations, and thus alter your behavior, Robbins describes a six-step reprogramming process called Neuro-Associative Conditioning:
Covey notes that another benefit of evaluating your perspectives is that you become more open-minded to others’ perceptions, which helps to expand your view of the world.
Normally, when we’re unaware of our unique perspectives and how they shape us, we assume that people who don’t agree with us are simply wrong. Covey says the mistake here is not realizing that their beliefs and actions only appear wrong through our own lens, but are completely valid through theirs. In reality, since each person’s experiences create different lenses, two people with different perspectives can look at the same facts, interpret them completely differently, and both be rational. For example, one person might think that a particular economic policy is killing jobs, while another person believes it is creating them—and each belief may be true in their respective communities.
Covey maintains that when you recognize that your individual experiences and influences frame your views, you can understand that other people’s distinct experiences and influences have also shaped their views, and that insight can breed empathy.
Paradigm Awareness Improves Religious Tolerance and Empathy
The principle that awareness of your own unique lens fosters empathy for other people’s extends to religious beliefs, as well. Each faith is a paradigm that shapes its followers’ views of morals, justice, and how society should function. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harai notes that monotheists are more often intolerant of others’ faiths and rituals than polytheists—because if you believe yours is the only right way (the only true God, the only way to salvation), then everyone else must be wrong.
It’s critical to break this barrier by taking the initiative to evaluate our perspectives because:
Most of us tend to surround ourselves with people whose lives and backgrounds are similar to our own, which often means their paradigms are also similar (for instance, people who are active in their religious community are surrounded by others who share the same paradigm). That homogeneity seldom pushes us to question our views.
Widening your perspective improves your collaborative skills at work and makes you more empathetic with your friends, family, and community. (It even improves your health.)
With this foundation in place, the rest of this guide builds on these ideas by explaining how Covey defines the effectiveness ideals that shape his seven practices and then diving into each of the habits themselves.
Each person has a unique set of perspectives that determine how they see the world and how they react to people, events, and situations. Use this exercise to better understand your perspectives.
Describe a recent situation in which you and another person interpreted an event or situation differently. Whether this was an interaction between the two of you or a story in the news, you both had access to the same facts but each had a different takeaway.
What was your reaction to hearing the other person’s interpretation?
Now that you have an understanding of perspectives, describe the perspective(s) that might have caused you to interpret the situation the way you did.
Now think of how the same perspective(s) influence you in other situations in your life. Is this a view that is benefitting you overall, or one that you might consider changing? Why?
In this chapter, we’ll discuss how and why Covey presents his self-help advice through seven sequential habits. Whether you adopt the seven habits casually or practice them religiously, you can optimize your results by understanding the rationale behind them.
Covey has established that changing your perspective is the first step to self-improvement—but he doesn’t say exactly how to do that. On one hand, altering your perspective is a first step in adopting the seven habits we’ll explore—and, on the other hand, a perspective shift is also the result of practicing the seven habits.
In this way, habits have a dual role.
Because habits have this cyclical relationship with character, they are an ideal tool for Covey’s internal approach: The seven habits are designed to build from the foundation up, establishing a mindset, skills, and routines that help you identify and achieve the things that are most important to you.
Additionally, calling them “habits” underscores Covey’s intention that these are lifelong behaviors—not one-time fixes. The seven habits are high-level, universal practices, and they encompass smaller habits that are more specific to each individual. For instance, the first of the seven habits is to take initiative, which is a general approach to life. For you, taking initiative could mean adopting a habit of talking with your manager anytime you’re overloaded at work, rather than suffering in silence.
Habits Make Actions Automatic
Part of the reason that habits are so closely connected with your character in this dual way is that they are embedded in your subconscious.
They are an expression of your character because they surface without any conscious effort to portray yourself in any particular way.
They are powerful reinforcers because they persist regardless of your conscious effort.
As authors Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel explain in Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, this is the crux of habits’ value: When a behavior becomes subconscious, it’s on autopilot, leaving your conscious mind free to tackle other things.
In other words, habits essentially put good behavior on cruise control. This does two critical things:
It ensures that you continue the behavior long term
It preserves your mental energy for more good choices
Furthermore, Covey prescribes the seven habits in a specific sequence, which aims to foster an interdependent perspective, which he says is crucial to being effective in all aspects of life—from marriage to family to the workplace. Interdependent people can take care of their own needs, but they also recognize that a collaborative team or partnership is greater than the sum of its parts.
(Shortform note: Interdependence is also critical to problem-solving in organizations, and communities. For example, while independence-oriented nationalism is on the rise, experts warn that globalist approaches are necessary to tackle the biggest challenges facing our world, including climate change, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the threat of nuclear war. And the Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the same lesson in starker terms.)
Covey asserts that you can only reach interdependence after achieving independence. For this reason, the first three habits aim to develop independence by focusing on internal growth and personal character. They are:
(Shortform note: Most of this book’s parallels with Awaken the Giant Within are in Habits 1 and 2 because Robbins’s predominant focus is on improving your internal world. As an analogy, if 7 Habits were the Bible, Awaken the Giant would be the Old Testament—it doesn’t really get into what happens after a pivotal turning point. While Covey covers a broader range of the self-improvement progression, Robbins dives into greater detail and provides more specific strategies for applying the principles. In this guide, we’ll include Robbins’s strategies for the first two habits.)
Habits 4-6 then build on your independence to develop interdependence through collaboration, cooperation, and communication. These habits are:
(Shortform note: Because these habits address how you interact with others, there are many external approaches for achieving the same ends (such as successful negotiations and collaborations). This guide supplements Covey’s internally oriented advice with behavior-driven tips; although Covey insists that behavior changes alone don’t create lasting results, they’re presumably effective when built upon a foundation of internal improvement.)
Finally, Habit 7 emphasizes the importance of self-renewal, which enables you to continue practicing and mastering the previous six habits. Covey asserts that self-renewal is critical to being effective; to explain, we must first distinguish between effectiveness and efficiency:
(Shortform note: Covey’s emphasis on effectiveness was likely inspired by Peter F. Drucker, who said that good management requires effectiveness, which he defined as identifying and carrying out the tasks that have the greatest impact on the individual’s and organization’s performance. Drucker wrote that there are five practices of effectiveness: time management, focus, making a unique contribution, maximizing your and others’ strengths, and sound decision-making.)
Efficiency is appealing because it maximizes output in the short term—but it is unsustainable. Instead, Covey promotes reigning in short-term output in order to prioritize self-renewal (akin to routine maintenance on a machine) and ensure long-term endurance. He describes this equilibrium as the P/PC Balance, which we’ll call output and capacity. Covey illustrates this balance with Aesop’s fable of the goose that laid golden eggs—the goose represents capacity, and the golden eggs represent output. In the fable, the goose lays one egg per day—but the farmer wants more, and quickly. In this pursuit, the farmer kills the goose in hopes of harvesting a bounty of golden eggs from the carcass, but he finds none. Worse, now the goose is dead, leaving the farmer worse off than he started.
Choosing Efficiency Over Effectiveness Is Harmful Personally and in Business
As an individual, prioritizing efficiency and maximum output without nurturing your capacity to produce leads to burnout. Unfortunately, case studies of this are all around, especially among Millennials (born 1981-1996), who have been dubbed the “burnout generation.” As a whole, Millennials are plagued by expectations that they should work tirelessly, and guilt when they don’t—and now they’re facing the consequences:
Physically, Millennials have higher rates of hypertension, high cholesterol, and other conditions that paint a picture of a generation whose health is deteriorating more rapidly than previous generations
Mentally and emotionally, levels of depression and anxiety among young people is at an 80-year high.
“Deaths of despair,” including overdoses and suicides, have recently risen more among Millennials than any other generation.
In a business context, overemphasizing output means prioritizing profits over employees’ talent development and general well-being. Succession management consultant Michael Timms has described how a profits-over-people approach creates a vicious cycle:
Company leaders focus on output and profits, neglecting succession planning (identifying and grooming future leaders internally) and employee development.
Due to the lack of planning, when an employee leaves, that worker’s manager and coworkers often have to carry that weight while management finds and trains a new hire.
The heavy workloads mean workers don’t have time to do long-term planning and strategic tasks, which puts them in a reactionary cycle of meeting deadlines and putting out fires.
Stressed and tired, employees become demoralized. Some leave the company, exacerbating the cycle for those left behind.
Meanwhile, when new employees are hired, rather than changing the atmosphere, they’re absorbed into it. They, too, become demoralized and soon leave.
By contrast, effective companies invest in their employees by offering good pay and benefits, creating a nurturing company culture, and providing professional development. Happy employees make more sales, provide better customer service, and make higher-quality products.
How do you actually create habits? Covey asserts that they form at the intersection of knowledge, ability, and aspiration, all of which are necessary ingredients in a lasting habit.
For example, imagine you want to improve your interactions with others because you tend to talk more than you listen, which often leads to misunderstandings and tension. To change your habit, you need to address all three aspects of it.
A Recipe for Habit Formation
Although Covey lists the ingredients for habit formation, he doesn’t exactly provide the whole recipe, so it’s worth exploring processes that can help you turn Covey’s principles into practices.
Atomic Habits author James Clear explains that a habit consists of four stages that result in a reward, which creates a positive feedback loop. Here are the four stages, and how to engineer them to form a habit such as walking your dog each morning:
Cue—This is the stimulus that signals to your brain that there’s an opportunity for reward. Make the cue obvious (put the dog’s leash near the coffee pot as a visual reminder).
