Tags / 12 quotes from 1 source
#habits
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Character is a composite of habits
OUR CHARACTER, BASICALLY, is a composite of our habits. “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny,” the maxim goes.
The gravity pull of habits
Habits, too, have tremendous gravity pull—more than most people realize or would admit. Breaking deeply imbedded habitual tendencies such as procrastination, impatience, criticalness, or selfishness that violate basic principles of human effectiveness involves more than a…
Habits as knowledge, skill and desire
For our purposes, we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our…
The maturity continuum
The Seven Habits are not a set of separate or piecemeal psych-up formulas. In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. They move us progressively…
Private victory builds self-confidence
The net effect of opening the “gate of change” to the first three habits—the habits of Private Victory—will be significantly increased self-confidence.
Public victory heals relationships
As you open yourself to the next three habits—the habits of Public Victory—you will discover and unleash both the desire and the resources to heal and rebuild important relationships that have deteriorated, or even broken.
Wait to be acted upon and you will be
As you study the other six habits, you will see that each depends on the development of your proactive muscles. Each puts the responsibility on you to act. If you wait to be acted upon, you will be acted upon.
Direct, indirect and no-control problems
The problems we face fall in one of three areas: direct control (problems involving our own behavior); indirect control (problems involving other people’s behavior); or no control (problems we can do nothing about, such as our past or situational realities). The proactive…
Widening the overlap of knowledge, skill and desire
Knowledge, skill, and desire are all within our control. We can work on any one to improve the balance of the three. As the area of intersection becomes larger, we more deeply internalize the principles upon which the habits are based and create the strength of character to…
Embryonic freedom grows or withers
People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day will, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally “being lived.” They are acting out the scripts written by parents, associates, and society.
Ineffective scripts unworthy of us
In developing our own self-awareness many of us discover ineffective scripts, deeply embedded habits that are totally unworthy of us, totally incongruent with the things we really value in life. Habit 2 says we don’t have to live with those scripts. We are response-able to use…
Living from a self-selected script
And if I do this, day after day my behavior will change. Instead of living out of the scripts given to me by my own parents or by society or by genetics or my environment, I will be living out of the script I have written from my own self-selected value system.