THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE OVERVIEW:
Paradigms and Principles:
There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living
-- David Starr Jordan
* * *
In more than 25 years of working with people in business, university, and marriage and
family settings, I have come in contact with many individuals who have achieved
the incredible degree of outward success, but have found themselves struggling with an
inner hunger, a deep need for personal congruency and effectiveness and for healthy,
growing relationships with other people.
I suspect some of the problems they have shared with me may be familiar to you.
I've set and met my career goals and I'm having tremendous professional success. But it's
cost me my personal and family life. I don't know my wife and children anymore. I'm not
even sure I know myself and what's really important to me. I've had to ask myself -- is it
worth it?
I've started a new diet -- for the fifth time this year. I know I'm overweight, and I really
want to change. I read all the new information, I set goals, I get myself all psyched up
with a positive mental attitude and tell myself I can do it. But I don't. After a few weeks, I
fizzle. I just can't seem to keep a promise I make to myself.
I've taken course after course on effective management training. I expect a lot out of my
employees and I work hard to be friendly toward them and to treat them right. But I
don't feel any loyalty from them. I think if I were home sick for a day, they'd spend most
of their time gabbing at the water fountain. Why can't I train them to be independent and
responsible -- or find employees who can be?
My teenage son is rebellious and on drugs. No matter what I try, he won't listen to me.
What can I do?
There's so much to do. And there's never enough time. I feel pressured and hassled
all day, every day, seven days a week. I've attended time management seminars and I've
tried half a dozen different planning systems. They've helped some, but I still don't feel
I'm living the happy, productive, peaceful life I want to live.
I want to teach my children the value of work. But to get them to do anything, I have to
supervise every move; and put up with complaining every step of the way. It's so much
easier to do it myself. Why can't children do their work cheerfully and without being
reminded?
I'm busy -- really busy. But sometimes I wonder if what I'm doing will make a difference
in the long run. I'd really like to think there was meaning in my life, that somehow things
were different because I was here. I see my friends or relatives achieve some degree of
success or receive some recognition, and I smile and congratulate them enthusiastically.
But inside, I'm eating my heart out. Why do I feel this way? 5
I have a forceful personality. I know, in almost any interaction, I can control the outcome.
Most of the time, I can even do it by influencing others to come up with the solution I
want. I think through each situation and I really feel the ideas I come up with are usually
the best for everyone. But I feel uneasy. I always wonder what other people really think
of me and my ideas.
My marriage has gone flat. We don't fight or anything; we just don't love each other
anymore. We've gone to counseling; we've tried a number of things, but we just can't
seem to rekindle the feeling we used to have.
These are deep problems, painful problems -- problems that quick fix approaches can't
solve. A few years ago, my wife Sandra and I were struggling with this kind of concern.
One of our sons was having a very difficult time in school. He was doing poorly
academically; he didn't even know how to follow the instructions on the tests, let alone
do well in them. Socially he was immature, often embarrassing those closest to him.
Athletically, he was small, skinny, and uncoordinated -- swinging his baseball bat, for
example, almost before the ball was even pitched. Others would laugh at him.
Sandra and I were consumed with a desire to help him. We felt that if "success" were
important in any area of life, it was supremely important in our role as parents. So we
worked on our attitudes and behavior toward him and we tried to work on his. We
attempted to psyche him up using positive mental attitude techniques. "Come on, son!
You can do it! We know you can. Put your hands a little higher on the bat and keep your
eye on the ball. Don't swing till it gets close to you." And if he did a little better, we would
go to great lengths to reinforce him. "That's good, son, keep it up."
When others laughed, we reprimanded them. "Leave him alone. Get off his back. He's
just learning." And our son would cry and insist that he'd never be any good and that he
didn't like baseball anyway.
Nothing we did seemed to help, and we were really worried. We could see the effect this
was having on his self-esteem. We tried to be encouraging and helpful and positive, but
after repeated failure, we finally drew back and tried to look at the situation on a
different level.
At this time in my professional role, I was involved in leadership development work with
various clients throughout the country. In that capacity, I was preparing bimonthly
programs on the subject of communication and perception for IBM's Executive
Development Program participants.
As I researched and prepared these presentations, I became particularly interested in how
perceptions are formed, how they behave. This led me to a study of expectancy theory
and self-fulfilling prophecies or the "Pygmalion effect," and to a realization of how deeply
embedded our perceptions are. It taught me that we must look at the lens through which
we see the world, as well as at the world we see and that the lens itself shapes how we
interpret the world.
As Sandra and I talked about the concepts I was teaching at IBM and about our own
situation, we began to realize that what we were doing to help our son was not in
harmony with the way we really saw him. When we honestly examined our deepest
feelings, we realized that our perception was that he was basically inadequate, somehow
"behind." No matter how much we worked on our attitude and behavior, our efforts were6
ineffective because, despite our actions and our words, what we really communicated to
him was, "You aren't capable. You have to be protected."