Craving—This is your desire for the reward, which creates your motivation for acting. Make the reward enticing to stimulate a craving (incorporate something you love into the walk, like listening to your favorite podcast).
Response—This is the action that you do in response to the cue, which triggers the reward. Make the action easy (put your walking shoes by the door).
Reward—This is the benefit or good feeling you gain from performing the action. Make the reward satisfying (take some quiet time to savor your coffee when you come home from your walk).
If this sounds like the conditioning process that Ivan Pavlov discovered with his famous drooling dogs, that’s because it is.
To gain a better understanding of why interdependence is the ultimate goal of the seven habits, let’s examine it more closely. According to Covey, people can graduate from dependence to independence to interdependence along the “Maturity Continuum,” which we’ll call the stages of personal development. Everyone is physically, emotionally, and intellectually dependent as an infant; as you go through life, you have the potential to become independent and then interdependent. You must reach each level before you can progress to the next (but your physical stage may be different than your emotional stage and/or your intellectual stage).
Here is a comparison of the three development stages:
| Overall | Physically | Emotionally | Intellectually | |
| Dependence | “You” paradigm: Depends on you (or others in general) to fulfill needs | Needs physical assistance to move and survive (for instance, infants and people with physical disabilities) | Bases identity and self-worth on other people’s opinions and behaviors | Relies on others to form opinions and make decisions (for example, “What do you think I should do?” or “What are your thoughts on this political candidate?”) |
| Independence | “I” paradigm: Does things for self without relying on others | Takes care of own physical needs, from feeding and grooming to getting around | Derives sense of worth from within, independent of others’ opinions | Makes decisions and forms opinions without others’ input |
| Interdependence | “We” paradigm: Has the capability and self-confidence that comes from independence, while also recognizing the power of working with others to achieve more than what’s possible alone | Can do accomplish physical tasks alone, but asks for help when needed | Has an internal sense of self-worth, but also takes other’s opinions and feedback into consideration | Thinks independently, while also considering information and perspectives from others |
Personal Development Parallels Leadership Development
While Covey frames these as stages of personal development, John C. Maxwell teases out many of the same traits into five levels of leadership, which he describes in a book by the same name.
Level-1 leaders depend upon their position of authority and Level-2 leaders depend upon the influence they wield as a result of their relationships with subordinates. Job title and influence are external factors, making these leaders dependent on outside forces.
Level-3 leaders inspire others because of their own achievements, motivation, and discipline—and these assets are independent of external forces.
Level-4 and Level-5 leaders are powerful because of their ability to develop others’ talents. In interdependent fashion, leaders at these highest levels combine their leadership skills with their team members’ talents to create greater results than either could have achieved individually.
Covey asserts that American society overvalues independence, which may come as no surprise in a nation built on capitalism and bootstrap ambition. In our collective admiration of independence, Covey explains that American society not only rejects dependence but also undervalues interdependence, because the latter’s emphasis on working with others appears to resemble dependence. However, while independence is a critical step in interpersonal evolution, Covey insists that interdependence is key to effectiveness—presumably not only for you but also your community.
Self-Help and Self-Care Don’t Promote Interdependence
Covey points out that the self-help industry is one area of society that particularly overplays the importance of independence. The same can be said of self-care, which became a mainstream mantra in the 2010s and has been described as the gentler cousin of highly disciplined self-help. Regardless of the method, both concepts have the same flaw: They focus only on improving and nurturing yourself, with no mention of how this is inextricably tied with helping your community.
The term “self-care” is often credited to Audre Lorde, a black, lesbian, feminist writer and civil rights activist. Lorde, who was battling cancer at the time, described self-care as “self-preservation” and “an act of political warfare.” For her, taking care of herself was essential to her ability to continue fighting systemic oppression. However, the term has been distorted by the current take on self-care, which often condones pulling away from your community in order to take care of yourself.
While modern self-care heavily emphasizes the self, Covey suggests it may reveal dependence rather than independence. He writes that sometimes people do selfish things in the name of independence, such as leaving their marriages and families. In reality, such acts typically reveal a lack of independence: In contrast to their claims, these people are often struggling with dependencies such as feeling controlled or victimized by other people and circumstances, so they change the circumstances instead of developing true emotional independence.
With this understanding, consider Covey’s suggestions for reaping the most benefits from the habits:
Teaching Improves Learning
Research confirms that people absorb a subject more deeply when they have to teach it to others. In a 2018 study, 124 students were told to read a text about an unfamiliar topic with the intention of teaching the information to others. Then, they were split into four groups and instructed to:
One at a time, give lessons on the material without notes
One at a time, give lessons by reading a provided script verbatim
Write down everything they could recall about the topic
Solve math problems
One week later, people from Groups 1 and 3 still remembered the material better than those who had read from the script or done math sets. This is because both methods involve retrieval, which is the most effective way to improve your retention of new information. You can also practice retrieval with quizzes, flashcards, and self-testing.
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Habit Description:
(Shortform note: While Covey elaborates on the importance of accepting the unchangeable, Robbins’s major emphasis throughout Awaken the Giant Within is on taking control through your decisions and your mindset.)
Habit 1 lays the foundation for the subsequent habits because taking initiative is key to adopting new behaviors and improving your life. This is the first of three habits that focus on your internal life and independence through your mindset, vision, and priorities (the other two are Envision the Life You Want and Prioritize Important Over Urgent). Covey has dubbed these habits “private victories”; we’ll call them habits for personal improvement.
He writes that every situation presents a choice between being reactive (externally influenced) or proactive (initiative-taking).
Taking Initiative Makes You Happy
Taking initiative is empowering because it entails taking control of your actions and your responses to circumstances—and that can make you both happy and successful. In The Happiness Advantage, positive psychology researcher Shawn Achor writes that feeling in control is one of the keys to happiness, and that happiness brings success (not the other way around, as many people mistakenly believe). Importantly, he clarifies that believing that you have control of your fate is more important than how much control you actually have. With that in mind, he describes two approaches to life that are similar to Covey’s, but while Covey’s approach focuses on action, Achor’s are based on perception.
People with an external locus of control (like externally influenced people) blame their circumstances on external forces over which they have no control. They deny responsibility for failures as well as credit for successes, leaving them unconfident and unempowered.
People with an internal locus of control (like initiative-takers) believe that they have a direct impact on their futures. They learn from failures and try to improve for future situations.
According to Achor, this sense of control contributes to increased motivation, lower stress, stronger relationships, improved communication and problem-solving, greater job satisfaction, and better physical health.
Covey makes a point to distinguish taking initiative from being blindly optimistic. (Shortform note: This difference plays out in how people respond to systemic racial inequity, especially as the issue has been more broadly publicized and acknowledged in recent years.)
(Shortform note: Similar to blind optimism, toxic positivity is an insistence on maintaining a positive outlook, and in doing so it disregards all painful and difficult emotions. While often well intended, this response causes shame and guilt for feeling bad, and it doesn’t allow people to feel and process painful emotions, which is necessary for growth.)
Covey offers six strategies for becoming proactive or taking initiative: two big-picture approaches and four actionable tips.
1. Big Picture—Don’t worry about things you can’t affect. Among the things you fret about, distinguish between concerns that are beyond your control (like a housing market slump) and things you can impact (like your upcoming mortgage payment). By definition, people who take initiative recognize and address the issues in front of them; they don’t spin their wheels on things they can’t affect, because it causes them unnecessary stress and reinforces feelings of victimization.
(Shortform note: Covey makes an important, implicit distinction between the things you can affect and the things you can control. Taking initiative is about making a plan to address an issue, even when there’s no way to guarantee the outcome—for instance, you can help your child study for a test, but you can’t control how she performs on it. This suggests that this habit’s greater virtue is in the psychological relief of tackling an issue and putting it to bed, rather than the specific results of the action.)
2. Actionable—Learn how to respond to problems you can’t control. Empower yourself by recognizing whether and how you can affect the issues that worry you, and then responding appropriately. Covey lists three categories of concerns and the proactive responses to each:
Category 1) Problems related to your actions
Category 2) Problems related to other people’s actions
Tips to Influence Other People’s Actions
While Habits 4-6 will discuss how to influence others through an internal approach, it also helps to have some actionable, externally oriented techniques for influencing others. Marketing psychology professor Robert Cialdini outlined six psychological principles of persuasion in his bestselling 1984 book, Influence. The book is meant to be a warning about manipulative techniques used by professional persuaders, such as salespeople and politicians—but you can also read it as a playbook of strategies to influence people in positive ways.
These are the six principles, and an example of how you could use them to influence someone to join a gym with you:
Reciprocity—If you want someone to agree to a request, do something nice for them just because—and then ask; they’ll likely feel compelled to do you the favor of complying. For instance, treat your friend to a coffee, then broach the subject of joining the gym together.
Commitment/Consistency—If you get someone to agree to something small, they will go out of their way to maintain that commitment if you make increasingly larger, related requests. For example, ask if they’ll go on a weekly walk with you to help you stay motivated. Then work up to pitching them on the gym membership.
Social Proof—People assume that if many people are doing the same thing, that must be the right thing to do. Thus, to influence someone to do something, emphasize that many other people are already doing that action. For instance, tell them that your coworker and her friend belong to the same gym and do workouts together.
Liking—Someone is more likely to comply with requests from people they know and like, people who are associated with those they know and like, and people who they believe like them. For example, your odds are better asking a friend than a neighbor.
Authority—People are more inclined to do something if an expert or authority figure tells them to. For instance, show your friend research proving that people with workout buddies are more consistent than solo exercisers.
