The 7 Habits In Summary

26 min readJan 19, 2020

My take on The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People book

How to be successful? I think that’s one of the reason people buy self-help books and also one of the value proposition of many self-help books. However, a lot of books out there only teaches the techniques and methods. And that’s how The 7 Habits book differ. This book teaches the readers to improve their deep inner selves first, to position their inner motives and mission on the right foundation, before teaching the methods and techniques.

All in all, the book comes down to 7 habits which seems so simple on the surface, but complex when you go deeper.

Be proactive
Begin with the end in mind
Put first things first
Think win-win
Seek first to understand, then to be understood
Synergize
Sharpen the saw

Those habits are divided into Private Victory (habit 1–3), Public Victory (habit 4–6), and the last habit 7 to keep us improve all those previous habits and sustain the effectiveness.

These habits are better learned and practiced sequentially. You cannot achieve Public Victory without achieving Private Victory first. It’s like building a house, you might be able to build a good looking house, but if the foundation is bad, it’ll eventually collapse.

Paradigms & Principles

Before going to the habits. We should talk about the paradigms & principles. This is really important since this is how you would be viewing the teachings in this book.

Personality Ethic

As I’ve said before, many books might be telling you “shortcuts” how to achieve success that you want. They might be teaching you how to improve relationships with others, communications, body-language techniques, etc.

They are teaching you the skills, methods, and techniques to achieve behaviors that you desire. Stephen Covey is calling this Personality Ethic. Despite it seems like a solid path for growth, they are fragile on its essence. You might be able to achieve what you want in the short term, but it’s not as good for long term.

For example, you might learn about listening and body-language skills for doing 1-on-1 with someone, but if deep inside your character is still not properly built, the other person might sense it. They might sense your intent to manipulate them, they might eventually sense that you don’t really mean what you’re saying. Other example, on negotiation, you might be able to win a deal which really benefits you but not so much on the other party. The other party will put up their guards when they meet you again, they will trust you less, and even worse they might not be interested to deal with you again.

Personality ethic ignores the fundamental character traits that might be the root cause to what’s holding you back. They are are mostly an empty promise, a quick-fix, and never result in lasting personal growth.

Character Ethic: Inside Out

Start from inside out. This is how the book wants you to work on improving yourself. Covey wants you to work on your character first, the fundamental habits and belief system form your view of the world, your deep personal missions and goals. Only behavior stemming straight from your character which will endure over time. Because if you’re able to improve your true character, there’s no fragile facade or mask needed, you’re already improved from deep within.

For example, if you want to improve your relationships with other person, you need first to become a more positive person yourself, not just master a few techniques that’ll make others like you more. If you want to improve your team, you need to start working on yourself first, make good examples, lead wholeheartedly, set your intentions correctly that you truly want your team members to improve, not just by implementing communication and motivation techniques to manipulatively push them to fulfill your hidden agendas. They will eventually sense your true character.

Align With The Natural Laws

To navigate the streets, we use map to direct us. To navigate in life, we use our own paradigms, principles, beliefs, and world-views. They are a subjective way to perceive and understand the world.

Nobody is really objective. Each and everyone of us is subjective. We perceived the world based on our paradigms. People with a negative paradigm might perceive getting lost in foreign city as a frustrating waste of time, whilst someone with a positive paradigm see it as an unexpected adventure. Getting a spontaneous feedback might be seen as an insult for negative paradigm’s person, while a positive paradigm’s person might see it as a good opportunity for growth.

Since our paradigms are at the core of our characters, shifting our paradigms is the key to make lasting changes. It’s the only way to change our objective realities. That’s why identifying and keeping your paradigms in check is really an important first step for personal growth.

For example, Covey tells a story of his mini-paradigm shift on one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly, calm and peaceful. Then suddenly a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud that the whole calm scene changed abruptly.

The man sat down next to Covey oblivious to the situation whilst his children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, and even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing yet the man did nothing. It was difficult not to feel irritated since the man seems so insensitive to let his children disturb other people, taking no responsibility at all. Covey finally said to the man, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”

The man lifted his gaze and responded, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.

Covey’s paradigm has shifted suddenly at that instance. He suddenly saw things differently, thought differently, felt differently. His irritation vanished. His heart was filled with the man’s pain, compassion and sympathy flowed freely. Everything has changed in an instant with that paradigm’s change.

Though not all paradigm shifts are this fast, each one can be just as powerful.