We began to realize that if we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change
ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.The Personality and Character EthicsAt the same time, in addition to my research on perception, I was also deeply immersed
in an in-depth study of the success literature published in the United States since 1776. I
was reading or scanning literally hundreds of books, articles, and essays in fields such as
self-improvement, popular psychology, and self-help. At my fingertips was the sum and
substance of what a free and democratic people considered to be the keys to successful
living.
As my study took me back through 200 years of writing about success, I noticed
a startling pattern emerging in the content of the literature. Because of our own pain, and
because of similar pain, I had seen in the lives and relationships of many people I had
worked with through the years, I began to feel more and more that much of the success
literature of the past 50 years was superficial. It was filled with social image
consciousness, techniques and quick fixes -- with social band-aids and aspirin that
addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily -- but
left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.
In stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what
could be called the character ethic as the foundation of success -- things like integrity,
humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty,
and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is representative of that
literature. It is, basically, the story of one man's effort to integrate certain principles and
habits deep within his nature.
The character ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living and that
people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and
integrate these principles into their basic character.
But shortly after World War I the basic view of success shifted from the character ethic to
what we might call the personality ethic. Success became more a function of personality,
of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques, that lubricate the
processes of human interaction. This personality ethic essentially took two paths: one was
human and public relations techniques and the other was the positive mental attitude
(PMA). Some of this philosophy was expressed in inspiring and sometimes valid maxims
such as "Your attitude determines your altitude," "Smiling wins more friends than
frowning," and "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.
Other parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive,
encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest
in the hobbies of others to get out of them what they wanted, or to use the "power look,"
or to intimidate their way through life.
Some of this literature acknowledged character as an ingredient of success but tended to
compartmentalize it rather than recognizing it as foundational and catalytic. Reference to
the character ethic became mostly lip service; the basic thrust was quick-fix influence
techniques, power strategies, communication skills, and positive attitudes.7
This personality ethic, I began to realize, was the subconscious source of the solutions
Sandra and I were attempting to use with our son. As I thought more deeply about the
difference between the personality and character ethics, I realized that Sandra and I had
been getting social mileage out of our children's good behavior, and, in our eyes, this son
simply didn't measure up. Our image of ourselves, and our role as good, caring parents
was even deeper than our image of our son and perhaps influenced it. There was a lot
more wrapped up in the way we were seeing and handling the problem than our concern
for our son's welfare.
As Sandra and I talked, we became painfully aware of the powerful influence of our
character and motives and of our perception of him. We knew that social comparison
motives were out of harmony with our deeper values and could lead to conditional love
and eventually to our son's lessened sense of self-worth. So we determined to focus our
efforts on us -- not on our techniques, but on our deepest motives and our perception of
him. Instead of trying to change him, we tried to stand apart -- to separate us from him --
and to sense his identity, individuality, separateness, and worth.
Through deep thought and the exercise of faith and prayer, we began to see our son in
terms of his own uniqueness. We saw within him layers and layers of potential that
would be realized at his own pace and speed. We decided to relax and get out of his way
and let his own personality emerge. We saw our natural role as being to affirm, enjoy,
and value him. We also conscientiously worked on our motives and cultivated internal
sources of security so that our own feelings of worth were not dependent on our
children's "acceptable" behavior.
As we loosened up our old perception of our son and developed value-based motives,
new feelings began to emerge. We found ourselves enjoying him instead of comparing or
judging him. We stopped trying to clone him in our own image or measure him against
social expectations. We stopped trying to kindly, positively manipulate him into an
acceptable social mold. Because we saw him as fundamentally adequate and able to cope
with life, we stopped protecting him against the ridicule of others.
He had been nurtured on this protection, so he went through some withdrawal pains,
which he expressed and which we accepted, but did not necessarily respond to. "We
don't need to protect you," was the unspoken message. "You're fundamentally okay."
As the weeks and months passed, he began to feel a quiet confidence and affirmed
himself. He began to blossom, at his own pace and speed. He became outstanding as
measured by standard social criteria -- academically, socially and athletically -- at a rapid
clip, far beyond the so-called natural developmental process. As the years passed, he was
elected to several student body leadership positions, developed into an all-state athlete
and started bringing home straight A report cards. He developed an engaging and
guileless personality that has enabled him to relate in non-threatening ways to all kinds of
people.
Sandra and I believe that our son's "socially impressive" accomplishments were more a
serendipitous expression of the feelings he had about himself than merely a response to
social reward. This was an amazing experience for Sandra and me, and a very
instructional one in dealing with our other children and in other roles as well. It brought
to our awareness on a very personal level the vital difference between the personality
ethic and the character ethic of success. The Psalmist expressed our conviction well:
"Search your own heart with all diligence for out of it flow the issues of life."