Scarcity—People find rare and exclusive things more appealing, so you can influence people to take your offer if you make it appear scarce or fleeting. For example, point out that you’re both so busy that partner workouts would be a rare opportunity to regularly spend time together.
Category 3) Problems you can’t impact, like the weather and the past
(Shortform note: In How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie provides tips for worrying less about what things you can’t affect. Some strategies include engaging in the present moment, keeping busy with productive activities, reframing issues to recognize when you’re blowing something out of proportion, and practicing gratitude.)
3. Actionable—Acknowledge and learn from your mistakes. Mistakes and regrets fall into the third category from the previous tip: You can’t change or undo them. Thus, the empowered response is to admit, accept, and learn from your mistakes—and to do so as quickly as possible. Covey posits that the longer you go without learning from a mistake, the more likely you are to repeat it.
(Shortform note: Tony Robbins applies this principle on a subconscious level with a habit-breaking technique he calls pattern disruption: When you catch yourself doing the action you want to change, abruptly interrupt it with something totally random (for example, stand up and shout something ridiculous). This prevents the signals in your brain from completing their usual course for that action; done consistently, these disruptions gradually weaken the brain wiring that triggers that behavior, which breaks the habit.)
Silicon Valley Celebrates Mistakes
Mistakes—making and learning from them—are crucial to building knowledge, improving skills, and innovating. In Silicon Valley, failure is such a virtue in the tech industry that the unofficial mantra has become, “Fail fast, fail often” (though some say the emphasis on relentless ambition drives many to exhaustion). There’s even an annual conference called FailCon, where people in the industry swap stories about their failures.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings writes about the importance of talking about failures in his book, No Rules Rules, where he describes the philosophies that helped the company adapt and thrive. He insists that when leaders are transparent about their own mistakes, it builds trust with their employees and encourages them to take risks, too.
4. Big Picture—Decide how you see yourself. Taking initiative involves creating your self-image, which impacts what you think, feel, and do, and it affects how you view others. In other words, your self-image determines everything from how you spend your time to whether you see others’ kindness as a weakness or a virtue. If you don’t mold your self-image, Covey posits that it’ll default to others’ opinions and actions toward you, which causes multiple problems:
Building on that, Covey says that people live up to their view of themselves, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Shortform note: Subsequent research bears this out: In her book, Mindset, psychologist and researcher Carol S. Dweck argues that the course of your life can be determined by whether you believe that your intelligence and abilities are unchangeable (a “fixed” mindset) or that they can evolve (a “growth” mindset).)
Awaken the Giant Within: Create Your Self-Image
Robbins stresses that it’s important to recognize the self-image you’ve subconsciously adopted, then shift it to be more empowering. He says you must regularly evaluate and adapt your identity to reflect the changes that come with age, experience, and new circumstances.
Robbins suggests these steps for reflecting on your current identity and the identity you’d like to embody:
Relax. Get into an open-minded state.
Repeatedly ask yourself, “Who am I?” until you hit on something that resonates with you. Write down whatever comes to mind.
Reflect on the way you’ve just identified yourself. Does your identity evoke pain or pleasure? If it carries pain, remember that you’ve chosen to adopt this self-image, and you can choose to alter it.
Write a list of all of the qualities you want to embody. If you possessed these traits, how would it affect how you talk, think, and feel?
Identify what kinds of actions, thoughts, and emotions you want your new self-image to trigger.
Create a plan for embodying your new identity. What behaviors would you need to adopt to be consistent with this self-image?
Commit yourself to this change. Every day, use your new label to describe yourself—when you’re thinking and when you’re talking to others. Tell your friends and family about your new identity; if they begin to see you in this new light, you will eventually internalize your new identity.
5. Actionable—Watch your language. Covey urges readers to be mindful of the words and phrases they use, which suggests that language reflects and also reinforces your approach to life. For example, consider the impact of how you talk about a job you don’t like:
Awaken the Giant Within: Transform Your Vocabulary
To transform your vocabulary, Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within) suggests being especially mindful of your habitual questions and metaphors.
Your habitual questions are primarily the questions you ask yourself, which trigger a sequence of thoughts on a subject. For instance, you’re struggling to master a new skill, and you ask yourself “Why can’t I get it?” This question is negatively framed, and it easily leads to thoughts like “I’m not good enough” and “I should give up.” By contrast, an empowering question like, “How can I alter my approach?” leads to more constructive thoughts.
The metaphors you often use (such as, “Life is like a box of chocolates”) are particularly powerful because they evoke imagery that gives the phrase a bigger impact. The vividness of metaphors makes them especially potent in influencing your thoughts, moods, and actions. For example, describing high crime rates as a beast of a problem that must be tamed has a more aggressive tone than saying that the issue is a social ill that needs to be diagnosed and treated from the source.
6. Actionable—Make and keep commitments to yourself and others. Taking initiative and addressing problems often requires goal-setting. Covey equates goals to commitments: You’re committing to taking steps to make concrete, proactive changes in your life. To grow this muscle and your overall effectiveness, Covey suggests a 30-day challenge in which you make small goals and take steps to achieve them. These commitments can be personal, at work, in your family, or in your relationships.
Awaken the Giant Within: Make More Decisions
While Covey advises making commitments, Robbins emphasizes making decisions (a type of commitment) as fundamental to taking control of your life. In fact, decision-making is unavoidable: Although it can seem like avoiding a decision is the easy way out, Robbins asserts that inaction is actually a decision to take a passive role and allow external factors to shape your life.
Try these tips to embrace decision-making:
Build your decision-making muscles. Practice making decisions at every opportunity, starting with small choices, like what to eat for dinner.
Don’t be afraid of making the wrong decision. Mistakes are inevitable—accept and learn from them.
View decisions as commitments. Making a decision to do something should eliminate any alternative in your mind. That commitment gives you clarity and focus.
Don’t avoid a decision because you don’t know how you’ll achieve it. Trust that, if you’re truly committed to your decision, you’ll find a way to manifest it.
As with all of the habits, taking initiative is a simple concept, but not an easy one to implement. Shifting your entire approach to life is a process—but it can help to have a thorough understanding of what that shift entails.
Covey asserts that adopting an initiative-taking mindset requires you to be in control of your thoughts and actions—and that means recognizing that you have control of those things, which is a two-part process.
So, Who Are You?
If you’re not defined by your thoughts, moods, or feelings, conditions, or conditioning, then what makes you you? That depends on who you ask.
Covey asserts that your core identity is defined by your character.
According to the Handbook of Self and Identity, your identity encompasses traits, roles, relationships, and memberships in social groups. Identities can be oriented to the past (who you were), present (who you are), or future (who you hope or expect to be).
In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle similarly writes that your identity is based on your job, education, appearance, social status, possessions, personal and family history, beliefs, relationships, and memberships in various groups (including racial and political). However, Tolle clarifies that your identity is separate from the true essence of who you are, your true Being.
It’s notable that none of these definitions claim that identity is fixed. Rather, identity is dynamic and evolving.
Covey warns that, initially, taking initiative will be difficult. Being proactive and taking initiative are actually natural human responses—but, just like a muscle, if you don’t practice these skills, they atrophy. If you’ve spent years blaming your problems on your circumstances and conditioning (for instance, “My parents raised me with this dysfunction”), it’ll take some deliberate practice to transition to an empowered perspective.
(Shortform note: In contrast to Covey’s advice to practice and hone proactivity as a skill, researchers Thomas S. Bateman and J. Michael Crant developed the proactive personality scale in 1993 based on the premise that people are naturally predisposed to be proactive or reactive. The scale measures people’s proactivity—the tendency to take action to affect external circumstances—so that managers can accommodate and optimize workers’ natural reactive or proactive inclinations, rather than trying to change them.)
Finally, taking initiative means you have to take responsibility for your actions and their consequences. Now that you know that you can choose your thoughts, feelings, and actions, Covey argues that you have to acknowledge that, explicitly or implicitly, you’ve chosen or allowed everything that’s happened in your life—good and bad.
Adopt an “Extreme Ownership” Mindset
As a leader, being proactive requires taking full responsibility for your actions and decisions as well as your team’s. In Extreme Ownership, former Navy SEALs and business consultants Jocko Willink and Leif Babin preach the virtues of an Extreme Ownership mindset, which entails:
Being accountable for your team’s performance. Instead of blaming others for mistakes, consider whether you provided adequate information, training, and support.
Maintaining and enforcing high performance standards. It’s your responsibility to help the team reach those standards and ensure that every member knows their role and understands how they’re contributing to the overall goal.
Checking your ego. You admit your mistakes, are open to constructive criticism, and put the team’s interests ahead of your own.
Giving credit for successes to all of your team members and lower-level leaders, instead of taking the credit as their leader.
Willink and Babin admit that, although the pillars of Extreme Ownership are simple, they are not easy—it’s not easy to take the fall for your team, to take feedback from a subordinate, or to own up to your failures. However, they insist that on the battlefield and in the office, personal accountability triggers a virtuous cycle: When a leader has an attitude of Extreme Ownership, it’s contagious, and everyone on the team starts prioritizing the team and its mission above their individual interests.
You need an initiative-taking mindset to grow and make positive changes in your life. Use this exercise to examine your mindset so you can become more proactive.
Describe a recent conflict or situation in which a person or circumstance was troubling you, and how you handled it.
Which aspects of that situation could you affect, and which ones were beyond your influence? Did you focus your energy and actions more on things that you could or couldn’t impact?
How could you have taken more initiative?
