I have re-read this work 22 times and raised my children on the principles within. Here are my notes that have been meticulously looked over for your convenience.
Thank me later.
Sincerely, Bitcoin Justin
7-Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen Covey
Private Victory:
CD1:
Principles are natural law that governs us, values are personal and subjective.
Values govern people’s behavior; principles govern the consequences of people’s behavior.
Principles are independent of us and they operate regardless of us.
Every culture practices universal principles in unique ways.
Any airplane is off the track much of the time but it just keeps coming back to the flight plan eventually it arriving at it’s destination. This is true with all of us as individuals, families and organizations. The key is to have an end in mind and a shared commitment to constant feedback and constant course correctness.
Humility is the mother of all virtues and courage is the father.
We must look through the lens as we see the world as well as how the world is.
Much of our perception is a product of our own motivation of how people will see us.
Examine your own motivations against your highest values because they impact perception which then impacts the behavior that follows.
If you want to achieve your highest aspirations and overcome your greatest challenges, identify the principle of natural law that governs the results you seek.
Success in any endeavor is derived by ultimately acting in harmony with the principles in which the success is tied.
Blame and victimism, whenever you find a problem you will usually find a finger pointing of blame.
Blaming only provided temporary relief of the problem.
Balance and piece of mind follow the person who follows his sense of clear priorities and lives with focus towards them.
True greatness is achieved through the abundant mind that works selflessly for the mutual respect and mutual benefit.
To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.
The way we see things is often the product of the things we seek or our deeper motivations.
The essence to us being objective is to realize that we are subjective.
Were we stand has more to do with where we are sitting.
The truly subjective person is the one who thinks that he or she is objective.
We see the world not as it is but as we area, or as we are conditioned to see it.
When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions and our paradigms.
The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps or assumptions and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experiences the more we can take responsibility for these paradigms, examine them and test them against reality listen to others, be open to their perceptions thereby getting a larger picture and far more objective view.
The fastest way to change somebody’s paradign is simply to give them a new role, a new perspective.
We can only make quantum improvements in our lives when we quite hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to the root, the paradign from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.
CD2:
The way we see the problem is the problem.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that we where at when they where created.
TS Elliot – “We must not cease from exploration and after all of our exploring is to arrive where we began and see the place for the very first time.
Aristotle – “We are what we repeatedly do, excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
Our character is a composite of our habits.
A habit is the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire.
CD3:
You cannot persuade another to change. Each of us guards the gate of change only by the inside. You cannot open the gate of another either by argument or emotional appeal.
Self Awareness – Enables us to stand apart and examine even the way we see ourselves.
Until we understand how we see ourselves we will be unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we will project our intensions onto their nature and call ourselves objective.
Victor Franco had more freedom by having the internal power to exercise his options while his captures had more liberties or the option to choose from within their environment.
Between stimulus and response is a space. Within that space lays our freedom to choose. With in those choices lies our growth and happiness.
Within the space of choice are the 4 endowments
Self Awareness
Imagination
Conscience (Personal Integrity)
Free Will (Our ability to act based on our self awareness)
Habit # 1 – Be Proactive – Means we are responsible for our own lives.
I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the awareness that something else is more important.
Love is a verb. Love the feeling can be recaptured.
Circle of Concern & Circle of Influence – C or Concern – You have no control over. It is ineffective to work on your C or C or the people around you and effective to work on your C of Influence or yourself, your behavior, choices & reactions. By working on your C or I you can have an indirect influence on your C or C.
C or C is filled with the Have’s – I would be happy if I just ……..
C or I is filled with the Be’s – I can be wiser. I can be more understanding. It is the character focus.
Anytime we think that what is out there with others or circumstances is the problem, the very thought is the problem because we empower what’s out there to control us.
The change paradign is from the outside-in meaning to change others to correct the problem. The proactive paradign is from the inside-out meaning to change myself to influence what is going on in the outside. I can be different, I can be more proactive.
If I have a problem with my marriage, what will I gain by confessing my wife’s sins? I immobilize myself in a negative situation and diminish myself to influence her by nagging. My criticism is worst than the conduct I want to correct, my ability to correct the situation withers and dies.
If I really want to improve the situation, I can work on the one thing I have control of. That is myself. I can stop trying to shape up my wife and work on my own weaknesses.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is just smile and be happy.
We are free to choose our actions. We are not free to choose our consequences. Consequences are governed by natural law.