-- David Starr Jordan
* * *
In more than 25 years of working with people in business, university, and marriage and
family settings, I have come in contact with many individuals who have achieved
the incredible degree of outward success, but have found themselves struggling with an
inner hunger, a deep need for personal congruency and effectiveness and for healthy,
growing relationships with other people.
I suspect some of the problems they have shared with me may be familiar to you.
I've set and met my career goals and I'm having tremendous professional success. But it's
cost me my personal and family life. I don't know my wife and children anymore. I'm not
even sure I know myself and what's really important to me. I've had to ask myself -- is it
worth it?
I've started a new diet -- for the fifth time this year. I know I'm overweight, and I really
want to change. I read all the new information, I set goals, I get myself all psyched up
with a positive mental attitude and tell myself I can do it. But I don't. After a few weeks, I
fizzle. I just can't seem to keep a promise I make to myself.
I've taken course after course on effective management training. I expect a lot out of my
employees and I work hard to be friendly toward them and to treat them right. But I
don't feel any loyalty from them. I think if I were home sick for a day, they'd spend most
of their time gabbing at the water fountain. Why can't I train them to be independent and
responsible -- or find employees who can be?
My teenage son is rebellious and on drugs. No matter what I try, he won't listen to me.
What can I do?
There's so much to do. And there's never enough time. I feel pressured and hassled
all day, every day, seven days a week. I've attended time management seminars and I've
tried half a dozen different planning systems. They've helped some, but I still don't feel
I'm living the happy, productive, peaceful life I want to live.
I want to teach my children the value of work. But to get them to do anything, I have to
supervise every move; and put up with complaining every step of the way. It's so much
easier to do it myself. Why can't children do their work cheerfully and without being
reminded?
I'm busy -- really busy. But sometimes I wonder if what I'm doing will make a difference
in the long run. I'd really like to think there was meaning in my life, that somehow things
were different because I was here. I see my friends or relatives achieve some degree of
success or receive some recognition, and I smile and congratulate them enthusiastically.
But inside, I'm eating my heart out. Why do I feel this way? 5
I have a forceful personality. I know, in almost any interaction, I can control the outcome.
Most of the time, I can even do it by influencing others to come up with the solution I
want. I think through each situation and I really feel the ideas I come up with are usually
the best for everyone. But I feel uneasy. I always wonder what other people really think
of me and my ideas.
My marriage has gone flat. We don't fight or anything; we just don't love each other
anymore. We've gone to counseling; we've tried a number of things, but we just can't
seem to rekindle the feeling we used to have.
These are deep problems, painful problems -- problems that quick fix approaches can't
solve. A few years ago, my wife Sandra and I were struggling with this kind of concern.
One of our sons was having a very difficult time in school. He was doing poorly
academically; he didn't even know how to follow the instructions on the tests, let alone
do well in them. Socially he was immature, often embarrassing those closest to him.
Athletically, he was small, skinny, and uncoordinated -- swinging his baseball bat, for
example, almost before the ball was even pitched. Others would laugh at him.
Sandra and I were consumed with a desire to help him. We felt that if "success" were
important in any area of life, it was supremely important in our role as parents. So we
worked on our attitudes and behavior toward him and we tried to work on his. We
attempted to psyche him up using positive mental attitude techniques. "Come on, son!
You can do it! We know you can. Put your hands a little higher on the bat and keep your
eye on the ball. Don't swing till it gets close to you." And if he did a little better, we would
go to great lengths to reinforce him. "That's good, son, keep it up."
When others laughed, we reprimanded them. "Leave him alone. Get off his back. He's
just learning." And our son would cry and insist that he'd never be any good and that he
didn't like baseball anyway.
Nothing we did seemed to help, and we were really worried. We could see the effect this
was having on his self-esteem. We tried to be encouraging and helpful and positive, but
after repeated failure, we finally drew back and tried to look at the situation on a
different level.
At this time in my professional role, I was involved in leadership development work with
various clients throughout the country. In that capacity, I was preparing bimonthly
programs on the subject of communication and perception for IBM's Executive
Development Program participants.
As I researched and prepared these presentations, I became particularly interested in how
perceptions are formed, how they behave. This led me to a study of expectancy theory
and self-fulfilling prophecies or the "Pygmalion effect," and to a realization of how deeply
embedded our perceptions are. It taught me that we must look at the lens through which
we see the world, as well as at the world we see and that the lens itself shapes how we
interpret the world.
As Sandra and I talked about the concepts I was teaching at IBM and about our own
situation, we began to realize that what we were doing to help our son was not in
harmony with the way we really saw him. When we honestly examined our deepest
feelings, we realized that our perception was that he was basically inadequate, somehow
"behind." No matter how much we worked on our attitude and behavior, our efforts were6
ineffective because, despite our actions and our words, what we really communicated to
him was, "You aren't capable. You have to be protected."
