7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Self Improvement by Stephen Covey

so before speaking about the first habiti want to bring to your attention a newmindset so before i read this book Inever really had this super-awesomeoutlook on life and in fact it changedmy thinking forever so when you’re inany situation in life you can choose tobe reactive more proactive but the basicidea is that by choosing to be proactiveyou choose to increase your circle ofinfluence you see there are things thatyou can control in there are things youcan’t directly control such as theweather where you were born or yourpersonal decisions of your boss thingsthat you can control include how youreact to it this is really the onlything you can control in life if youreact without thinking or you say aharsh word to your friend or you drinkall night and live in self-indulgentafter a long day where you just becomedepressed when the weather is gloomy youare becoming a reactive person you letthe environment control you and you’resimply a person reacting to stimuli whenyou were reactive you focus on thingsyou cannot control for example you mayhave been born into a socio-economiclower or middle class family you mayhave been born into an abusive familyyou may even been diagnosed with aterrible illness but focusing on it willnot change it you know what you cancontrol this is the secret to beingproactive and in turn becoming aneffective person you can control yourwork ethic you can control how you treatthe people in your life and you cancontrol if you put on your seatbelt ornot by focusing on things that you cancontrol you bring more power into yourlife and widen your circle of influenceso when short reactive people are peoplewho complain a lot instead of actuallygoing out and changing their actions andproactive people understand that even ifthey’re complaining was justifiedcomplaining about it wouldn’t changeanything it would just be negativetoxins in their life including theirsocial environment of their peers seemost people choose to complain simplybecause it’s easier so let’s move on tothe second habit how do you want peopleto think of you at your funeralthe second habit is all about becomingthe person you want to be by thinkingdeeply about how other people think ofyou now I’m mature enough person and notreally care what most people think of mebut I do care what my loved ones thinkof me I want my girlfriend to think i’mloyal trustworthy and fun to be aroundand because of this i’m not going tocheat on herI’m not going to lie to her and I’m notgoing to fill our conversations withcomplaints or negative thoughtssee when you die and there’s a crowd ofpeople standing around your coffinwhat will they say over their bestmemories of you or their worst memoriesof you be thinking about the end beforeany major decision and this will helpyou become a more effective person youwant to be remembered as a person whoadded value to societymaybe start filling your facebookstatuses with more positivity and upbeatcontent basically are you doing thethings that allow you to say you’vebecome the person that you want to bethe second half but also goes intocreation a bit see according to stephencovey the author everything is createdtwice once in the mind and once in thephysical real worldthe problem is that many things arecreated in the mind but never manifestedinto tangible things because we tellourselvesI can’t do it a lot of time the onlything stopping you from doing somethingis yourself and even worse situation iswhen things aren’t even created in themind at all for some people debt drugsdespair or other life problems prevent aperson from thinking about creation andonly on the negative outcomes of theirsituation and this is where the firsthave it comes back stop focusing on whatyou can control and you’ll be able tocreate more you’ll be able to add morevalue to the world the last thing StevenCovey mentions in this chapter somethingcalled a personal mission statement nowthis is the one line sit-ins that youcan rely on to give you a sense ofpurpose in the world a very simplemission statement is I want the world tobe better because i was here in factthat’s Will Smith’s personal missionstatementOprah wants to be a teacher and be knownfor inspiring my students to be morethan they thought they ever could beif you keep this mission statement inmind when you make every decision youwill always keep the end in mind nowthat we’ve talked about the end let’stalk about the beginning so StephenCovey came up with this thing called theurgent and important matrix basicallyeverything you can do falls into one offour categorieshere’s the super easy graphic they canmake it easier to understand basicallyanything urgent is something that needsto be done as soon as possible andanything important is something thatmakes us effective the advice the authorgives is to do things that are noturgent but they have to be important assoon as possible because if you dothings that aren’t urgent before theyare urgent then you won’t have to fretabout doing them last minute here’s thething that kind of annoys me if I askmost people what they thought wasimportant they would say things liketheir health their relationships theirfinancial credibilitywhen you look into their actions theyspend their time doing other meaninglessthings like organizing papers going outfor long lunches hanging out with thewrong crowdfussing over little crab doing stupidstuff for the better part of their daythat doesn’t lead them to bettering thethings that they said was important tothem so you got to put first