What are some reactive things you often say to yourself (like “that’s just the way things are”)? How can you turn these into proactive statements instead?
Habit Description:
Covey argues that you have to imagine the life you want before you can achieve it. Creating this vivid picture helps to keep you focused amid daily demands and distractions. In other words, you need a clear sense of your destination and direction to avoid being derailed by detours.
(Shortform note: While Covey’s point is fairly common sense—you can’t reach a destination you haven’t identified—Tony Robbins argues in Awaken the Giant Within that focusing on your goals is more complex: It actually works both on a subconscious and a conscious level. First, Robbins writes that such focus triggers a sort of radar in a part of your brain called the Reticular Activating System, which directs your attention to resources and opportunities that can help you achieve those goals. Second, inspiring and exciting goals create motivation on a conscious level that pushes you to persevere in the face of challenges.)
The first aspect of this habit is identifying who you want to be and what you want to do. To crystallize this, Covey suggests an exercise to clarify what’s important to you from a long-term, big-picture perspective.
(Shortform note: While Covey suggests finding clarity by imagining yourself at the end of life and working backward, author and organizational psychologist Benjamin Hardy advises doing the opposite: Imagine what you’d do if you had only one month to live, but you couldn’t tell anyone about your prognosis. What if you had one year? Five years? His explanation suggests that the immediacy of deciding what you’d do with just one month highlights what’s most important, while expanding that vision to one year and then five years helps you clarify how to balance those values with necessary day-to-day logistics—for instance, maybe you could neglect work and only spend time with loved ones for a month, but not for five years.)
With this in mind, Covey recommends creating a personal mission statement (we’ll call it your personal manifesto to emphasize the passion behind it and the daily action it aims to inspire). This is a living document that encompasses who you want to be and what you want to do. Your manifesto helps to keep you focused on your big-picture goals so that you can ensure all of your actions and decisions support that vision.
Covey offers these tips for developing your own personal mission statement:
1) Allow ample time. Writing your manifesto requires deep introspection and careful thought, which can take weeks or months. Don’t rush, as the process is as important as the final result.
(Shortform note: Covey later published First Things First, in which he discusses personal mission statements in greater detail. He recommends going on a personal retreat to write your manifesto, and doing the same annually to reassess and revise it.)
2) Identify your core (or, as Covey calls it, your center). This is the source of your identity, perspective, drive, and direction in life. Ideally, your core—like your perspectives—should be centered on universally accepted principles, like fairness and service to others. Principles provide consistent standards on which to base your identity and goals. However, many people have other values at their core, such as money, pleasure, or family; although these may seem like worthy values, their changing natures make them unstable centers, which creates chaos in your life. For example, if family is the core of your identity, then who do you become when your children move out of the house or you get divorced? (More on this in the “Going Deeper” section.)
(Shortform note: In Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins asserts that not only knowing but also living by your values brings a sense of fulfillment, inner peace, certainty, and joy. By contrast, if you haven’t explicitly identified your values—such as love, success, and freedom—you may do things that conflict with these ideals and feel unhappy or frustrated without understanding why.)
3) Identify your roles, such as spouse, sibling, parent, friend, professional, and individual. If you don’t create your vision and goals to address each of your roles, you may focus your manifesto too heavily on one area of your life and neglect others.
(Shortform note: In First Things First, Covey argues that feeling unbalanced among your various roles is the biggest source of dissatisfaction in many people’s lives. For example, many people feel pulled between their work and their families. To find balance, he says that you must stop compartmentalizing your roles, and instead find ways to integrate them. Granted, you can’t be in two places at once, but you can create an overall sense of balance in your life by recognizing your roles and proactively planning how to fulfill them all.)
4) Create goals for each role. Effective goals should focus on the end result you want, rather than how you’ll get there. Once you’ve identified your destination, then you can figure out a path to reach it.
(Shortform note: Goal-setting theory confirms that creating specific, challenging goals improves performance. Psychologist Edwin Locke and organizational effectiveness professor Gary Latham, who developed the theory in the 1960s, asserted that specific goals (like “make 12 sales this week”) provide a concrete target, which often pushes people to achieve more than if they set a vague goal such as “close as many sales as possible”. )
5) Regularly review and revise your manifesto as your life, priorities, and circumstances change. Revising your manifesto ensures that it reflects such changes in your life and goals, while also allowing you to refine your approach; for instance, you may realize that one iteration of your manifesto puts too much emphasis on your professional life, so you revise to create more balance in your personal life.
Checklist of an Effective Personal Manifesto
Personal manifestos are as unique as the people who write them. But, in First Things First, Covey lists several characteristics that every manifesto should have:
It reflects a strong connection with your inner life and your best self.
It recognizes and incorporates your unique talents.
It guides you to contribute to a higher purpose beyond yourself.
It addresses your physical, social, mental, and spiritual needs.
It is grounded in universal principles.
It incorporates your values (what kind of person you want to be) and your vision (what accomplishments do you want to make).
It balances your personal, family, work, and community roles.
It inspires you.
Covey argues that, similarly, organizations and even families should have group missions or manifestos. In addition to keeping everyone on the same page about the group’s values and goals, these documents create a sense of unity and investment in the well-being of the group. For that reason, it’s critical that everyone in the group is involved in creating the manifesto, and that they share their thoughts about what matters to them and what they believe the group’s priorities should be.
Market Your Business With a Story, Not a Mission
In his book Building a StoryBrand, marketing expert Donald Miller argues that organizational stories are more easily digestible and attention-grabbing than mission statements, which makes them more effective at engaging and energizing consumers and employees. He presents a formula for writing this story, called the StoryBrand 7-Part Framework (SB7):
The hero (customer) wants something and
Encounters a problem that stops her from getting it.
She needs the help of a guide (your brand) who has
A plan to help her solve the problem.
The guide (brand) must call on her to act.
The stakes must be clear—what does she stand to lose if she doesn’t act and
What she might gain if she does act?
In the process of creating your personal manifesto, defining your core values is arguably the most abstract step, but it is also essential. Rather than being principle-centered, many people have cores like their marriage or work, which shape their identity and goals. However, as we’ll see, none of these “cores” leads to success as effectively as principle-centered manifestos.
To gain a better understanding of your core—in order to acknowledge and possibly shift it toward principles—review Covey’s descriptions of the most common centers and note which ones resonate with you. Since Covey argues that the only stable core is one centered in principle, he also lists the drawbacks of each of these common cores.
| Core | Description | Drawbacks |
| Family | You derive your security from the strength of your family traditions and reputation. | Your self-worth is vulnerable to others’ actions and external forces that are beyond your control. |
| Friend or Enemy | Paradoxically, these two cores are largely the same: Your interactions with other people, their opinions of you, and their treatment of you determine your sense of self-worth. | Your guiding force is how you think others will respond to your decisions, and you have no individual power because other people are determining your actions. |
| Work | Your identity is defined by your profession and position at work. | You’re likely to be a workaholic who sacrifices your relationships, health, and hobbies in the name of work. |
| Possessions | Your focus and self-worth are tied up in material possessions (e.g. cars and nice clothes) or intangible possessions (e.g. social status and authority). | Your self-worth depends on maintaining these possessions. It also rises and falls based on whether you’re around someone who has more than you, making you feel inferior, or less than you, making you feel superior. |
| Church | Whereas being spiritually-centered can guide you through inner examination and discovery, being church-centered emphasizes the appearance of being involved in the community, meeting social standards, and displaying your membership in the group. | You’re guided by how you think others will see you, rather than religious principles. You feel threatened by anything that jeopardizes your image or membership in the church. |
| Self | You’re primarily driven by what benefits you. | You’re driven more by selfishness than by an earnest attempt to develop and improve yourself. |
According to Covey, your core determines your experience more than the actual outcome, and your experiences have a greater impact on your life than your specific actions. For instance, imagine that you’ve been invited to your cousin’s destination wedding and you’re conflicted about whether to go.
Covey notes that, in contrast, if you’re principle-centered, you weigh your options and decide which action best aligns with your principles. In the example, a principle-centered decision may be to go, not to go, or to plan a trip to visit your cousin another time instead—but whichever option you choose, your experience will be different in several ways than if you were making the decision based on a different core. When you make a principle-centered choice:
Awaken the Giant Within: Identify the Emotional Goals Behind Your Core Values
While Covey asserts that your core guides your actions, Tony Robbins argues that your values serve this purpose. Although it appears that these two terms could be synonymous, Robbins distinguishes between two types of values:
Ends are the emotional states you’re pursuing, and which make life fulfilling, like happiness and security.
Means are the ways you intend to reach the ends. For instance, valuing family is a means to experiencing love and happiness, which are ends. (Means seem to be more in line with Covey’s description of cores.)
According to Robbins, you must identify your end values to avoid pursuing means that lead to the wrong ends. For example, imagine that you value freedom (end), so you pursue a management role at work (means) because you believe it will give you more freedom to set your schedule and priorities. However, when you get the promotion, you discover that you are more constrained because you now report to senior leadership and your performance directly impacts the company’s success. If you were focused only on the means, you would believe that you’ve achieved your goal, and you may not even realize that your lack of freedom is causing persistent dissatisfaction; on the other hand, if you’re aware of the ends you value, you can recognize that you need to change course to achieve them.
If you bristle at Covey’s suggestion to re-evaluate a core that’s important to you, such as family, you can use Robbins’s approach to reframe while still acknowledging all the things that give your life meaning. For example:
Friend or Enemy—If your core is your friends, perhaps your end values are connection and a sense of belonging; if your core is a work rival (a type of “enemy”), perhaps your end value is becoming the best you can be in your profession, and your rival spurs you on.
