7 posts tagged “self improvement”

The last of the 7 Habits involves the act of "sharpening the saw." This isn't the "last habit" as Stephen Covey has a whole book on what he calls "The 8th Habit," but in the context of the original 7, this is the last one.

You can't be too busy "sawing" to sharpen your saw. Eventually, your saw will become dull and ineffective. The same thing goes for us. We need to sharpen our saws to maintain our effectiveness as people. What are our blades? There are four:

Physical: Taking case of yourself physically. This means making sure you are eating the right food, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, and the like. This has historically been an area where I have not taken good care of--thus the reason I am overweight. I have committed myself to maintaining the exercise program I have restarted and I am also working on changing my diet--again--in a quest to gain and maintain a healthy body.

Social/Emotional: Taking care of your connections with people. Part of that is "making connections" with people, which is one reason I participate in Kitsap Penninsula Linux Users Group as well as West Sound Tecnology Professionals Association--to get some face time with people. Maintaining connections is something I need to work on. I am really bad at calling my close friends or my relatives on a regular basis.

Mental: Learning, reading, writing, and teaching. I spend a lot of time doing these things. Most of the reading I do is online, and I use my blog as a method of teaching, not to mention the "teaching" I do in my day job. This is a blade that is always getting sharpened.

Spiritual: Whatever you do to get in touch with your "inner spirit," whatever that is for you. Examples include lusinging to music, medidating, praying, or serving. This is an area I have been neglecting. I have been trying to work on meditation, but I usually do it at the wrong time of the day--sometime after the kids in bed, and meditating turns into a cat nap.

Speaking of cat naps, I think I am going to go take a slightly longer catnap--it's bedtime. :)

tags: 7 habits, self improvement

I should have done this last week, but I chose to do other things last week. :)

The idea behind this habit is that all too often we listen to people with the intent to reply, not to truly understand the other person. In our quest to be understood--something most everyone desires--it is possible to ignore the other person completely, hear only part of what they are saying, or filter what they are saying through our own experiences. Based on that "experience," we think we understand the other person and are quick to offer advice, but it may not even be asked for or relevant.

Should you not provide advice when someone talks to you? If they ask for it or if there is a high level of trust in the relationship, sure. But don't be quick to offer it unless they specifically ask.

Truly listening to someone is hard work. By truly listening, you "get inside their mind." You listen not only with your ears, but your eyes and your heart. You listen to the words, you look for non-verbal cues, and listen with your heart to find the meaning and feeling that comes through in the other person's voice.

Listening itself seems fairly straightforward. What isn't so straightforward is the mindset that goes along with listening. Listening with the intent of understanding requires you to put your agenda and your ego aside. Don't try and take over the conversation, ask questions of the person to help draw out their thoughts and feelings or to clarify something you're missing. Really try and see the world as the other person sees it. Echo that understanding to the other person so they can confirm your understanding.

This ability to understand things from the other person's view is one of the things that makes me an effective technical support person. However, I need to work on this with other people--particularly my son. I had an incident with my son recently where my wife was not particularly happy with how I was handling the situation, so she took over. Later, I had a conversation with her about the situation. Instead of trying to say why I was right and she was wrong, I took the time to seek understanding. I told her up-front that my goal was to understand what the issue was and that I primarily wanted to listen. Well I got an earful.

I am not going to rehash the entire conversation, but the big thing that fell out of it was that my wife really felt I wasn't seeking understanding with my son--someone who desperately needs it. The particular situation with my son would have been much better had I seeked understanding instead of doing what I did. That hurt, but my wife was right.

Doing the work to seek understanding up front is much easier than it is to go back and correct misunderstandings later on.

tags: 7 habits, self improvement

Competition is something everyone has been exposed to at one time or another because just about everyone has played some kind of sport. Sports is all about competition, and it has some benefits. It motivates you to succeed, you get an emotional rush when you "win," you improve your skills.