thingsfirst spend some time with your familybefore you waste your time doingsomething like playing video games startputting effort into creating a monthlybudget instead of putting your effortpinning new things on pinterest go andwork out first before watching that newepisodethe problem here is somethingpsychologists call cognitive dissonanceand it’s when the things you say aremost important to you aren’t the samethings that you’re spending most of yourtime on in fact some psychologists saythat this is unhealthy the disconnectbetween what we say we will do and whatwe actually do is terrible and I thinkworking on this would improve a lot ofour lives so the first three habits areabout managing yourself and what you cando independently there are things youcan make changes mindsets you can alteran attitude you can adjust tothey set the foundation for the nextthree habits which have to do withbecoming an effective person in societyand involve being dependent so thefourth habit is called think win-winStephen Covey says that there are sixtypes of relationships and you can thinkof them as personal business or evenbiological animalistic relationships thefirst to what most people think theworld is made of lose win or win losewhich means for me to win you have tolose or the other way around people withthis type of mentality think that tohave the largest skyscraper in theneighborhood they must tear all theother skyscrapers down you should avoidthese situations because someone willlose even if the net gain 20 in factmost people don’t even agree to us inthis they believe in reciprocal altruismin the long run with lose is like aparasite where one wins and the otherlosses the next relationship that we’regoing to talk about is just toxic andnasty it’s called lose-lose the bestexample I can think of is there’s astory where this couple got marriedcouple years later they decided to getdivorced but the man knew that hisex-wife when half of everything that heowned in court but he had quite the egoand he didn’t want her getting hisFerrari or Lamborghini so he sold themboth for ten dollars eachsee both people in this situation lost asubstantial amount of value because oftheir hatred and you should definitelyavoid any type of relationship like thisthe next to relationships are not badbut they should also be avoided solelywin relationships aren’t really arelationship at all since they onlyaffect one person people in this type ofrelationship don’t care what anyone elsegets as long as they get what they wantit’s actually very selfish that the nextrelationship is called No Deal or NoDeal is a neutral mentality and it’sactually the most preferable one is thelast one is not offered basically eachindividual agrees that if both partiesdon’t win there is no deal in otherwords it’s completely unselfish if Ican’t get what I want without youbenefiting to it’s not worth it andthere’s no dealthe next relationship we’re gonna talkabout is called win-win and these happenin couple relationships or businessrelationships and even in ecologymutualistic relationships or symbiosisis the term 12 animals benefit fromliving together for you to win the otherperson does not have to loseI could buy and read a book that givesme huge insight into a recent problemI’m dealing with and because of this ibenefit from the advice and the authorbenefits from the money I can make avideo and uploaded to youtube andbenefit from the advertisement revenueand the viewers will benefit from thelife changing perspective so startsearching for win-win relationships andyou will surely become an effectiveperson haha the next habit i love thishappenso the other gives a little story wherethat is talking to his coworker about asituation with his son the father andson have a talk after the talk to dadgoes to his friend for adviceI just can’t understand my son sometimesthat ad says he won’t listen to me andhis friend goes let me rephrase that youcan’t understand your son because hewon’t listen to you says the friend Ithought to understand another person youhave to listen to themhonestly when I read this little story iactually got goose bumps but the authoris so righthow many times we get mad at anotherperson because they don’t think the waythat we think we haven’t even tried tohear their side of the story first wesee the world through our eyes even froma baby we are born egotistical andunderstanding others views does not comenatural learning to become an effectiveperson is understanding everyone hastheir own perspectives and opinions fromtheir own personal experiences in lifeevents you should seek first tounderstand because once you understandthe situation and the person’s feelingstowards that you might have a betterchance of helping them understand youso this is a little technical but I wantto get into the five levels of listeningthat Covey of covers the first is calledignoring and it’s just downright rude sothe second level is the kind of level mysister talks to to my momit’s called pretending yeah uh-huh rightyou’re at least responding to the personthe third level is called selectivehearingwe only hear certain parts of theconversation usually only the parts ofbenefit us and it’s really easy to dothis with someone who talks a lot orpreschool child another level up iscalled attentive listening which is notnecessarily listening to the content butrather the way the words are beingspoken and you focus on the energy ifyou listen to a motivational speaker inanother language and you actually getmotivatedthat’s called attentive listening thelast type of listening we hardly everexperience