Thought 36: The 7 Habits 📖

How can i be my most effective self?

“Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”

For this maker project, we were asked “How can I be my most effective self?” To answer this question, we were assigned a book to read, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. This book highlights 7 extremely important traits used by successful to manage their lives. The seven habits are:

1. Be Proactive: Proactiveness is about controlling your reactions using logic and reason, especially to things that you cannot control. I found proactiveness to be similar to the philosophy of stoicism. 
2. Begin with the End in Mind: When planning for some kind of achievement, make sure to decide what is your final goal. Beginning with the end in mind is a great way to make sure you are staying on track.
3. Put First Things First: Now that you know your final goal, you need to plan how you are going to get their. To do that, you need to evaluate your priorities. Work on what is most important and urgent, and ignore everything else.
4. Think Win-Win: Thinking Win-Win means coming up with the best possible solution for everyone involved in a negotiation. This requires critical thinking.
5. Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood: When someone comes to you with a problem, you need to understand where they are coming, their needs, and their goals, before you come up with a solution.
6. Synergize: This habit is about working with other people in an incredibly efficient way. A team that is synergized is twice as effective as a team that isn’t. 1 synergized person + 1 synergized person = a solution 3 times stronger.
7. Sharpen the Saw: Take all the habits you have developed so far, and keep working on it. Improve your skills by continuing to practice them. Continue to remove bad habits and build good habits.

We have been reading this book for a long time. We even worked on it at Loon Lake. We completed several activities to discover how we can be our most effective selves. One was to make a table of people you look up to, and write a personal mission statement. After we finished reading a few chapters of the book, we completed an assessment activity to show our learning. These activities helped me become a more effective person by making me reflect on what I read in the book. It is commonly said by the PLP teachers that “the only way you learn is through reflection.” The teachers have a point. Even in this blog post, I am reflecting on my work and learning from it. 

After we finished the book, we were given one last assignment. To create 3 assessment activities that are metaphors for the 3 core competencies: Thinking, Communicating, and Personal/Social. Each of these activities had to fall under one of 3 categories: Audio, Visual, and Kinaesthetic.

For the Thinking category, I created an audio discussion with Max L. and Mateo. We each talked about which of the habits we think fall under the Thinking category.

For the Communicating competency, I decided to draw various symbols and drawings that reflect habits 1 and 2. I drew on a (fake) plant pot, so it falls under the kinaesthetic category.

For the Personal/Social competency, I created a collage of ways I sharpen the saw; activities I do to improve my self.

I will move forward to use these in my growth as a learner. I can continue to to achieve effectiveness by reading a variety of similar self-help books. I have been planning to do this for a while and now that I have read the 7 habits, I feel as if I have the motivation and capability to do so.