Business is also about competition--with other companies. Unfortunately, competition seems to occur within a business. People "compete" for having the best idea for something, "compete" for a promotion, "compete" for the attention of the boss. We also complete outside of business, for example with your spouse over any little thing, or with your children over everything. :)

All of this comes from a mentality that the things are scarse. Namely, that the more someone else has, the less you can have. While for a few things this is true, the fact of the matter is most things we seek are not scarce, but rather abundant. Everyone can get attention and praise, everyone can contribute and profit from a situation. It takes approaching things with a Win-Win mindset.

A Win-Win mindset seeks mutual benefit and is designed to be cooperative. Also, to have a cooperative mindset, you must listen to what the other people want and be honest about what you want. This last part takes courage.

Some other mindsets that permeate our life include Win-Lose, where winning at the expense of the other is the goal, Lose-Win, where you give up what you want to the other person despite your feelings to the contrary, Lose-Lose, where you actively try and bring other people down, and Win, which basically means you are focused on winning and don't particularly care if the other person wins or loses too, and finally Win-Win or No Deal where you either come to a mutually beneficial agreement or "agree to disagree" amecibly.

So how do to you have a Win-Win mindset? You have the the courage to express your thoughts and feelings, and the willingness and ability to seek to understand the thoughts and feelings of others.

When you have a Win-Win mindset, you can begin to build Win-Win agreeements with others. Win-Win agreements have five elements:

Desired Results: What end you have in mind.
Guidelines: The rules that govern pursuing the desired results.
Resources: What tools you have to use to meet the guidelines.
Accountability: What will be used to measure that the desired results are obtained.
Consequences: What will happen if the desired results are (not) achieved?

To give an example of this, I recently took my kids to a large playground. The big problem I have with this playground is that my son, almost 6, wants to go all over the place and I feel he is still too small to be out of my sight. I, of course, have to watch my daughter, who is only 2. I decided to give into my son and take him to this playground, however I made an agreement with him about what I expected. I had him repeat the agreement back to me to confirm his understanding. It looked something like this:

Desired Results: We need to be able to see each other at all times. If you want to move out of my sight, to a different part of the playground, you must ask me first.
Guidelines: Can I see you? Can you see me?
Resources: Eyes and ears.
Accountability: Did he dissapear or not?
Consequences: If the Desired Results aren't obtained, son would be forbidden from going to this playground for several weeks.

As I am thinking about this, a large part of thinking Win-Win is embdedded in the next habit, which is "Seek first to understand, then to be understood." To be truly Win-Win, you must understand the other particiants.

tags: 7 habits, self improvement

The idea behind putting first things first is to prioritize "important" things first instead of "urgent" things. What's important? What's urgent? What's the difference? Things that are important are activities that represent your values, mission, and high-priority goals. Things that are urgent require immediate attention.

Given that description, it sounds counter-intuitive. We should be focusing on urgent things, right? Not necessarily. It depends on what kind of "urgent" we are talking about. Tasks fall into one of four quadrants on a "Time Matrix." Urgency is on the X axis and Importance on the Y axis.

Quadrant 1 (QI), in the upper left, is the urgent and important things. This is called the quadrant of necessity, and includes things like crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects, meeting preparations, medical emergencies, etc.

Quadrant 2 (QII), in the upper right, is the items that are not urgent, but are important. This is called the quadrant of effectiveness, and includes tasks like planning and preparing, prevention, understanding or reaffirming your values, planning, building relationships, renewing yourself, and empowerment.

Quadrant 3 (QIII), in the lower left, is the items that are urgent but not important. This is called the quadrant of deception, mostly because things in this quadrant look a lot like QI issues, but really aren't. These are things like interruptions, unnecessary reports, email, meeetings, phone calls, and other peoples minor issues.

Quadrant 4 (QIV), in the lower right, is the items that are not urgent or important, otherwise known as the quadrant of waste and excess. Busywork, trivia, irrelevant phone calls/email, various time wasting activities, excessive TV, web surfing, or relaxation.

If you really need a visual of this, look on orgcoach.net.