Work—If your core is your work, perhaps your end value is freedom: The more you work now, the faster you make money, and the faster you make (and save) money, the earlier you can retire and stop being chained to a job.
Possessions—If your core is a set of possessions like your wardrobe, perhaps your end value is beauty.
Church—If your core is your church, perhaps your end value is your connection to God.
Self—If you are your core, perhaps your end value is caring for yourself so you can better care for others.
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Your personal manifesto keeps you on track with your values and big-picture goals. Use this exercise to start drafting yours.
Which core(s) listed in the chapter (such as spouse center, family center, work center, money center, self center, pleasure center) primarily drives your goals and actions in life?
List your various roles (such as individual, employee, and friend).
Write a long-term goal for each role.
You now have the ingredients for your personal manifesto. Write a few sentences that summarize the main themes of these elements.
Habit Description:
(Shortform note: While Covey’s advice is helpful for assessing and prioritizing tasks, it may help to complement his strategy with the more detailed, systematic approach described in Getting Things Done, by management consultant David Allen, which we’ll discuss below.)
Covey explains that all tasks can be categorized based on their urgency and importance: An activity can be one (either urgent or important), both, or neither.
To get a greater understanding, let’s examine each of Covey’s categories of tasks, which he refers to as quadrants. (Spoiler alert: Habit 3 teaches you to spend most of your time on Category-2 tasks.)
Category 1: Urgent and Important
Category 2: Not Urgent, but Important
Category 3: Urgent, but not Important
Category 4: Neither Urgent nor Important
Covey contends that effective people understand the value of proactively investing in Category-2 activities—and it’s easier to recognize what’s important (and what’s not) once you’ve defined your goals and principles, as you did in Habit 2.
Develop Time Management Skills to Complement the Tools
Although Covey doesn’t give attribution, this time management matrix was actually created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who faced countless demands on his time in his roles as the president, an Army general, and a supreme commander for the Allied Forces and NATO. However, subsequent time management research suggests that the Eisenhower Matrix addresses no more than two of the three skills necessary for effective time management.
Tools like the matrix or the GTD (Getting Things Done) system won’t work if you don’t have the skills to use them—here are the three skills you need for time management:
Awareness that your available time is limited (this skill is key to avoid procrastination)
Arrangement of your time through goal-setting, planning, and scheduling
Adaptation of your time while carrying out tasks, particularly when you’re interrupted or when you have to shift priorities (this skill is key to prioritizing effectively)
The matrix helps you hone one or two of these skills, but not all three:
Awareness—The matrix doesn’t factor in how long a task takes, gauge how accurately you estimate how long activities will take, or improve how you budget your limited time.
Arrangement—The matrix is most effective in this category because it helps you prioritize what’s important so that you can arrange your tasks and obligations accordingly.
Adaptation—The matrix potentially improves adaptation by providing a system to gauge and adjust priorities on the fly. For instance, if you’re in the middle of an important task when your coworker sends an urgent request, you can quickly use the matrix to categorize the new task and then decide how it stacks up against what you were already working on.
While the matrix is a helpful tool, it isn’t enough alone to make substantial time management improvements: Research shows that each of the three skills is equally important in effective time management.
Below are some evidence-based tips to improve your time management skills:
Awareness:
Determine the time of day when you’re most productive. Divide the day into chunks and spend a week logging your most- and least-productive time slots.
Test your awareness skills: When you finish a task, compare how much time you budgeted and how much time you spent.
In The Effective Executive, Drucker recommends logging everything you do and how long it takes for three to four weeks at a time, twice a year. Once you know definitively how you’re spending your time, you can create a plan to use it more effectively.
Arrangement:
Schedule time for yourself. When you need to spend time on a task or project, put it in your calendar and treat it like any other appointment.
Ask someone else to check your budgeted time for certain projects to avoid underestimating how long something will take.
Adaptation:
Tackle daunting tasks in short bursts of 15 to 30 minutes. This will give you momentum and prevent procrastination.
Establish distraction-free times; turn off phone and email alerts and stay off social media during these windows.
Covey asserts that weekly planning is the most effective way to manage your time and stay on the path toward realizing your personal manifesto.
(Shortform note: You’re also less likely to become fixated on details and lose sight of your goals with weekly planning than with daily planning. Further, you’re less likely to feel overwhelmed or paralyzed by the details,)
Follow these steps to create your weekly plan:
Shifting your time and attention primarily to Category 2 (what Covey calls “Quadrant 2”) is a gradual process. Initially, you’ll only have time to spare from Categories 3 and 4. However, over time, the tasks you accomplish in Category 2 will prevent Category-1 issues.
Prioritize and Get Things Done
Like much of Covey’s advice, Habit 3 takes a big-picture approach to scheduling your tasks and to-dos. But when it comes to the relentless flow of emails, favors, and other tasks that arise and often overwhelm us, his only guidance is to use the urgent-important matrix to prioritize and to build open time into your schedule for the unexpected.
This is where the Getting Things Done (GTD) system can help: This approach details how to gather, assess, organize, and address every to-do that you encounter. The five steps of the GTD system are:
Capture all the problems and ideas that are taking your attention. Find every sticky note, email, and to-do and put it in a tray.
Clarify what you need to do with each item: throw it away, keep it for reference, delegate it, do it, schedule it, or save it to reconsider later.
Organize each item based on your evaluation from Step 2. Reference items and things to reconsider later should be filed away, delegated items should be handed off, action items go on a to-do list, and scheduled items go on a calendar.
Review your calendar and to-do list frequently; your calendar determines the structure of your days and weeks, while your to-do list tells you what to tackle between scheduled appointments. Additionally, do a weekly review to review your files and to capture, clarify, and organize new items.
Engage with the task—in other words, get it done.
Whereas Covey recommends a weekly schedule, the GTD system emphasizes a weekly review to stay up-to-date with new demands. Additionally, the author notes that as you master the GTD system through time and practice, you’ll graduate to longer-term planning.
Initially, it’ll take about two years to cement these practices into habit. During that time, the system will primarily improve your time management on an hourly and daily basis.
Once the system becomes second nature, you’ll be able to manage your time on a weekly and monthly scope. At this stage, you can ensure that your actions are aligning with your goals, values, roles, and responsibilities, as Covey promotes.
Finally, you’ll have been effectively managing your time for so long that you’ll transition out of Category-1 tasks and focus almost exclusively on Category-2 activities (though the author doesn’t use these terms). At this stage, you can dedicate your time to creative, meaningful pursuits that improve your life.
One key Category-2 activity is delegating: Instead of simply reacting to get a task done as quickly as possible, delegating is a short-term time investment that ultimately gives you more time for important activities. Covey lists two forms of delegation:
Four Styles of Delegation
Whereas Covey lists only two styles of delegation, The Achievement Centre (TAC), a professional development and coaching organization, lists four styles of delegation. While both sources agree that the most effective style is stewardship delegation, a more thorough list of ineffective strategies can help you identify your delegation style in order to improve it.
Stewardship delegation, which matches Covey’s description, is the most effective method.
Dump and run, which involves handing off a task without explaining the desired results, deadline, or available resources. To turn this into stewardship delegation, the manager must provide necessary information and support.
Gopher delegation (their spelling differs from Covey’s) is defined as assigning individual, isolated tasks without explaining how they fit into larger organizational goals; gopher delegators provide more “what” and “how” information than dump-and-run managers, but they leave out important “why” context. For stewardship delegation, the manager must provide greater context so that the team member understands how they and their work contribute to the team.
Micromanaging, which actually fits Covey’s description of Gofer delegation, involves the delegator specifying how the task should be completed and constantly monitoring progress. Achieving stewardship delegation requires the delegator to clarify deadlines and expectations for progress reports.
For effective stewardship delegation, Covey contends you must clearly communicate your expectations in six areas:
(Shortform note: Beyond communicating expectations, these strategies can make delegation more effective: Learn to let go of control, start small, play to people’s strengths, teach new skills so you can delegate more, and ask for feedback on how you’re delegating.)
Stewardship Delegation Brings Long-Term Benefits
Beyond freeing up your time, stewardship delegation gives the person you’re delegating to an opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and experience. Research focused on delegating in an organizational context shows that this creates a positive ripple effect:
The subordinate feels that their job is meaningful and that they have freedom to innovate, which leads to greater job satisfaction, productivity, and dedication to the organization.
The subordinate feels that their supervisor has confidence in them, which empowers the subordinate and improves their relationship with their supervisor.
The subordinate becomes more motivated to improve their skills, often by seeking constructive feedback.
As the subordinate’s expertise grows, it creates a virtuous cycle that benefits both the subordinate and the supervisor.
Covey suggests these steps for transitioning to a Category-2 mindset:
Tips for Your Weekly Review
Covey and Allen (Getting Things Done) both recommend taking time each week to create and review your schedule. These tips from the GTD system will help you make the most of Covey’s weekly review steps.
Set a day and time you can commit to each week and ensure that you will be focused and uninterrupted. Most people need about two hours.
Make sure your to-do list is up-to-date with new and completed items.
Reassess the importance and urgency of items as needed.
Review everything on your calendar from the past week and consider whether your meetings and appointments produced new tasks to add to your to-do list.
Review your upcoming calendar entries and determine whether you need to add any preparation-related tasks.
Review the tasks you’ve delegated and determine whether you need to follow up or take any action to spur progress.
