Habit 1 said that you are in charge, with habit 2 is the first creation (in the mind). Habit 3 is the second creation, in reality. Habit 3 is where you do stuff. Habit 3 to me is the Getting Things Done habit.Put First Things First sounds very logical, yet we mess this one up a lot of times. First Things are not the things that need to be done first, but the things that have to come first. YOU decide what the first things are! In habit 2 you have made a lot of these decisions. The things that make you happy, the things that give you true
fulfillment, those are the First Things.

Covey makes a strong case to plan blocks of time for these First Things in your calender, and stick to them. The rest can be used as filler as there’s so much more that comes your way than only your First Things. Getting Things Done is all about dealing with all the stuff that’s coming at you. Both Stephen Covey and David Allen provide me a piece of the puzzle here. The GTD system would benefit from the time leadership matrix that Covey describes in his book.

The time-leadership matrix
The Eisenhower matrix (Eisenhower is the real inventor) combines importance and urgency into a matrix to make up 4 quadrants:

Q1: the stress quadrant

• This is the important and urgent quadrant.
• This is where you find the the crises, projects close to their deadlines, urgent problems and so on.
• The strategy: Do Now!
• It needs to be done, and it needs to be done fast!

Q2: the value quadrant

• This is important, but not urgent.
• This is where you find education, working on your vision, investing in people and so on.
• The strategy: Schedule time.
• It needs to be done, plan time to do it before it gets urgent.

Q3: the deception quadrant

• It is urgent, but not important.
• This is where you find most interruptions, some meetings, other peoples chores.
• The strategy: Delegate.
• It needs to be done fast, but are you the one that needs to do it?

Q4: the regret quadrant

• It neither important nor urgent
• This is where you find pass-times, some phone calls (you know them), the “too much” activities (too much television, too much internet).
• The strategy: Eliminate
• And why were you doing this again?

Most people are Q1 and Q3 dominant. The urgency gives them a rush, it feels that you’re important, you deal with the urgent stuff. The challenge is to get Q2 as big as possible. The more you invest in Q2, the smaller the need for urgency (Q1 en Q3).

This is a very powerful concept, and I use it in combination with GTD. For all my projects and actions, I think about the relationship between the projects and next actions and the quadrants. If it turns out to be Q3, I define new actions to prevent this stuff from landing on my desk the next time.

Recap of the private victory
The first 3 habits are what Covey calls the “Private Victory”. These three habits will bring you to independence. In short the three habits are:

• You have to do it
• Imagine what you want
• Do it!

The private victory is not an easy victory. Look around you and you’ll recognize one of these three habits in the people that surround you. Surf around on the web and there are a lot of blogs, sites and communities dealing with one or more of these habits.

Next week habit 4: Think Win-Win

Previous articles in this series:
Covey’s Habits 1: Be Proactive
Covey’s Habits 2: Begin with the end in mind

Can’t wait? You can buy Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People at Amazon, or as an audiobook here. There’s also an audiobook on this habit alone, or a complete book (the audiobook and the book are NOT the same in this case).

If you liked this article, please bookmark it in del.icio.us or stumble it. Thanks!

“Cheshire Puss,” Alice began,
“would you please tell me which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends on where you want to get to.” said the cat.
- Lewis Caroll in Alice in Wonderland

Habit 1 was about understanding that YOU are in control. Habit 2 is the goal-setting habit. This habit is a lot of fun, and a lot of this blog is about habit 2. Begin with the end in mind is the habit where you get to dream up all the good stuff.

This habit is based on the fact that everything is created twice. The first creation is in the mind, the second creation is in the real world. This is always true! The trick is to think about what your goals are consciously (habit 1: take control, be proactive)!

This is the good part, you can now think of everything you want to achieve. Make sure that it is authentic, that it is part of what YOU want to achieve, and not what others want you to achieve. I encourage you to write it down, both for later reference and for deepening your thoughts.

Energy flows where attention goes

The movie The Secret (fanacritical review by me here) is mostly about this habit. The Secret is a movie about the Law of Attraction. This law says that there is power to thoughts (one of the concepts in NLP as well): if you think about something, you will attract it to you. James Arthur Ray phrases it like this:

Energy flows where attention goes.

Create that what you want in your mind, and the (your) energy flows in that direction. Knowing what you want will help recognize everything that is going to support you in achieving what you want (the second creation). Mind you, you still have to work for it! But the process will be so much more productive, because you will (subconsciously) recognize opportunities that will help you.