Have you ever been to the Bermuda Triangle? Most of you would say no, but I bet you have. Many people spend lots of time on QI and QIII tasks, then often escape in QIV tasks, which sometimes brings you back to a QI task. If you draw this out, you have a line between QI and QIII, a line between QIII and QIV, and a line from QIV to QI. That, my friends, is what we call the Bermuda Triangle, and it sucks your will to live. :)

In any case, the trick is to spend more time on QII activities. By planning, you can reduce or eliminate QI and QIII items. For example, eating right and exercising, definitely QII activities, can reduce or eliminate health problems later in life, which are definitely QI.

Let's talk about planning for a minute. The key to putting first things first is to actually plan. There are two types of planning: weekly planning and daily planning. The weekly planning is done at the start of a week and consists of three activities: Reviewing mission and roles, choosing "big rocks," and scheduling the week.

Reviewing mission and roles is fairly straightforward. Review your "mission statement" and the roles that come from that. Roles are key relationships and things for which you are responsible. For example, my roles include father, husband, employee, blogger. Chances are once these roles are enumerated and the mission statement is in place, you won't have to redefine these things, but you will need to review them each week.

For each role, ask yourself this question: What is the most important thing I can do in this role this week? These are your "big rocks." The big rocks can come from your conscience, your mission, your goals, and key projects you may be working on. The rocks can come in the form of tasks, appointments, and areas of focus. For example, this week, one of my "big rocks" is writing this particular blog entry. Others include exercise, learning about meditation (and actually doing it a couple of times, and determining ways to make my wife's life easier.

Once you have identified the big rocks, schedule them. Schedule them first before you schedule other things that might be happening in the week. Regularly scheduled meetings at work can be viewed as "big rocks," though I wouldn't necessarily identify them as such. They are demands on the time that must be accounted for like everything else. Sometimes, one of your big rocks will displace one of those regularly scheduled meetings. That happens. :)

After the week is scheduled, then follow up on your planning daily to ensure that you are continuing to meet your weekly goals. You will also account for any changes in schedule that might need to be made. Looking at the number of hours you have left in the day, you will come up with a realistic task list for the day and prioritize it.

Finally, you should have a planning system of some sort. I decided to use the planning system I got as a result of taking the 7 Habits class. It's a paper day planner. Seems kind of weird that a techie is using paper instead of something electronic, but I actually like having it on paper. Paper doesn't crash or get lost in an upgrade. ;) Whatever system you use, it needs to be integrated, i.e. have tasks, appointments, notes, and contacts, it needs to be mobile, i.e. with you all the time, and it needs to be personalized, i.e. customized for your own needs.

One thing that is a key part of putting first things first is learning how to say "no," mostly to QIII things. This is an area that I need to work on.

You wouldn't drive a car without knowing where you're going, right? Before you get in the car to go somewhere, you have an idea of where you're going. You might have the place pictured in your mind. You might imagine the route you are going to take to avoid traffic or construction. You might might have a list of the things you are going to do when you get there. The end of the trip is firmly in mind before you get behind the wheel.

What if you didn't know where you were going, or even have an idea of where you are going? You'd drive around for a while, you might find some interesting things along the way. You might end up getting some place pretty cool. But you might also end up going the wrong way, down the wrong street, into the wrong part of town. Before you know it, you're lost and out of gas, and you have no way out. You don't even know how you got there.

Life is exactly like driving a car. If you have a clear picture of what you want out of life, then your life has clear destination--a clear goal to work towards. Having the picture in your mind is key to getting you where you want to go. Having the picture also often makes it very clear how to get there--the path you will need to take. Even if the path is not clear, at least the guidelines for getting there will be. Each action you take can be evaluated within the framework of getting to that destination. Will it work? Not always. Sometimes you have to try a number of different things. Sometimes you have to change your tactics. Sometimes you have to change what you are working towards. That's okay to do. It's better to have a bad plan today than to have a good plan tomorrow.

Now I'm going to throw around one of those really cheesy business concepts here: a mission statement. A mission statement is, quite simply, something that defines your purpose. In business, a mission statement defines what the business is in business for. Within a business, a mission statement can be used within a division or business unit to give the group a purpose.

