Habit 5 - Listening Skills Are In Your Circle of Influence

1. The real key to your influence with me is your example, your actual conduct.

2. If you don’t have confidence in the diagnosis, you won’t have confidence in the prescription.

3. Four Steps to Emphatic Listening Skills

1. Mimic content

2. Rephrase content

3. You reflect their feeling

4. You rephrase the same content and reflect the feeling

4. Listening skills are in your Circle of Influence. That’s something that’s within your control. As you focus on your circle of influence, you really deeply understand other people.

Habit 4 - Courage & Consideration

1. 6 Major Deposits

1. Understanding the Individual – Accepting the value others places on what they have to say; touching on the person’s interest or need.
2. Attending to the Little Things – Little acts of kindness
3. Keeping Commitments
4. Clarifying Expectations
5. Showing Personal Integrity – Honesty is conforming our words to reality. Integrity is conforming reality to our words.
6. Apologizing sincerely when you make a withdrawl

2. Problems are a chance to build the relationship. Every problem is a Production-Capability Opportunity, a chance to build the emotional bank account, to build the relationship.

3. Win/Win character Traits

o Integrity - Integrity is conforming reality to our words.

o Maturity - Maturity is balance between courage and consideration.

o Abundance Mentality – there is plenty for everybody

4. Six Paradigms of Human Interaction

1. Win/Win – High courage & High consideration

2. Win/Lose – High courage & Low consideration

3. Lose/Win – High consideration & Low courage

4. Lose/Lose – Adversarial conflict

5. Win – No consideration

6. Win/Win or No Deal – Provides emotional freedom and protects the relationship

5. Most of life is an interdependent, not an independent reality.

Habit 3 - Schedule Your Priorities, Importance = Positive Difference

1. Effective People are not problem-minded, they are opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventatively.
1. Ask: What one thing could you do (you aren’t doing now) that if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life?
2. Integrity is, fundamentally, the value we place on ourselves. It’s our ability to make and keep commitments to ourselves, to “walk our talk.”
2. The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose. You have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.

• The subordination requires a purpose, a mission, a clear sense of direction and value (from Begin with the Desire Result in Mind), a burning “yes!” inside that makes it possible to say “no” to other things. It also requires independent will, the power to do something when you don’t want to do it, to be a function of your values rather than a function of the impulse or desire of any given moment. It’s the power to act with integrity to your proactive first creation.

3. Importance has to do with results. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative, more proactivity. We must act to seize opportunity, to make things happen. If we don’t have a clear idea of what is important, of the results desired in our lives, we are easily diverted into responding to the urgent.

• Rather than focusing on events and time, focus on enhancing relationships and on accomplishing results.

4. Schedule Your Priorities- The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. This can best be done in the context of the week.
5. Managing Ourselves

• Identify Roles
• Schedule Your Priorites
• Daily Adapting, Reviewing in the Morning
• You are the programmer, Write the program, Run/Live the Program

6. Self Management vs. Time Management

• Principle Centered
• Conscience Directed – subordinate your schedule to higher values
• Defines Your Unique Mission, including values and long-term goals. Gives Direction and purpose to the way you spend each day.
• Balance your life by identifying your roles, set goals and activities in each key role
• Gives great context through weekly organizing (w/ daily adaptation) through review of your key roles

7. Effective Delegation

Set the Expectations with the Following:

1. Desired Results
2. Guidelines
3. Resources
4. Accountability
5. Consequences

Habit 2 - Imagine the Final Picture

1. Begin with the end/final picture in mind.

• What do you want the result to be? What’s your vision?

2. Progression/Continuity
• Habit 1: Take Control
• Habit 2: Imagine the desired result/finished product/end
3. “Our peculiar security is the possession of a written constitution”
• Personal Mission Statement à Personal Constitution (US constitution)
• Use it as the standard by which everything is evaluated
4. Center is Source For:

1. Security – Sense of Worth, Identity, Anchor, Self-Esteem, Strength
2. Guidance – Direction, frame of reference, Criteria to govern
3. Wisdom –Perspective, Balance, Understanding
4. Power – Capacity to act, accomplish, overcome; Energy

5. A good affirmation has 5 basic ingredients

o Personal

o Positive

o Present tense

o Visual (able to be visualized)

o Emotional/Emotion based

6. Retracting/Depending/Myopic/Narrow Centers

• Family
• Money
• Work
• Possessions
• Pleasure
• Friend
• Enemy
• Church/Club
• Self
• Spouse

7. Live a script that is in harmony with your deepest values, and make your life a product of your own proactive design.
• Mission Statement is not something you write overnight. It takes deep introspection, careful analysis, thoughtful expression, and often many rewrites to produce it in final form.