Visualize it!

The power of this habit is in your ability to make a clear representation of your goals. The more detail you have in the representation the better. Make sure you are representing it from the first-person perspective (see it through your eyes), make it full of vivid colors, hear the sounds and so on. The better you can experience being in the desired situation, the more power the representation gets.

For most people this means visualizing. However, if you prefer the auditory representation system (modalities in NLP): try to hear the sounds associated with the desired state, what music do you hear, what conversations are going on etc. For people with a preference for feeling/touch (kinesthetic), what does the situation feel like, what’s the temperature, what movements are associated with it. Get the drift? You can test your preference here.

This habit is a lot of fun to do. Do this often, it will deepen your experience and it will bring you closer to achieving what you want.

Covey covers different topics in his book, a.o. mission statements, getting the extreme end in mind (death), and principle-driven life. I will discuss these topics in future posts. Can’t wait? You can buy Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People at Amazon, or as an audiobook here. There’s also an audiobook on this habit alone. Get the DVD of the movie The Secret here.

Next week habit 3: Put first things first

“Everyone talks of apathy, but no one does anything about it.”
-Anonymous

Being proactive may be the single most important habit change that you’ll ever achieve. By being proactive you take control, you choose what you life is about. Life is not “happening” to you anymore.

When I was in university I found the following quote in one of my marketing books:

“There are 5 types of companies:
- Those who make things happen
- Those who think they make things happen
- Those who watch things happen
- Those who wonder what the heck happened
- Those that didn’t know anything had happened”

This is true for people as well. Being proactive is about making things happen. It is about YOU making things happen, it is up to you!

Choosing a response

Our daily lives are filled with stimuli (other people, television, radio, e-mail, internet, blogs, weather, traffic, and so on). Luckily we are able to filter out a lot of these stimuli, we could not function properly if we couldn’t (the inability to filter stimuli is one of the characteristics of autism and pervasive development disorders).

But filtering out stimuli is not enough. From an evolutionary viewpoint we have developed a lot of standard responses to stimuli. A stimulus happens and we respond in a split second. BANG! WHOA! It happens to us all day (and for emergency situations probably for the better). However we have the ability to choose a response when we create a gap between a stimulus and a response. According to Stephen Covey we can do this because of:

• self awareness
• independent will
• creative imagination
• conscience

Not doing this makes us a function of our environment, as the stimuli from the environment would be the single defining factor for our behavior. That doesn’t sound very appealing now does it?

Proactive language

One of the ways you can recognize proactive or reactive attitudes is language. You can recognize reactive language by the fact that the origin of action is outside the person. Pro-active language is the opposite, you take control of the action.

Reactive:
Something should be done about it.
Pro-active:
I’m going to solve this issue.

Reactive:
I’ll try to do better.
Pro-active:
I’ll do better.

Reactive:
If only I had enough money, I would re-do my bathroom.
Proactive:
I want to re-do the bathroom, now how can I get the money for it?

Words and language are very powerful. It works both ways, you recognize the attitude by the language, but you can change your attitude by the language as well! Start talking proactive, and you will set your mind to taking action. Just like that.

Other resources about being pro-active:

• Steve Pavlina on being proactive
• Wikihow on being proactive
• Being proactive on article alley

Next week is about habit 2: Begin with the end in mind

Can’t wait? You can buy Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People at Amazon, or as an audiobook here. There’s also an audiobook on this habit alone.

PS: I cannot remember whether the quotes are attributed to someone. It they are, please let me know, and I’ll correct the references.

This is the announcement of the start of a series of posts on Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people. It will consist of 7 posts (geez I wonder how he got to that number).

I learned about Covey’s habits for the first time in 2000 when I worked as a management trainee for Ormit (site unfortunately only available in dutch). At Ormit I had the opportunity to get a lot of training and courses. Seven habits was one of them, and the training appealed to me. Mostly because the title of the training was Effective leadership, and I have a thing for leadership…

The training was a very memorable one, and it was given by the (very successful Dutch) trainer Remco Claassen (dutch again). It covered 3.5 days (nearly non-stop), and it was mind blowing and funny at the same time. Remco used a mix of theory and experience-based training, that proved to be very powerful. Remco thanks!

I will be covering the 7 habits in Covey’s order in the coming 7 weeks. New posts will appear every tuesday, and henceforth tuesday will be habits tuesday.

Can’t wait? You can order Stephen Covey’s book at Amazon:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (also available as audiobook).