We began to realize that if we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change
ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.The Personality and Character EthicsAt the same time, in addition to my research on perception, I was also deeply immersed
in an in-depth study of the success literature published in the United States since 1776. I
was reading or scanning literally hundreds of books, articles, and essays in fields such as
self-improvement, popular psychology, and self-help. At my fingertips was the sum and
substance of what a free and democratic people considered to be the keys to successful
living.
As my study took me back through 200 years of writing about success, I noticed
a startling pattern emerging in the content of the literature. Because of our own pain, and
because of similar pain, I had seen in the lives and relationships of many people I had
worked with through the years, I began to feel more and more that much of the success
literature of the past 50 years was superficial. It was filled with social image
consciousness, techniques and quick fixes -- with social band-aids and aspirin that
addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily -- but
left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.
In stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what
could be called the character ethic as the foundation of success -- things like integrity,
humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty,
and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is representative of that
literature. It is, basically, the story of one man's effort to integrate certain principles and
habits deep within his nature.
The character ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living and that
people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and
integrate these principles into their basic character.
But shortly after World War I the basic view of success shifted from the character ethic to
what we might call the personality ethic. Success became more a function of personality,
of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques, that lubricate the
processes of human interaction. This personality ethic essentially took two paths: one was
human and public relations techniques and the other was the positive mental attitude
(PMA). Some of this philosophy was expressed in inspiring and sometimes valid maxims
such as "Your attitude determines your altitude," "Smiling wins more friends than
frowning," and "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.
Other parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive,
encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest
in the hobbies of others to get out of them what they wanted, or to use the "power look,"
or to intimidate their way through life.
Some of this literature acknowledged character as an ingredient of success but tended to
compartmentalize it rather than recognizing it as foundational and catalytic. Reference to
the character ethic became mostly lip service; the basic thrust was quick-fix influence
techniques, power strategies, communication skills, and positive attitudes.7
This personality ethic, I began to realize, was the subconscious source of the solutions
Sandra and I were attempting to use with our son. As I thought more deeply about the
difference between the personality and character ethics, I realized that Sandra and I had
been getting social mileage out of our children's good behavior, and, in our eyes, this son
simply didn't measure up. Our image of ourselves, and our role as good, caring parents
was even deeper than our image of our son and perhaps influenced it. There was a lot
more wrapped up in the way we were seeing and handling the problem than our concern
for our son's welfare.
As Sandra and I talked, we became painfully aware of the powerful influence of our
character and motives and of our perception of him. We knew that social comparison
motives were out of harmony with our deeper values and could lead to conditional love
and eventually to our son's lessened sense of self-worth. So we determined to focus our
efforts on us -- not on our techniques, but on our deepest motives and our perception of
him. Instead of trying to change him, we tried to stand apart -- to separate us from him --
and to sense his identity, individuality, separateness, and worth.
Through deep thought and the exercise of faith and prayer, we began to see our son in
terms of his own uniqueness. We saw within him layers and layers of potential that
would be realized at his own pace and speed. We decided to relax and get out of his way
and let his own personality emerge. We saw our natural role as being to affirm, enjoy,
and value him. We also conscientiously worked on our motives and cultivated internal
sources of security so that our own feelings of worth were not dependent on our
children's "acceptable" behavior.
As we loosened up our old perception of our son and developed value-based motives,
new feelings began to emerge. We found ourselves enjoying him instead of comparing or
judging him. We stopped trying to clone him in our own image or measure him against
social expectations. We stopped trying to kindly, positively manipulate him into an
acceptable social mold. Because we saw him as fundamentally adequate and able to cope
with life, we stopped protecting him against the ridicule of others.
He had been nurtured on this protection, so he went through some withdrawal pains,
which he expressed and which we accepted, but did not necessarily respond to. "We
don't need to protect you," was the unspoken message. "You're fundamentally okay."
As the weeks and months passed, he began to feel a quiet confidence and affirmed
himself. He began to blossom, at his own pace and speed. He became outstanding as
measured by standard social criteria -- academically, socially and athletically -- at a rapid
clip, far beyond the so-called natural developmental process. As the years passed, he was
elected to several student body leadership positions, developed into an all-state athlete
and started bringing home straight A report cards. He developed an engaging and
guileless personality that has enabled him to relate in non-threatening ways to all kinds of
people.
Sandra and I believe that our son's "socially impressive" accomplishments were more a
serendipitous expression of the feelings he had about himself than merely a response to
social reward. This was an amazing experience for Sandra and me, and a very
instructional one in dealing with our other children and in other roles as well. It brought
to our awareness on a very personal level the vital difference between the personality
ethic and the character ethic of success. The Psalmist expressed our conviction well:
"Search your own heart with all diligence for out of it flow the issues of life."
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