Our behavior is fundamentally governed by principles. Living in harmony with them produces positive consequences. Violating them produces negative consequences.
We are free to choose the response in any situation. In choosing them we also choose the consequences.
When you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.
The proactive approach to any mistake is to
Acknowledge it instantly
Correct it and
Learn from it
Our response to any mistake reflects the quality of the next moment.
At the very heart of our C or I is our ability to make and keep commitments.
Being proactive means to be a model, not a critic.
Look at the weakness of others with compassion, not accusation. It’s not what they are doing or not doing that is the issue, the issue is your chosen response.
Samuel Johnson – “The fountain of contempt must spring up in the mind and he who has little knowledge of human nature has to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts and will multiply the grief he proposes to remove.
Application # 1:
For one full day, listen to yourself and the people around you. How often do you hear reactive phrases like “I can’t” or “If only”.
Imagine a situation in the past and how you responded reactively. Replay that situation before you relive it and imagine how you can respond proactively.
Application # 2:
Identify a problem in your business or personal life. Identify if it is a direct, indirect or no control problem. Identify the first steps you can take in your C of I and take the steps to solve that problem.
Habit # 2 - Begin With The End In Mind.
What lays before us or what lays ahead of use are tiny matters compared to what lays within us.
It is possible to be very busy without being very effective.
All things are created twice. First is a mental creation, 2nd is a physical creation. Blue prints before the house.
Management = Doing things right
Leadership = Doing the right things
Management is a bottom line thing. “How can I best accomplish.” Leadership is a top line thing “What are the things I want to accomplish.”
It’s not about having things, but about having mastery or victory over self.
To begin with the end in mind means to re-script myself so that the paradign to witch my attitudes and behaviors flow are in congruent with my deepest values and aligned with the correct principles.
Personal mission statement CD4 Track 11 40 seconds
Many so called emotional or mental illnesses are really symptoms or an underlying feeling or meaninglessness or emptiness.
A personal mission will give you direction and meaning to all that you do.
Whatever is at the center of our life will be our source of guidance, security, wisdom and power.
Security represents your sense of worth and identity.
Guidance means your source of direction in your life.
Wisdom is your perspective on life
Power
CD5
There is a common thread that is weaved between most spouse-centered relationships. That common thread is emotional dependence.
If our sense of emotional worth comes from our marriage, then we become highly dependent on that relationship.
We become dependent to the moods, treatment, feelings and behavior of our spouse or any outside influence.
When responsibilities increase or stresses occur we tend to revert back to the script we were given when we grew up, but so does our spouse. Those scripts are usually different ways of handling financial, child disciplines or in-law issues that come to the surface. When those deep seeded tendencies combined with the emotional dependency on a marriage the spouse centered relationship reveals all of its vulnerability. When we are dependent on the person from whom we are in conflict both need and conflict are compounded. Love hate over reactions, fight or flight tendencies, withdraw, aggr4esiveness, bitterness, resentment and cold competition are some of the usual results. When these occur we tend to fall even further back on background tendencies and habits in an effort to justify and defend our own behavior and to attack our spouse. Inevitably, anytime we are too vulnerable we feel the need to protect ourselves from further wounds so we resort to sarcasms, cutting humor, cynicism, anything to keep from exposing the tenderness within. Each partner tends to wait on the initiative of the other for love only to be disappointed but also to confirm the rightness of the accusations made. There is only phantom security in such a relationship. When all appears to be going well guidance is based on the emotion of the moment. Wisdom and power are lost on the counter dependent negative interaction.
Consider the 4-Life Supporting Factors. Security, Guidance, Wisdom, Power
When my sense of personal worth comes from my net worth, I am vulnerable to any factor that affects that worth.
If my sense of identity lies in my reputation or the things that I have, my life will be in a constant state of jeopardy.
When writing your mission statement concentrate on your Roles & Goals. Break down your roles and think about what you want to accomplish in each area.
CD4 Track 1-3 Centers
Malcolm Muckerage – “When I look back on my life now a days as I sometimes do what strikes me most foreably about it is what seems at the time most significant and seductive seams now most futile and absorb. For instance, success in all of its various guises being known and being praised in all of its ostensible pleasures like acquiring money or seducing woman or traveling going to or foe in the world and up and down like Satin explaining and experiencing whatever vanity fair has to offer. In retrospect, all of these exercises in self-gratification seam pure fantasy what Pascal called licking the earth.