So which paradigms should we all strive for? The most effective ones are the ones aligned with the larger universal principles, like fairness, honesty, and integrity. Since the majority of people agree that these principles are good, we can see them as permanent, natural laws.

Therefore, we need to shift and map our paradigms to these natural principles. The better our paradigms reflect these natural principles, the better we are at attaining effective and lasting personal growth. This is what this seven habits are all about.

Private Victory

Private Victory, I would say, is the foundation of all the other upcoming habits. It’s the relationship between you and your inner hearts. It’s you trying to talk one-on-one with your tiny little heart on how to improve your self. It’s you talking to the mirror asking “what do you want to be?”, “why are you here?”, “how do you want people to remember you after you die?”

Habit 1: Be Proactive

We’re all responsible for our own lives. But what does it mean to be responsible? Look closer at the word “responsibility”, they consists of “response” and “ability”. It’s the ability to choose your response. Animals are slaves to external stimuli, they are pre-programmed to “response” in a certain way to external stimuli. We, humans, can reflect on a stimulus and reprogram our “response” in a specific, desirable way. We are “able” to “response” in our desired way.

Most of the time, we, unconsciously or not, are not “responsible”. We become reactive to external stimuli. “Oh, the weather is bad today, I’m not motivated to work”, “It’s not my fault, it’s the work environment here that is really unsupportive.” We become reactive people.

Reactive people are driven by feelings, circumstances, conditions, environments. They are affected by the social environment. When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

Highly effective people are not reactive, they are proactive. They are not affected by external environment or situation. They are value driven. They recognize their ability to proactively influence external stimuli.

Difference of Circle of Concern and Influence of Proactive and Reactive people

One excellent way to be proactive is by identifying your Circle of Concern and Circle of Influence. The outer circle is your Circle of Concern, representing all the things we’re concerned about. Inside this Circle of Concern, there’s a smaller Circle of Influence, which represents all the things you can actually do something about.

Proactive people focus on the Circle of Influence, choosing to work on the things within their control. They take initiatives, they response to external stimuli in a good desired way. They don’t blame the environments, they take control of the situation, they own the problems. This is resulting in the expansion of their Circle of Influence.

Reactive people focus on the Circle of Concern, fretting over things they can’t alter. Blaming on the situations, blaming other people, disowning the problems. Stressing over things they can’t control. It results in their Circle of Influence shrinking.

Habit 2: Begin With The End In Mind

This chapter is talking about goals, also your end goals. And what’s more “end” than the death itself? That’s how Covey opens this chapter.

When I read the opening paragraphs of this chapter, I remember Steve Jobs speech at Stanford. He said that he had a habit to look in the mirror every morning and ask himself, “”If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?” If the answer’s been “no” for too many days in a row, something must not be right.

It’s interesting to talk about death. It’s a topic that we may not talk about so much when we’re young. But it’s actually a really great tool to reflect ourselves. If you really imagine it deeply, in the face of death, you may find your true inner goals, missions, and motives.

For this next paragraph, let’s imagine this deeply with me. Picture yourself going to a funeral of a loved one. As you come in, you see so many friends and families there mourning. You can feel the sorrow. As you walk down deeper to the room, you look inside the casket, and you suddenly come face to face with yourself. This is your funeral, 1 week from now. All these people have come to honor you, to express their feelings and appreciations toward your life, your legacy. As you take a seat, you can hear your friends and families talking about you, how have you behave in your life, how your actions when living impacted them. Your friends, families, coworkers, neighbors. They’re all there.

Now think deeply, what would you like your friends and families say about you and your life? What impression do you want to leave them? What kind of husband, wife, father, or mother would you like their words to reflect? What kind of son, daughter, brother/sister, cousin? What kind of friend and colleague are you? What do you want them to see in you? How do you want them to remember you?

How do you feel? Have you found your answers? Have you found your deep inner fundamental values? You may have established a brief contact with your inner guidance system at the heart of your Circle of Influence.

Personal Mission Statement

After doing those “death visualization exercise” and you have touched your inner guidance system let’s translate that into your own personal mission statement. Begin with your inner fundamental values, then align that in harmony with the universal natural principles. Creating a mission statement might take weeks or even months of introspection and reflections until you feel really comfortable with it, before you feel it as a complete and concise expression of your innermost values and directions.