Delegation is a crucial tool for reducing your workload and managing your time—but what do you do if there’s no one to hand tasks to? Covey doesn’t offer advice for this possibility, but other sources provide a few options:
Reflect on the time you spend in each of the time management categories; this is an important first step to shifting how you spend your time.
Name one Category-1 (urgent and important) task you did today and explain why it belongs in that category.
Name one Category-2 (not urgent and important) task you did today and how much time you spent doing it. If you have not done any Category-2 activities, name one you could do within the next 24 hours.
Name one Category-3 (urgent and not important) task you did today. What is one strategy you could use to spend less time on unimportant activities like this?
Name one Category-4 (neither urgent nor important) task you did today. What do you gain from this activity (for instance, entertainment or relaxation)?
Review your previous answers and write one observation you have about how you spend your time.
Now that you’ve developed your independence in Habits 1-3, Habits 4-6 build on that foundation by focusing on interdependent (or collaborative) success through strong relationships and effective interactions.
Habit Description:
Interpersonal success starts with approaching every interaction as an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial outcome. Covey calls this a Win/Win mindset. This is admittedly difficult:
But he argues that the effort is worth it:
To better understand the mutually beneficial mindset, see how it compares to other approaches to negotiation.
| Mindset | Description | More Detail | Leadership Style | Takeaway |
| Win/Win: Mutually Beneficial | There is plenty (of money, success, happiness, and good fortune) to go around. | People with this mindset value cooperation over competition. | (Shortform note: Covey doesn’t specify a leadership style, but this mindset is characteristic of collaborative leadership, in which colleagues with different expertises work together to achieve shared goals.) | In interdependent relationships, Win/Win is usually the only viable option because it preserves the relationship’s health. |
| Win/Win or No Deal:
Everyone Wins, or No One Does |
Sometimes a Win/Win resolution is impossible, and it’s better for the relationship to drop the negotiation altogether. | This is not always possible (for example, you can’t abandon your kids if you don’t see eye-to-eye with them). If that’s the case, take a compromise, which is a low form of the mutually beneficial approach. | (Shortform note: This may not characterize a particular leadership type, but there are leaders who know when to leave a deal on the table—and those who don’t.) | Sacrificing the negotiation for the sake of the relationship raises the odds of successfully collaborating in the future. |
| Win/Lose:
Either I Beat You or You Beat Me |
Everything is a competition; your success must come at the expense of someone else’s. | This win is short-lived: The other person develops negative feelings about their loss, which impedes future collaborations. | Authoritarian (use authority, power, status, or personality to win)
(Shortform note: This leadership style generally hampers team members’ performance, commitment, and creativity—but it can be effective in certain contexts.) |
This approach is effective for competition (like sports), not cooperation. |
| Lose/Win:
Have Your Way and I’ll Deal With It |
Follow the path of least resistance rather than causing conflict—even when that means sacrificing what you want. | People with this mindset have personal weakness and insecurity, which drives them to seek others’ acceptance and also makes them intimidated by others’ strength. | Permissive, laissez-faire
(Shortform note: Laissez-faire leadership typically hurts productivity, increases employee conflict, and lessens leadership satisfaction.) |
This approach is unsustainable because it causes people to suppress their feelings and become angry, resentful, cynical, and even physically ill. |
| Lose/Lose: If I Can’t Win, Neither Can You | People with this mentality want the other person to lose more than they want themselves to win. | Fierce competition between two Win/Lose people can devolve into both sides adopting Lose/Lose mindsets, each desperate to see the other lose. | Covey calls this a “philosophy of war,” suggesting that it is the mindset of a leader whose primary objective is to beat competitors. (Shortform note: Business consultant Terri Bozkaya argues that this ultra-competitive behavior is typical of aggressive leaders, who compensate for their personal weaknesses by aggressively demonstrating their strength. | Covey doesn’t spell this out, but it seems clear that a paradigm that causes both sides to lose is not effective. |
| Win:
Everyone for Themselves |
Look out for yourself, and expect others to do the same. | This is only effective if achieving your goal matters more than how it impacts others. For instance, if you urgently needed to order supplies and your usual vendor couldn’t fill the order in time, you would risk burning bridges and hire the first supplier that could fill the order. | Selfish leaders, whose top priority is their own success, rather than the team’s (Shortform note: Selfish leaders tend to crave power and often gain power through dominance. Although some employees prefer dominant leaders over prestige-oriented ones, dominance eventually hurts group dynamics.) | The lack of consideration for others doesn’t foster the necessary trust and cooperation for an effective interdependent relationship. |
Critiques of Win/Win
Although the idea of finding a mutually beneficial solution seems hard to oppose—if everyone wins, who’s left to disagree?—there are a number of arguments against this approach.
Negotiation coach Jim Camp asserts that win/win often means that the more powerful party pushes the other into a less-than-ideal compromise. In Start With No, he posits that a win/win mindset pressures both parties to rush to any agreement rather than doing the haggling necessary to reach the best deal.
Similarly, others say that win/win is a fallacy (particularly prevalent in many tech companies’ mission statements) that allows the powerful to justify their wins, while glossing over the shortcomings of the less-powerful people’s supposed win; instead, there are times when the powerful simply need to sacrifice for the greater good. For instance, a company that sells affordable food could call it a win/win when the company profits and reduces food insecurity—but the bigger picture may be that the company should use its resources to provide free food to those most in need.
Social scientist Jeremy Sherman also points out that, in economics, a win/win between vendor and customer can be a losing prospect for society, and that the government has a role to step in to prevent that loss. For instance, a purely win/win approach would allow people of any age to buy alcohol and cigarettes—the vendors gain more profit and the customers get what they want—but the government has deemed it better for society to put an age requirement on those purchases.
Covey says you need five key components to set the stage before you even sit down at the negotiating table:
1) Know your values and principles. If you don’t, then you can’t determine what constitutes a “win” for you.
(Shortform note: While Covey argues that you must know your values in order to identify what’s best for you in a negotiation, he doesn’t point out that you also must know the values underlying your objectives. This allows you to be flexible and open to alternative outcomes—as long as they still meet your values—and being flexible can help you reach a better deal than settling for a lesser offer just because it checks certain boxes.)
2) Consistently live by those values and principles. This shows that you have integrity and gives the other person confidence that you’ll genuinely commit to helping them win, too.
(Shortform note: Research shows that your perceived integrity is one of three key factors that makes others trust you, and that being viewed as trustworthy makes you more effective in negotiations.)
3) Have high levels of courage and consideration: courage to express your goals and expectations, and consideration to factor in the other person’s perspective.
(Shortform note: In Dare to Lead, Brene Brown writes that there are four skills that build your courage—facing vulnerability (accepting that you can’t control the responses to your words and actions), choosing and practicing clear values (echoing Covey’s two points above), building trust and connection (Covey’s fifth component, below), and developing failure resistance (the ability to recover and move on quickly after something goes wrong).)
4) Adopt an Abundance Mentality, or the conviction that one person’s success doesn’t come at the expense of another’s. This requires a solid sense of self-worth and a personal sense of direction, which gives you the security to celebrate another person’s value and direction.
(Shortform note: Covey was the first to coin the term “abundance mentality,” as well as “scarcity mentality,” which is the belief that there are limited resources and one person’s success must come at the cost of another’s (the Win/Lose mindset). Subsequent research has found that a scarcity mindset impedes your focus and decision-making skills, which causes people in poverty—who are constantly reminded of their scarce money and resources—to make choices that often keep them in a cycle of poverty.)
5) Maintain a high level of trust with the other person. You must trust that the other person respects and cares about you enough to want you to win, too (and vice versa). That caring also pushes you both through the sometimes-difficult work of negotiating a mutually beneficial solution.
Make the Other Person Feel Secure and In Control
Former FBI hostage negotiator, CEO, and author Chris Voss presents a different approach to negotiation in Never Split the Difference: He argues that the win/win approach assumes that people act rationally in negotiations, when they’re actually driven by emotions. As such, successful negotiations depend on fulfilling people’s two basic emotional needs:
To feel secure
To feel in control
To do this, Voss suggests strategies that Covey would probably categorize as external approaches:
Using “calculated empathy,” or understanding the other person’s feelings for the purpose of getting what you want. Understanding how they feel allows you to show empathy, which makes the other person feel safe enough to open up about what they really want—and that information is crucial in negotiations.
Giving them the illusion of control so that you can lead them to the result you want while making them think it’s their idea. You can do this by:
Asking open-ended questions (like responding to their suggestion with “How could I make that work?”) that help them see things from your perspective
Getting them to say “no” to something early in the negotiation, which makes them feel that they’ve asserted some control
With this foundation, how do you actually arrive at a mutually beneficial solution? Covey suggests four steps:
1) Try to understand the other person’s perspective. We’ll explain how to do this in Habit 5.
(Shortform note: Rather than understanding the other person’s perspective, Voss suggests changing it. If you’ve made them feel secure and in-control enough to divulge their hidden desires, and you know how to exploit cognitive biases and other irrational blind spots (which Voss details in the book), you can make them believe that helping you achieve your preferred outcome will actually satisfy their own desires.
2) Pinpoint each person’s biggest concerns. Describe these as objectively and straightforwardly as possible.
(Shortform note: Voss promotes a related tactic called labeling, in which you identify and articulate the other person’s feelings (for instance, “You seem frustrated”). This is a calculated empathy technique that creates a sense of intimacy and rapport by demonstrating your insight and empathy.)
3) Identify what results constitute a “win” for each person.