Centers - One of the best ways to identify your center is to look at your own life supporting factors,
By centering our lives on the correct principles, universal, timeless and self evident, we create a solid foundation for the 4-Life factors.
CD6
Principles are bigger than people or circumstances
The more we learn the more clearly we can focus the lens for witch we see the world.
Principles don’t change but our understanding of them does.
The wisdom that comforts principle centered living comes from the correct maps, the way things are, the way things have been and will be.
We are free to choose the actions, but we are not free to choose our consequences.
When writing a mission statement the involvement process is as critical as the written material.
Habit # 3 – Put First Things First
Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.
The degree in witch we have developed our independent will in everyday lives is measured by personal integrity. Integrity is fundamentally the value we place on ourselves.
A successful person has a habit of doing things that failures wouldn’t do. Successful people don’t like doing them either.
The best time management – organize and execute around priorities.
Time Matrix
You are much more effective to focus on relationships and results then to focus on time and management
The only place to get time for quad #2 is to rob from quad #3 & #4. At least from the beginning.
The enemy of the best is often the good.
You have to know when to say no to worthy projects when the yes inside you is burning hotter for the things you know you need to be doing to stay in quad #2
Quadrant #2 – Organize needs to meet (6) criteria
Coherence – There is harmony, unity and integrity between your vision and mission. A personal mission statement should be in your planner to constantly refer to. Roles should be listed to help define short and long term goals.
Balance – Your scheduling tool should keep your roles in balance so you don’t ignore important roles such as health, relationships, family, ect. You can’t compensate on one category to make up for what you lack in another. Ex. You can’t be a successful businessman but be in the middle of a divorce.
Quad #2 Focus – Deals with prevention and staying out of crises. The best way to do this is by organizing your life on a weekly basis. The key is not to prioritize what is on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. Plan by the week instead of the day.
People Dimension – You need a schedule tool that deals with people and not just schedules. Why you can think in terms of efficiency when dealing with time, a principle centered person thinks in terms of effectiveness when dealing with people.
Flexibility – Your planning tool should be your servant, never your master. Your schedule should be tailored towards your desires, needs and particular ways.
Portable – Your scheduling tool should be taken with you and used when you need it.
CD7
Quadrant #2 Organizing includes (4) key activities.
Identify and write down your key roles. You can break key roles by listing specific areas within. Within work or professional, within family ect. Write down the key areas you see yourself spending time in over the next 7-days
Goals – List the activities or goals you wish to accomplish in each role over the next 7-days
Scheduling – Go through your organizer and schedule the time you are going to work on your goals. Plan 1 or 2 hours on Sunday to plan your week & goals.
Daily adapting – Respond to priorities while adapting to unanticipated events such as relationship based or crises type scenarios.
Taking a few minutes to review your schedule each morning can put you in touch with the value based decisions that you made at the beginning of the week when you prioritized your schedule.
As you review your day you can see how your roles and goals provide a natural prioritization that grows out of your innate sense of balance. It provides both discipline and spontaneity.
The more completely weekly goals are tied into the wider framework of correct principles and a personal mission statement, the greater the chance of effectiveness will be.
Think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.
The first person you need to consider in terms of effectiveness rather than efficiency is yourself.
4th Generation Scheduling Tool
Principle Centered – It allows you to see your time as what is important and effective.
Conscience Directed – It gives you the ability to see your life in harmony with your deepest values.
It defines your mission in terms of value and long-term goals. This gives direction and purpose to the way you spend each day.
It helps balance your life by identifying your roles and goals in each key activity of your life.
It gives greater context by weekly organizing.
Delegation – We accomplish all that we do through delegation either through time or other people.
Delegate to time = Efficiency
Delegate to people = Effectiveness
Delegating through people is the single most high leverage activity there is.
Transferring your responsibilities to others skilled and well-trained individuals allows you to give your time to other high leverage activities.
Delegation means growth for both individuals and organizations.
JC Penny – “The wisest decision I ever made was to let go.”
Producers – Does what is necessary to accomplish desired results. A painter is a producer; an architect that draws up plans is a producer.
Manager – A person who works through people and with systems to produce golden eggs.
A producer can invest (1) hour of effort to produce (1) hour of results. A manager can invest (1) hour of effort to produce 10,50 100 or more hours of results.
The key to effective management is delegation.