Example of mission statement with roles and goals

One good way in creating your personal mission statement is to write it in terms of the important roles in your life. This will give you balance and harmony across your roles in life. It keeps each role clearly before you. You can review your roles frequently to make sure that you don’t get totally absorbed by one role to the exclusion of others that are equally or even more important in your life. After identifying your roles, think and write the long term goals you want to accomplish on each of these roles.

Remember that an effective goal focuses primarily on results rather than activity. It identifies where you want to be, and, in the process, helps you determine where you are. It gives meaning and purpose to all you do. And it can finally translate itself into daily activities so that you are proactive to fulfill your personal mission statement.

Keep your mission statement always in your mind. Use that as your map and guidance on your decisions in life. Translate that into your day-to-day goals before working on anything. Review it regularly as you gain more knowledge and insights. Remember and reflect on it when you’re feeling down and unmotivated.

On anything you do in life. Always remember to start visualizing the destination first, the end goals. Whether it’s a strategic business plan, work task, marriage, and any other decisions, do not start it before you can truly visualize and reflect the destination first.

Habit 3: Put First Things First

You have a mission and goals now? Good. Now what?

Let’s live it day in and day out. However, we sometimes get too busy in the day that it may be challenging and it really demands good time-management and prioritization skills. This is what the third habit’s all about.

Remember the word, “first things first.” This means rigorously prioritizing everything you do so that important things are always taken care of first, while putting everything else aside to be dealt with or delegated later. So, how do you tell which things are important?

Enter time management quadrants. Categorize all your tasks and activities to two dimensions: urgency and importance. This will give you 2x2 matrix with 4 quadrants:

Quadrant 1: tasks that are important and urgent, like crises that need to be dealt with right away.
Quadrant 2: tasks that are important but not urgent, like, say, writing mission statement, building important relationships, and planning for the future.
Quadrant 3: tasks that are urgent but not important, like, say, a phone ringing while you’re working on something else.
Quadrant 4: tasks that are neither important nor urgent.

Out of these quadrants, you should focus on quadrant two. These actions are the ones that will have an enormously positive impact on your life. And when you work enough in quadrant two, you’ll find far fewer crises emerging in quadrant one.

Fourth-Generation Time Management

Throughout time, many have addressed and come up with strategies for time management. On this book, Covey teaches us to use the latest fourth-generation of time management.

Before going into fourth-gen time management, let’s touch a bit on the third-gen. On third-generation, time management looks like this:

It has calendar and appointment planning
It has priorities, goals, and connects those with the activities planned
It includes the concept of daily planning
It focuses on efficiency

It already looks great. But the fourth-generation time management adds some important points that I, personally, really like and got impacted on.

Third generation focuses on efficiency, and as people apply it, they have begun to realize that “efficient” scheduling and control of time are often counterproductive. It clashes with the opportunities to develop rich relationships, to meet human needs, and to enjoy spontaneous moments on a daily basis.

Those issues, I personally have experienced them back then. I made weekly plans and commit to them. But there are many times that there are spontaneous moments with other people that won’t fit with my planned schedule. Sometimes, I ignore those moments and feeling bad for ignoring the opportunity to develop rich relationships with other people. Other times, I engage with the spontaneous activities, I felt good for that, but I felt disappointed of myself at the end of the day for not able to achieve my plans. Often times, I just ignore my schedules, or even not creating any schedules at all to avoid being disappointed with myself for not achieving it. I got turned off by the third-generation time management, it felt too restricted, it ignores the value of preserving relationships, it ignores spontaneity.

Fourth-generation time management address those issues. It recognizes that “time management” is really a misnomer. The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves. Rather than focusing on things and time, fourth generation focus on preserving and enhancing relationships and on accomplishing results.

Fourth-generation time management focuses on Quadrant 2 activities. It prevents you from over scheduling the day, resulting in frustration and the desire to occasionally throw away the plan and escape to Quadrant 4.