(Shortform note: Voss suggests that you might gain a better understanding of what the other person wants than they have themselves: He emphasizes the importance of getting the other party to open up enough to reveal the desires and worries driving their negotiation objectives, and he argues that people are often so overcome these emotions that they scarcely know what they really want.)
4) Determine a new solution that achieves those results.
Use Principled Negotiation to Reach a Mutually Beneficial Solution
In Getting to Yes, Harvard law professors Roger Fisher and William Ury suggest using objective criteria (such as market values or expert data) to measure how a solution benefits both sides. Using objective standards improves fairness, efficiency, and the working relationship between the deal-makers.
Criteria is one of four elements of Fisher and Ury’s principled negotiation, a win/win framework for deal-making. The other three elements are:
People—Separate personalities and emotions from the substance of the negotiation. People’s emotions and the dynamics of the relationship often get intertwined with the issue being negotiated, so Fisher and Ury emphasize that sensitivity and respect are essential for successful negotiations.
Interests—Focus on each side’s interest—which involves their needs, desires, fears, and concerns—not their position. While two people argue over opposing positions, there can be a third solution that meets everyone’s interests.
Options—Brainstorm multiple options that meet mutual interests. Instead of there being a winner and loser, this makes a win/win outcome possible.
Unlike the other habits, Covey clarifies that you should not adopt this approach universally or unconditionally.
Reaching a mutually beneficial solution can be difficult, depending on your emotional involvement in the issue, your relationship with the other person, and their willingness to strive for a win/win outcome. Follow this exercise to improve your current approach.
Describe a current or recent disagreement you’ve had with someone.
Try to see things from the other person’s perspective. How do you think she views the problem and what would constitute a “win” for her?
What would constitute a “win” for you?
What are a couple of possible solutions that could have been mutually beneficial?
Next time you face a conflict with this person, what can you say or do to stop the momentum of the argument and ask the other person to work with you to find a mutually beneficial solution?
Habit Description:
We discussed in Habit 4 that an essential step in reaching a mutually beneficial solution is to try to understand the other person’s perspective and concerns. The key to understanding people is to listen with the intent to grasp their perspectives; this is empathic listening. Empathic listening involves not only hearing people’s words but also paying attention to their nonverbal cues, like their posture, gestures, and cadence.
(Shortform note: Empathic listening is a cornerstone of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a communication framework that is rooted in compassion and understanding and outlined in the book, Nonviolent Communication. Author Marshall B. Rosenberg developed and used NVC in his work with civil rights activists and school desegregationists in the 1960s.)
As your empathic listening improves, you’ll progress through the four stages of empathic listening.
| Description | Pros | Cons | Example | |
| Stage 1 | Mimicking, or repeating a person’s words back to them (also called “active” or “reflective” listening) | You’re actively listening to what the other person is saying.
You avoid responses that focus on yourself. |
This is not very effective for problem-solving, because you’re only repeating the information—not processing it.
If you don’t have a solid relationship with the other person or show a genuine interest in what she’s saying, mimicry can come off as insulting. |
Your spouse says, “I hate this job. It’s just wasting my time.”
You respond, “You can’t stand your job. You feel like it’s a waste of time” |
| Stage 2 | Rephrasing the content | You have to actually process what the other person said. | Your response is dominantly logic-oriented; it doesn’t address the other person’s emotions. | In response to your spouse, you say, “You’re tired of your job and you don’t think it will help you in your career path.” |
| Stage 3 | Reflecting the feelings the person is expressing | You pick up on how the other person is feeling, which helps you begin to understand their perspective. | Your response is based in emotion; it doesn’t incorporate logic. | Your response to your spouse is, “You’re feeling frustrated and exasperated.” |
| Stage 4 | Combining Stages 2 and 3: Rephrasing what the other person is saying and also reflecting their feelings | You integrate emotion and logic to better understand the other person.
In the long run, you save time and effort by avoiding misunderstandings. |
You must invest more time and energy on the front end to understand the person’s perspective. | You respond to your spouse, “Your job is making you feel frustrated and exasperated, and you don’t think it will help you in your career path.” |
Effective Listening Requires More Than Empathy
Subsequent research found that effective listening requires more than what Covey has suggested. (It’s worth noting that this research studied effective—but not specifically empathic—listening.) Most notably, this research found that effective listening involves a lot of responding, but the responses must be supportive and constructive. The study even found that effective listeners often give advice, but that the feedback clearly reflects that the listener thoroughly understands what the speaker is saying.
The authors of the study, leadership consultants and authors Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, list six levels of listening, some of which overlap with Covey’s stages of empathic listening:
Create a safe space for the speaker to share their thoughts and feelings.
Put away distractions like phones and make eye contact with the speaker; besides making the speaker feel heard, these actions also make you, the listener, more attentive.
Logically understand what the speaker is saying. Ask questions or reiterate to ensure that you have an accurate understanding. (This is comparable to Covey’s Stage 2.)
Interpret the speaker’s nonverbal cues, including posture, facial expressions, and cadence. (Covey gives this overarching advice, but doesn’t associate it with a specific stage of listening.)
Aim to understand how the speaker feels about what they’re saying; support and validate those emotions. (In isolation, this is comparable to Covey’s Stage 3, but Zenger and Folkman’s descriptions suggest that each of these levels incorporates the attributes of the previous levels. In that case, Level 5’s emotional understanding is layered on top of Level 2’s logical comprehension, which would make this parallel to Covey’s Stage 4.)
Contribute to the conversation by asking questions, offering insight, or giving advice that could help the listener develop a new perspective or solution. These contributions must focus on the speaker and the issue at hand, rather than diverting the focus to the listener.
Once you reach Stage 4, your empathic listening will improve your outcomes because:
Empathy Is a Key to Good Leadership
The four benefits Covey lists indicate why the idea of empathic listening has become so popular among leaders: Leaders are continually looking for ways to get better data, build trust with employees, improve their employee’s problem-solving abilities, and express themselves in an accessible, understandable way.
Aside from negotiations, such empathy is critical for leaders to understand their team members’ wants and needs, so that they know the best ways to rally and support the team. In Nonviolent Communication, Rosenberg agrees that empathic listening makes it easier for you to relate to the other person on a human level, since you’re focused on understanding their observations, feelings, needs, and requests.
Supporting your team empathetically is what Michael Brenner has dubbed Champion Leadership in his book Mean People Suck. Brenner—a business consultant, CEO, and bestselling author—posits that champion leadership leads to more engaged employees, greater innovation, and better business outcomes.
To master this habit, Covey suggests you make a point of spending one-on-one time with people and building your level of trust and goodwill. Additionally, practice empathic listening with these exercises:
Practice Empathic Listening
While Covey’s suggested exercises allow you to practice empathic listening, he doesn’t provide many specific strategies to be successful at it. First, consider these tips for empathic listening from the Crisis Prevention Center:
Signal that you're listening with your body language and gestures like nodding.
Withhold your judgments. You don’t have to agree with the other person, but you must release your opinions long enough to understand the other person’s perspective.
Paraphrase what you think the other person is saying, and ask them if you’re correct. (NVC recommends paraphrasing in the form of a question, such as, “Are you feeling _ because you need ?”)
Embrace silence. Sometimes your presence is enough to make the other person feel supported. Also, be careful not to interrupt or respond too quickly if the other person needs time to think.
Don’t cut the conversation short. Make sure the other person has expressed everything they wanted to say. You may need to set up another time to talk more.
Additionally, NVC lists several common responses that you should avoid, because they engage with the speaker intellectually rather than empathically:
Offering advice (“You should try …”)
Consoling (“It wasn’t your fault.”)
Correcting (“Maybe you misunderstood.”)
Educating (“There’s a valuable lesson in this.”)
Interrogating (“How did that happen?”)
One-upping (“I’ve dealt with something worse.”)
Shutting down (“Don’t worry so much.”)
Storytelling (“My friend had a similar situation …”)
Sympathizing (“I’m sorry you’re going through that.”)
As discussed, when you try to understand others, it encourages them to do the same toward you—and you can help them to understand you by communicating who you are, how you feel, and what you think. Specifically, Covey argues that the key to helping others understand you is to use the Greek rhetorical philosophy of ethos, pathos, and logos, in that order.
How to Communicate With Empathy
Effectively communicating, as Covey suggests, requires as much finesse and technique as empathic listening—but, again, Covey doesn’t provide actionable strategies. Here, Nonviolent Communication outlines specific tips for empathic expression in four steps:
Observe without evaluating. This involves making specific, observable statements rather than using labels or generalizations. For example, say, “I was still speaking” rather than, “That was rude” or “You always cut me off.”
Identify and express your feelings. Once you’ve made your observation, build on it by sharing your feelings. To clarify, feelings should describe your physical or emotional state, not your feelings or thoughts about something.
Connect your feelings to your needs. Every feeling arises because a certain need (such as autonomy or acceptance) is or isn’t being met. Identify what need is underlying the feeling you named, so that you’re clear about your goals for this communication.
Make specific requests. Once you identify what you need, ask the other person for exactly what you want. A few tips:
Tell them what you do want, rather than what you don’t want.
Be specific. Asking simply for “help” leaves them to interpret what that entails.
Make requests, not demands. The other person should feel free to say “no” without backlash.
Make sure the other person understands by asking them to reflect back what you’ve said in their own words.
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We all have misunderstandings from time to time—and sometimes the consequences are more severe than others. Use this exercise to see how you can practice careful, empathic listening to avoid misunderstandings in the future.
Describe a recent situation in which you misinterpreted or misunderstood someone.
In which of the four stages were you listening (mimicking, rephrasing, reflecting feelings, or listening empathically) and how do you think this contributed to the misunderstanding?