and it’s called empathiclistening this type of listening is thelistening with the intent to understandyou will get inside the other person’sframe of thinking and understand thembetter and it’s not just the words theysay or how they’re saying them either wegive them all of our attention includingpaying attention to their body languageand paying attention to their feelingsthis is very powerful because it givesyou accurate data to work with tounderstand their thoughts feelings andmotives instead of you being a brickwall saying conform to me another formof great advice Stephen gives is todiagnose before you prescribe whichbasically means to understand before yougive advice one of the best ways to findmore win-win situations is to understandwhat the other person wants and needsbefore you can find a way both of youcan benefit so the next habit is calledsynergize and it took me a while tocompletely understand this but itbasically means the interaction of twoor more parts to produce an outcome thatis greater than the sum of theirindividual parts so very basic versionof synergy comes from a teaching andphysiology so one part might be ourheartanother might be your brain and thethird maybe your stomach of course theseare very complex organs individually butif they work together they are extremelyeffectiveanother example would be trees andsquirrels separately trees can reproduceby their nuts falling to the groundplease refrain from commenting aboutthis unless there’s a really strong windthey won’t spread very quickly on theother hand squirrels can live withouttrees but they would have to live inbushes and eat only berries they mightstruggle hibernating and eating food inthe winter together though the scrollsget protections in the trees as well astons of nuts to eat the trees get thebenefit of getting our nut spread acrosseven more land together they achieve andgrow more than if they were separate andone last example would be drugs andalcohol the effect of sleeping medicineis intensified greatly when mixed withalcohol andnot suggest trying this on your own andin fact most doctors and warned againstitthese are considered constructivesynergy but there’s also reductivesynergy an example of this is if you hadthe plague it but then you’re alsodiagnosed with depression both arereally bad to have and if you have themat the same timewell you might need some external helpand medicine there’s actually work forthis and it’s called come morbidity theopposite of synergy can also happensometimes referred to as negativesynergy and this is when waste iscreatedlet’s say you spend five million dollarson a business deal and another companyputs in five million dollars for the youboth can invest in the same company formore moneyhowever the business that you put moneyand actually failed because it went overa certain amount and because of taxes itfailed the sum of two parts is actuallyless than the total amount of bothseparately an example of negative energywould be one plus one equals one-halfseeking synergy will benefit your lifein many ways but particularly yourbusiness relationships and general lifewill benefit if you can find synergysynergy is basically one plus one equalsthreethat was a sixth Abbott and thatconcludes the habits that you can dowith improving yourself by dealing withothers now we’re going to be moving onhow you can unleash your futurepotential by investing to the bestinvestment you can make is in yourselfam I reading this book you’re ahead ofthe curve and by watching this video youhave a huge advantage of other people socomfy gives the example of this guycutting down a tree with a very dolesaltI mean it’s gonna take him at least sixhours to cut down this huge tree if hewere to spend one hour sharpening thesaw it would only take him three hoursto cut down the tree leading to a totalof four hours instead of six we see howsimple this is how easy it is for theguy to cut the tree down faster but wehardly ever apply the same principle toour lives for example we can sharpen ourphysical saw by eating while maintaininga healthy diet and exercising regularlylet’s sharpen the saw by working outthree times a week instead of paying forit with advanced medical treatment in 40yearsanother example of sharpening our mindsis by learning reading and teachingthere are plenty of studies that showteaching someone something is a greatway to ingrain ideas into her head andin fact it’s one of the reasons i’mmaking this video instead of reading theinstruction manual we try to do itourselves and waste three hours when wecould have humbled ourselves andsharpened our mental song but he alsosuggests sharpening some other areasour life such as emotional and spiritualareas you can invest in yourrelationships with others in many wayssome of which includes spending timewith your friends playing games withyour family or studying with classmatesenriching your spiritual life is alsoimportant whether you’re religious ornot listening to music engaging increating art and spending time in prayeror meditation will always add value toyour life in the long run living ameaningful and effective life doesn’tjust happen you have to make time tocultivate the areas of your life youwant to produce fruits and you do thisby sharpening the song i hope afterwatching this video you’ve gained atleast one gold nugget of knowledge orpractical life advice they move you inthe right direction of becoming a moreeffective person if you like this videoplease leave a big fat like if you wantmore educational valuable life improvingvideos like this subscribe thanks forwatching