Go For Delegation = Go for this and go for that. Task directed minute by minute. One on one supervision of methods. How many people can you manage when you need to be involved in every move they make?
Stewardship Delegation = Based on results. It gives a choice of methods and manages the results. It involves clear upfront and mutual understanding and commitment in (5) areas.
Desired results – Spend time, be patient. Show ten what the desired results are, but not how they are going to do it. Let the person see it, taste it. “Clean and Green” Make a statement of what the desired results are going to look like and work on a commitment of when they are going to be accomplished.
Guidelines – Identify the parameters for which the individual is going to operate. They should be as few as possible to avoid method delegation. They should include formable restrictions to help the individual avoid long standing traditions or getting into trouble. If you know the failure paths of the job, identify them and show where the quicksand is. You don’t want the person to reinvent the wheel. You want to tell them what not to do, but you don’t want to tell them what to do.
Resources – Identify the available or technical resources the person can use to draw from to accomplish the desired results.
Accountability – Set up the specific guidelines will be used to evaluate the desired results and the specific times that evaluations will take place.
Consequences – Specify what will happen both good and bad as a result of the evaluation.
Complete delegation Disc #7 tracks 6&7
Application # 1:
Make a list of activities and the people you can delegate those activities to.
Application # 2:
Identify a quadrant #2 activity you know you have been neglecting in your life. One that you know if you have done it well it would make a significant impact on your life either personally or professionally. Write it down and commit to implement it.
Application # 3:
Draw a time management matrix. Log your time for 3-days in 15-minute intervals. How accurate is your estimate. Are you satisfied with the way you spend your time? What do you need to change?
Application # 4:
Organize your next week. Start by writing down your roles 7 goals for the next week. Transfer the goals to a specific action plan. At the end of the week evaluate how well your plan translated your deep values and purposes into your daily life and what level of integrity you where able to maintain in those deep values and purposes.
Application # 5:
Commit yourself to start organizing on a weekly basis and set up a regular time to start doing it.
Application # 6:
Convert your current planning tool into a 4th generation tool.
Public Victory
There can be no friendship without confidence and there can be no confidence without integrity.
Private victory precedes public victory just like 1st grade precedes 2nd grade.
You can’t be successful with other people if you have not paid the price of being successful with yourself.
You can’t talk yourself out of problems that you behave yourself into.
The principle of sequencing. You can’t have the fruits without the roots.
If you don’t know yourself, control yourself and have mastery over yourself, it is very difficult to like yourself.
Independence is an achievement. Inter-Dependence is a choice only independent people can make.
The most important ingredient we can put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but who we are.
A double minded person is unstable in all of his ways.
The place we start when building any relationship is inside ourselves, inside our circle of influence, inside our character.
Emotional bank account – metaphor – It is the amount of trust built up in a relationship. It’s the feeling of safe.
You deposit into an emotional account through courteousies, kindnesses, honesty, keeping your commitment.
Deposits = Built up of trust with others.
Reserves of deposits will compensate for mistakes. Communication does not need to necessarily need to be clear, you will trust anyways. You wouldn’t be an offender because of a choice of particular words.
When a trust account is high, communication is easy, instant and effective.
If you have a habit of showing discourtesy, disrespect, cutting someone off, over reacting, ignoring, becoming arbitrary, betraying their trust, threatening or playing little tin God in their life, eventually their emotional bank account is overdrawn. The trust level gets very low. What flexibility do I have? I’m walking on mind fields. I have to be very careful of everything that I say. Measure every word, it’s tension city. Memo haven, protecting my backside, politicking. Many organizations and families are filled with it. Instead of rich spontaneous understanding and communication the situation becomes accommodating where two people attempt to live individual lifestyles. The relationship may further deteriorate to one of hostility and defensiveness, the flight or fight response creates verbal battles, slammed doors, refusal to talk, emotional withdraw and self pity. It may end up in a cold war with home life sustained only by children. Sex or social pressure or image protection.
The P/PC lighthouse is there. We can either break against it or use it as our guiding light.
One of the greatest deposits you can make is just by listening without preaching or suggesting or reading your own autobiography into what they have to say. Listen and let them feel your true and honest concern and acceptance of them.
There is no quick fix. As genuine deposits keep coming and coming they increase the balance.
Building and repairing relationships takes time. If you become impatient you could very well withdraw all of the deposits you have made and diminish yourself.