In the context of knowing where you are going in life, a mission statement articulates your vision for where you want your life to be. It is "the end," as it were. By having that vision clearly defined, you can begin to evaluate everything in your life with respect to that mission.

For the moment, at least I have determined that my mission statement is four simple words: Share, Improve, Serve, Inspire. It's not perfect and doesn't capture everything I want to become, but it captures the core of what I am and what I want to be.

You might want to have a look at FranklinCovey's Mission Builder to help you craft your own mission statement.

tags: 7 habits, self improvement

One of the things that resulted from my taking The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People course is that I have committed to share these principles with someone else as I work through them on my own. I seem to work better with written words than oral words, and I figure a few people out there could benefit from this stuff, so why not blog about it?

The first habit Stephen Covey talks about is being proactive. What does that mean, exactly? It means to realize that who and what you are isn't a result of circumstances, but rather a result of choices we as people make. Now that might seem self-evident, but it's difficult concept for a lot of people to live. I can't claim to do it all the time--I don't think anyone can--but it is certainly the ideal.

Let me give an example from my own life. Those who have known me for a long time know or at least have heard me talk about the fact my parents were not shining examples of humanity. They had their good qualities and bad, but on the balance they would not be considered ideal parents--and they were divorced to boot. For many years, I chose to obsess over that in a very negative way. It affected my social and emotional skills greatly. To some extent, it still does.

When years later I finally realized that my upbringing had no bearing on how I chose to live my life, my life improved dramatically. My whole outlook on the world changed. I was free to choose, and it felt wonderful!

When I was five or so, I had a very defining moment in my life. I'm not exactly sure what precipitated this thought in my adolesent brain, but it is a thought that has defined a huge part of who I am to this day. That thought? I would not put my kids through the same divorce crap I was going through then. The result? I'm married to someone who is just as committed to not divorcing as I am (though we have had our share of issues). Whether my kids will turn out better than I remains to be seen, of course. ;)

Had I realized back when I was five that I could make a choice, not just in that circumstance, but in anything that happened to me, man, would my life have turned out differently! That being said, I can't do anything about the past and can only resolve going forward to always choose my response to stimulus. I can be a transition person and stop the negative patterns from being given to my children.

Nazi Death Camp survivor Viktor Frankl wrote: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." Frankl observed that the main difference between the people that survived Auscwitz and the people that didn't were the people who realized that despite all the oppression, the one thing that the Nazi's couldn't take away from them was their freedom to choose their response to what was happening.

Human beings are endowed with four things that other creatures don't havse: self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and indepdendent will. These things help create the space between stimulus and response, give us guidance about how to respond, the ability to visualize the result, and ultimately, the ability to act as we choose.

One other thing about being proactive is knowing what you have influence over and what you do not, and focusing on only that which you have direct control over. So what do you have control over? Your actions, your responses. These are within your Circle of Influence. Your Circle of Concern, which is a superset of your Circle of Influence, includes stuff you do not have any control over, such as external events and other people's reactions and responses to you. It is a waste of time to focus on things which you cannot control. By focusing on your Circle of Influence, you and your Circle of Influence will grow substantially.

tags: 7 habits, self improvement

One of the things I have spent some time on this week is defining my mission statement as a result of taking the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People training. While I'm not there yet--is anyone ever really there?--I am a lot farther along than I was.

I want my mission statement to be simple. Just a few words that capture the essence of what I want to do and what I want to be. I want to remember it and keep it in mind at all times so I can ensure I am keeping with my mission.

For too long, I have been living by default and not by design. Despite that, I've been pretty damn lucky. I've managed to get myself into a very good position in terms of my work. My family situation, while it can be improved, is also good. However, what I have lacked is a coherent plan for getting where I want to go. A mission statement isn't a full fledged plan, but it's goes a long way towards drafting one.

I have been able to narrow down my mission statement to the acronym SIS: Serve. Inspire. Share. Of course, this is a rough draft and may change. Hoewever, as some people wiser than I have said, a bad plan today is better than a good plan tomorrow. It's certainly better than no plan, which is what I have now.

tags: 7 habits, self improvement