Habit 2 – Begin with the end in mind – Self Leadership
In order to be effective and travel on the path that you want, it’s important to have a sense of where you want to go. Seems simple enough, but how often do we really know our destination?
I’ve been writing a good amount about “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. This book was written back in the 1990’s and read by more than 25 million people but I just discovered it about a year ago and found it to be timeless. It has been a game changer for me.
To quickly recap, the book organizes into 7 categories (i.e. Habits) that effective people do. Those things are based on self evident natural laws that determine long term consequences for certain actions (these are called Principles in the book). I’ve discussed and given examples of some of these principles in previous blog articles. It’s amazing to me how obvious and familiar these principles are once you read about them, yet we have a tendency as human beings to forget or ignore them and experience the negative consequences as a result.
Habit 1 is “Be Proactive”, i.e. recognize that you choose and are responsible for your actions, no one else. You have the ability between stimulus and response to choose what your response will be. You never “have to” do anything. However, there are consequences for your actions (or lack of actions) that you don’t get to choose and often weigh heavily when we choose our actions. The natural laws we discussed above, determine the long term consequences. For example, you can choose to be rude to other people. The consequence is that those people will not want to be around you or work with you in the long term.
Habit 2 -Begin with the end in mind. This habit says, that in order to be effective and travel on the path that you want, it’s important to have a sense of where you want to go.
Seems simple enough but how many times do we work really hard, are very busy, working to climb the ladder of success and to later find it was leaning against the wrong wall? Its easy to be busy, very busy, without being very effective. Lots of people struggle to achieve higher income, more recognition, a degree of professional skill, only to learn that their drive to achieve this goal blinded them to what was really important.
Imagine the actual end
To exemplify this, the book starts by having you imagine your death and the exercise is to describe what you wanted people to say about you.
My personal perspective was that I wasn’t concerned with what people said about me, I was more interested if I would have been the person I want to be, i.e. if I would be what I imagined for myself. Perhaps that was the point. For example, I would want my children to say I was a loving father who took time to play with them, to love them, to listen to them when they were having a good or bad day, to help them achieve the things they wanted to do and experience. I would want my friends to mention that I was a good friend and they enjoyed spending time with me, going on new adventures, spending quality fun moments together as the years past by.
Interestingly at no time did money, success at work, watching TV, or reading the news come up for me. The book mentions that most people at the end of life talk about the relationships and the people in their lives, nothing else. I think this is a great insight into how people relationships are what really matter in the end to most folks.
How do we put this into practice?
All things are created twice. There is the mental creation where we imagine what we want to create, and the physical creation, when we actually create it. If we don’t take the time to imagine and design the house, when we build the house, it will be very confusing and require a lot of costly re-work. In business, you clearly think of the product or service you want to provide and then organize all the things to support it such as financial, research, marketing, personnel, research and development. It all has to be aligned with the end goal in order to be effective. Before you go on a trip, you determine your destination and best route. Before you plan to build a patio, you plan its shape, location, and what it will be made of.
Leadership Versus Mangement
The book distinguishes between leadership and management. Leadership is about determining the “What” and management is about the “How”. Have you ever experienced a disconnect between these? I.e. leadership says, “The ladder is leaning on the wrong wall” while management says “shut up, we’re making progress”?
Often we will not know the terrain of the path ahead, or what we will need to travel it. But we will know where we are heading which will help us get back on track whenever we stray and to deal with challenges along the way. A great quote from the book “Efficient management without effective leadership is like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic”
Leadership is hard
Leadership is hard because it requires focusing on long term gratification instead of day to day urgent matters. We are often focusing on efficiency, setting and achieving goals, before we clarify our values, the destination. Hence values must come first.
The fundamental mechanism the book recommends is to write a mission statement for yourself and to base that mission statement on correct principles that matter to you. For example, the constitution of the United States was based on self evident principles written in the declaration of independence. It is timeless because it is based on correct principles. Everything we do in the United States is compared with it. It often reminds us we are off the path and need to adjust to get back on course.
In the same way understanding who you are and what you are about helps you deal with change, adversity, and any challenges that comes up. Because if inside you have a changeless core, based on correct principles, and is timeless, it will guide you on the right path. Rapid change and challenge can cause people to give up and let circumstances determine their path. This does not have to be. With their vision of who they want to be (their mission statement) guiding them, they can get back on course each time.
In my next blog article I will discuss the recommended way to develop a personal mission statement. Stay tuned…
If you liked this article and would like to get notified when new articles are published, consider signing up for the blog mailing list. If you are interested in managing your time more effectively, check out our Yomez App and sign up for the Beta.