It takes character to be proactive, to focus on your circle of influence to nurture growing things and not to pull up the flowers to see how the roots are coming.
Building and repairing relationships are long-term investments.
CD 8
6-Major deposits that build emotional bank accounts.
Understanding the individual - Really seeking to understand the other person is one of the most important deposits you can make. It’s the key to every other deposit because you simply don’t know what constitutes a deposit to the other person. Until you understand that individual from within that individual’s frame of reference, what may be a deposit for you may not be perceived as a deposit to the other person at all. It may even be perceived as a withdraw because it does not touch the persons deep interest or needs. To make a deposit, what is important to another person needs to be as important to you as the other person is to you. Our tendency is to project out of our own autobiography what the other person wants or needs. We project our intentions on the behavior of others. We interpret what constitutes a deposit on our own needs and desires. Treat all of your children the same by treating them differently.
Attending to the little things – The little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Small discourtesies and unkindnesses, little forms of disrespect makes huge withdraw. In relationships the little things are the big things.
Keeping Commitments – There is not more of a massive withdraw than to make a commitment to someone and not come thru. Make promises very carefully. Never make a promise you can’t keep. If you cultivate the habit of keeping the promises you make, you build bridges of trust that span the gap between you and your child. If that child has cultivated trust in your acts and your word he will act on your council.
Clarifying expectations – Clear expectations in the area of roles is important. Unclear expectation in the area of goals undermines trust. You will find that the cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals. Unclear expectations lead to misunderstandings and disappointment and withdraw of trust. When you come into a new situation it is important to get all expectations out on the table when it comes to roles and goals. We create many situations just by assuming that our expectations are self-evident and are clearly understood and shared by other people. The deposit is to make the expectation clear from the beginning.
Showing personal integrity – Personal integrity generates trust and is the basis for many different kinds of deposits. Lack of integrity can undermine almost any effort to generate high trust accounts. Integrity includes but goes far beyond honesty.
Honesty = Telling the truth, conforming our words to reality
Integrity = Conforming our reality to words. Keeping promises and fulfilling expectations.
One of the best ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those that are not present. In doing so we build the trust of those that are present.
When you defend those that are absent you build the trust of those that are present. You may get a temporary golden egg by putting someone down or sharing privileged information but your strangling the goose, weakening the relationship that supplies enduring pleasure and association.
Integrity as an interdependent reality – You treat everyone by the same set of principles. You are integrated around principles. Integrity – Integrated. As you do, people will come to trust you.Apologize sincerely when you make a withdraw. Great deposits come in sincere words. “I was wrong”. “That gave you no dignity and I’m deeply sorry.”
It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly.
People with little internal security cannot apologize. It makes them vulnerable or appear soft and weak. They fear that others may take advantage of them. Their security is based upon the opinions of other people and they are worried what others may think. In addition they usually feel justified for what they did. They rationalize their own wrong in the name of the other persons wrong.
To be a deposit the apology must be sincere. It is the weak who are cruel; gentleness can only be expected from the strong.
Sincere apologies make deposits, repeated apologies are interpreted as insincere and are withdraws.
It is one problem to make a mistake and quite another not to admit it.
Laws of love and laws of life.
When we make deposits of unconditional love, when we live the primary laws of love we encourage others to live the primary laws of life.
When we truly love others without conditions and without strings we help them feel secure and safe and validated and affirmed in their essential worth, dignity and integrity. Their natural growth process is encouraged. We make it easy for them to live the laws of life, cooperation, cont5ribution, self-discipline and integrity.
When we violate the primary laws of love by attaching strings and conditions we encourage others to violate the primary laws of life. We encourage them to be in a reactive and defensive position.
It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual then to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses. You spend countless hours working for what’s out there without having a deep meaningful lasting relationship with the people at home, the people you work with, the people closest to you.
Creating the unity necessary to run a business, marriage or a family takes great personal strength.
It is at a very essential one on one level that we live the primary laws of love and life.
P-Problems are PC Opportunities
Every P-Problem is a PC Opportunity. It’s a chance to build the emotional bank account that significantly affects the interdependent relationship.
Many interactions change from transactional to transformational. ex.” Help a child or teenager with a problem”
Strong bonds of love and trust are created as a child senses the value parents give to their problems and to them as individuals.
The Habit of Interdependence
This is the habit of public victory or success with other people.
Effective interdependence can only be achieved by effective independent people.