Habit 1 - Respect Your Proactive Nature, Circle of Influence/Concern, Problems &Behavior

1. Beware of the Social Mirror – sometimes they are more projections than reflections
2. Listen to your language – Let’s look at our alternatives. I choose. I prefer. I will.
3. Circle of Influence - Review a challenging situation in the context of Circle of Influence.
• How can you respond proactively?
• Work on things you can do something about.
4. Problems & Behavior: Direct, Indirect, and No Control - Select a problem from work or personal life and determine whether it is
• Direct Control (Problems involving our own behavior)
• Indirect Control (Problems involving other people’s behavior)
• No Control (Problems we can do nothing about, such as our past or situational realities)
5. Show more Initiative- Use your Resourcefulness and Initiative!
• Holding people to the responsible course is not demeaning, it is affirming.
• Proactivity is part of human nature, and even if the muscles are dormant, they are there. Respect others and your own proactive nature.
• Many people wait for something to happen or someone t take care of them. But people who end up with the good jobs are proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary ,consistent with correct principles, to get the job done.
6. Consequences & Natural Law - While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. They are out in the Circle of Concern.
7. Be driven by values, not feelings. It’s the nature of reactive people to absolve themselves of responsibility. It’s so much safer to say, “I am not responsible.” If I say I am responsible,” I might have to say “I am irresponsible.”

Ephiphany

I figured out what I want to write about.

If you're going to take on a project, it has to involve something you are truly passionate about. Something that you do without anyone telling you or pushing you-- often it is something you can't help spending time and money on.

The trick to people who are successful is that they acknowledge when they're stuck on something. There's a need, there's a drive, they can't help it. While watching one of my two favorite YouTube makeup gurus today, I heard her say something that stuck with me. Why does she spend all that time going to the store, buying makeup, testing it, blogging about it, buying more, testing more, rinse and repeat, and then more video blogging?

She just loves it. She loves makeup, she loves trying new colors, techniques, products. I'm trying to think now if there was something special about the way she articulated it to really drive this home, but I don't remember specific words and I can't find any key moment of exaltation in the videos I watched today.

No magic sentence or phrase to immortalize her love affair with makeup in my head, but I can just tell she is addicted to it, and all she is doing is sharing her addiction with the world. It's her passion.

The difference between her and me is that she embraces what she loves. First she is actively conscious of it and acknowledges it. Second, she embraces it. She doesn't hold back. Everyone else's instinct and conditioning is to hide or downplay what they love. To not let it consume them, to let it cool off. Even to hate themselves for wasting time with it. After all, what can come from something you love?

Day 2 - What is Good

Learning how to be a good person sounds at first like too basic a question. Like something you should know already, that you were supposed to learn in Kindergarten.

Truthfully though, when I was that age I didn't think critically about what I was being taught. I was able to regurgitate other people's ideas self-righteously if someone asked the questions, but I was in such a hurry to repeat what was fed to me that I never truly took the time to digest it.

It is my habit to do what I am told, to trust that the guiding voice, whether it be my mother, my professors, or other superiors, are right. I expect them to be right because that was the nature of my world growing up. People who were older knew better and could be trusted to guide and lead you. For a person with authority not to do that was a failure on their part, an inability to carry out their assigned role.

My mom took her responsibility as a parent when she was younger so seriously that she was the final word on many things. She instilled a strong sense of justice in me. The problem with that was that I came to expect that from the world, and to judge when it was not so. The other consequence, of course, was that sometimes I did not wrestle enough with big questions on my own, and that I did not think enough for myself.

Certainly there were things which I questioned, and it is in my nature to enjoy new ideas and argumentation. To challenge, and debate. Unfortunately I don't think that I did this enough with some very basic but very important questions. Perhaps until now there was no need.

It is too ambitious for me to attempt to answer the question "how to be a good person." Implicit in this question is the quandry of how to answer this question- to define the scope of what parts of this question can be answered and how. A list of good behaviors? Behaviors to avoid? No. I think the real tricky part of this is teaching yourself how to evaluate your own behavior and other people's. It cannot be a blanket list of rules. There are two many situations and details in reality for a list to name each situation and address its remedy. To define how to be good you must first determine what you believe is good.