How might your own perspectives and assumptions have contributed to the misunderstanding?
Were there obstacles preventing you from listening empathically (e.g. distractions, your assumptions, time constraints)? How could you eliminate those in the future?
Habit Description:
According to Covey, collaboration creates an outcome that’s greater than the sum of its parts, as in 1+1 = 3 or more (for example, the harmony of two people singing together is entirely different than any sound either could produce alone). This is possible because the relationship itself adds value by creating the opportunity for collaboration.
Covey says you can’t create this kind of collaborative magic without the interdependent habits we’ve already discussed:
These habits foster trust and goodwill, which enables both parties to communicate openly, and that makes collaboration possible. The table below shows the important relationship between trust, communication, and outcomes.
| Trust Level | Communication | Outcome |
| Low |
|
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| Moderate |
|
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| High |
|
|
Oxytocin Improves Trust and Collaboration
Subsequent research has revealed that the connection between empathy, trust, and collaboration is not only behavioral—it's neurological. Paul J. Zak, who studies neuroeconomics (the intersection of neuroscience and economics), found that
When people feel trusted, their brains release higher levels of oxytocin.
When people have higher levels of oxytocin, they become more trustworthy and trusting.
When people are in an environment with high levels of mutual trust, they become more productive and collaborative, as well as happier, more energetic, and more loyal to the organization.
In other words, Covey’s and Zak’s equations are similar but distinct:
Covey: Trust improves communication, which improves collaboration.
Zak: Trust raises oxytocin, which improves trust (that again raises oxytocin in a virtuous cycle), which improves collaboration.
You need a high level of trust and candid communication to produce creative, collaborative results. The collaboration then further strengthens the relationship, which adds to the high levels of trust and encourages even more communication and cooperation.
Example: Trust and Candor Are Key to Netflix’s Innovative Success
In No Rules Rules, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote that fostering trust and candor enabled the business to adapt and grow from a mail-order DVD service to an international media company that produces original, award-winning content for millions of subscribers.
Hastings wanted his employees to feel trusted and empowered to improve innovation; he believed that when people don’t feel the freedom to make their own decisions, it hinders their creativity. Hastings built trust by:
Eliminating vacation policies and travel and expense policies, instructing employees to use their best judgment, and providing some parameters to prevent abuse
Empowering all employees to make decisions and own the consequences, rather than seeking approval from managers
With that trust in place, Hastings insisted that employees provide frequent, candid, constructive feedback to create accountability and ensure that teams recognize mistakes, learn, and improve as quickly as possible. To do this, he:
Taught employees how to constructively give and receive feedback
Instructed staff to give feedback to managers and executives—not just peers and subordinates
Formalized feedback with written and face-to-face 360-degree reviews (also called multi-rater feedback or multi-source feedback or assessment), in which each employee receives comments on their performance from everyone on their team and anyone else in the company who wants to chime in
Increased organizational transparency by making sensitive data (like profit and loss statements) available to all employees
Hastings also describes a third key element to Netflix’s success: Hiring only top-tier talent and firing them when their performance drops (but sending them off with a generous severance). Hastings asserts that, without a top-quality staff of dedicated employees, high levels of trust and candor don’t work. This echoes Covey’s premise that you need to develop the previous habits—which arguably make you a top-quality individual—in order to effectively collaborate.
Before you can effectively collaborate with others, Covey says you need to develop “internal synergy,” which we’ll call balance. Life can be logical as well as emotional, and to be effective, you need to be both analytical and intuitive.
Integrate Reason and Emotion to Access Your Wise Mind
Covey references the common belief that some people rely more heavily on their emotion-oriented right brain, and others on their logic-oriented left brain. While the concept of right- and left-brain dominance has since been debunked, the point that we must balance reason and intuition is a valid one.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy aims to help patients achieve this balance by tapping into their “wise mind,” where reason is integrated with feelings. (This is related to Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom, which balances knowledge, context, morals, and values.) Try these practices to tap into your wise mind:
Be present; try not to think of anything but what you’re experiencing right now.
Notice your thoughts without judging or engaging with them.
Notice your physical sensations.
Notice your emotions without judging or trying to change them.
Recognize that positive and negative can coexist (for instance, you may be excited about a new job but also sad about certain aspects of leaving your old job).
Recognize that strong emotions can distort your view of what’s true and false; try to identify objective facts.
Covey’s discussion suggests that, as an individual, one of the best ways to promote successful collaboration is to be prepared with the right elements—a collaborative mindset, empathic listening skills, high levels of trust, clear communication, and internal synergy. However, as a leader, you have more authority to control the setting and gather the right ingredients for collaborative success.
Neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak identified eight strategies that managers can use to build a high-trust culture in order to boost collaboration (and oxytocin).
Like much of Covey’s advice, collaboration as a concept is fairly simple, but it’s not easy to do. You and the other party may have to overcome substantial challenges to effectively collaborate—but the results are worth the effort.
How to Foster Non-Threatening Collaboration
While many business leaders understand the value of collaboration, they often overlook the fact that employees may feel threatened by the prospect of sharing information, resources, and responsibilities—they could feel like they’re working themselves out of a job.
Lisa B. Kwan, a senior researcher and executive leadership coach at Harvard, calls this the “collaboration blind spot,” and it can have negative ripple effects. First, a team’s threatened, defensive reaction causes them to hoard information and sabotage the collaboration. Then, the failed collaboration creates a negative expectation that taints future collaborative efforts before they even start. Just as Covey writes that collaboration is contagious, it appears that counter-collaboration is, too.
To avoid this fate, all the teams involved must feel secure in their position and value at the company. (Kwan focuses on teams, but, presumably, this also applies to individual employees.) Kwan identified three elements that create a team’s sense of security, and she outlines how to protect each one when initiating a collaboration.
Identity—An individual’s or team’s identity gives them a sense of who they are within the company. Leaders should reflect on how each group identifies itself (including its unique traits and sources of pride) and how the collaboration could threaten that self-image. Then, leaders can publicly recognize key aspects of the teams’ identities and emphasize how important they are to the company.
Legitimacy—This is why the individual or team exists and is valued within the company. Again, leaders should reflect on the groups’ main sources of value and how asking them to share information and responsibilities in the collaboration might make them feel that their legitimacy is in jeopardy—and, again, the solution is to recognize and reinforce that they are valued. Teams might especially need this affirmation in the early phases of collaboration.
Control—This is an individual’s or team’s autonomy to do their work. Leaders should identify each team’s areas of expertise—including technologies, processes, and outcomes—and consider whether and how these are impacted by the collaboration. If the initiative calls for either group to share or give up control in any of these areas, leaders can maintain their sense of security by giving them greater control over some other area of responsibility, even if it’s unrelated to the collaborative project.
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Habit Description:
You must keep yourself mentally and physically healthy in order to avoid burnout and continue being productive. Covey returns here to the concept of balancing output and capacity from Part 1. In this case, your good habits and positive behavior are the output, and your physical, mental, and emotional health is the capacity.
Covey says self-renewal not only enables you to continue practicing the other six habits—it actually improves your efficiency and effectiveness, creating an upward spiral of growth and self-improvement. Self-renewal nurtures your conscience, the small voice that pushes you toward what’s right and aligned with your principles. As you feed and strengthen your conscience, it helps you stay disciplined and focused on a principle-centered path that fosters growth through the seven habits.
Self-Care Buffers Against Stress
While Covey focuses on how self-renewal enhances your positive habits, he overlooks the fact that one of the pivotal ways it does this is by weakening the negative impacts of stress. In other words, the better you manage your stress through self-care, the more you can engage in positive behaviors. This reframes the benefits of self-care: It doesn’t make you feel better by masking or distracting from your issues, but rather by helping you work through them.
A 2018 survey of hundreds of American medical students—a notoriously stressed-out population—asked them to self-report their levels of self-care, stress, and quality of life. The researchers found that students who engaged in more self-care had a higher quality of life, despite high levels of stress.
Covey prescribes self-renewal in four dimensions, and he explains how each one connects with the previous six habits:
Focus on What’s Most Important
Minimalists have developed similar categories, not for the express purpose of self-renewal, but rather as a way to focus on the most important things in order to eliminate excess and live a simpler life. However, decluttering your life in key areas could also contribute to self-renewal.
In Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life, authors and minimalists Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus describe five key values to focus on (some of which overlap Covey’s four dimensions):
Health—Eat well and exercise.
Relationships—Drop unproductive relationships and invest in meaningful ones.
Passions—Pursue a mission-driven passion instead of career and status.
Growth—Make small, daily changes that contribute to substantial growth over time.
Contributing to others—Serve society and help others grow.
Beyond benefiting yourself, Covey argues that self-renewal benefits the people around you—which further benefits you, creating a virtuous cycle:
Awaken the Giant Within: Help Yourself to Help Others, and Vice Versa
Covey’s description suggests that your self-care passively benefits those around you by making you a calmer, more pleasant person to interact with. By contrast, Tony Robbins urges you to take a more active role by finding ways to give back to others, and he explains that this has a somewhat cyclical relationship with self-care: On one hand, he asserts that giving back to those around you (as well as society and the world, on a larger scale) is an essential element to living a fulfilling life.
On the other hand, he emphasizes that you must nurture your own needs in order to have the capacity to give to others—analogously, flight attendants instruct passengers to secure their own oxygen masks before helping others put on theirs. Additionally, when you recognize that you don’t have to be a martyr to help others, you’ll be more inclined to take care of yourself and those around you.