Applying Fourth-Generation Time Management

Now, let’s put this Quadrant 2 focused time management into practice:

Plan weekly. Take aside your time each week for planning a week ahead. Organizing on a weekly basis provides much greater balance and context than daily planning. The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. And this can best be done in the context of the week.
Identify your roles. Just like when writing mission statement. Identify your roles for your upcoming week (eg. Individual, Spouse, Parent, Salesperson, Community Service, Symphony Board Member)
Select your goals for the week. Think of one or two important results you feel you should accomplish in each role during the next week. Ideally, these weekly goals would be tied to the longer-term goals you have identified in conjunction with your personal mission statement.
Scheduling. Having identified your roles and goals for the week, you can translate each goal to a specific day or time, as priorities or action plans. When scheduling, remember to focus on Quadrant 2 activities. Do not over schedule your week. By focusing only on Quadrant 2 activities, you will leave some remaining unscheduled space on your week. This will give you freedom and flexibility to handle unanticipated events, to shift appointments if needed, and to enjoy spontaneous experience.
Daily adapting. With Quadrant 2 weekly organizing, daily planning becomes more a function of daily adapting, of prioritizing activities and responding to unanticipated events, relationships, and experiences in a meaningful way. Taking a few minutes each morning to review your schedule can put you in touch with the value-based decisions you made as you organized the week as well as unanticipated factors that may have come up.

Delegation

We accomplish all that we do through delegation, either to time or to other people. If we delegate to time, we think efficiency. If we delegate to people, we think effectiveness.

Delegating to other skilled and trained people enables you to give your energies to other high-leverage activities. Delegation means growth, both for the individuals and for organizations.

A producer can invest one hour of effort and produce one unit of results whilst manager can invest one hour of effort and produce 10, 50, or 100 units through effective delegation.

There are two kinds of delegation: “gofer delegation” and “stewardship delegation.”

Gofer delegation means “Go for this, go for that, do this, do that, and tell me when it’s done.” This method puts the manager involved in every move. It’s not a really effective way to delegate to other people. Think of how many people is it possible to supervise or manage when you have to be involved in every move they make?

Meanwhile, stewardship delegation is based on a paradigm of appreciation of the self awareness, the imagination, the conscience, and the free will of other people. Stewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods. It gives people a choice of method and makes them responsible for results.

Stewardship delegation involves clear, up-front mutual understanding, and commitment regarding expectations in five areas:

Desired results. Create a clear, mutual understanding of what needs to be accomplished, focusing on what, not how. Visualize the desired result. Have the person see it, describe it, make out a quality statement of what the results will look like, and by when they will be accomplished.
Guidelines. Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate. These should be as few as possible to avoid methods delegation, but should include any formidable restrictions. You wouldn’t want a person to think he had considerable latitude as long as he accomplished the objectives, only to violate some long-standing traditional practice or value. That kills initiative and sends people back to gofer’s creed of “Just tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it”
Resources. Identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational resources the person can draw on to accomplish the desired results.
Accountability. Set up the standards of performance that will be used in evaluating the results and the specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.
Consequences. Specify what will happen, both good and bad, as a result of the evaluation.

Public Victory

Before moving into all the habits in Public Victory part, you need to build a good foundation of your Private Victory first. You cannot build a good long-lasting home without a good foundation. Practice and implement habits in Private Victory first before you implement these 3 next habits. After building the foundation, this is where we’ll build the visible parts of our house. Become independent first before you become inter-dependent.

Emotional Bank Account

Since we’re going to the relationships area, let’s talk first about emotional bank account. We all know about our financial bank account. We can check it on our phone, withdraw it on ATM, or deposit money into it.

The concept is the same here on relationships with people. But instead of withdrawing and depositing money, we’re withdrawing and depositing trust. Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship. It’s the feeling of safeness you have with another human being.

If I make deposits into an Emotional Bank Account with you through courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping my commitments to you, I build up a reserve. Your trust toward me becomes higher, and I can call upon that trust many times if I need to. I can even make mistakes and that trust level, that emotional reserve, will compensate for it. My communication may not be clear, but you’ll get my meaning anyway. You won’t make me “an offender for a word.” When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.

But if I have a habit of showing discourtesy, disrespect, cutting you off, overreacting, ignoring you, becoming arbitrary, betraying your trust, threatening you, or playing little tin god in your life, eventually my Emotional Bank Account is overdrawn. The trust level gets very low. Then what flexibility do I have? None. I have to be very careful and measure every words I say. It’s protecting my back, politicking.

Here, Covey suggests that there are six major deposits that build Emotional Bank Account:

Understanding the individual. Really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit. One person’s mission might be another person’s minutiae. For example, when you’re working on high priority project and your six-years-old child interrupts you to help on his Lego-building. It may seem trivial to you, but for your child it may be his very important mission.
Attending to The Little Things. The little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Small discourtesies, little unkindnesses, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships, the little things are the big things.
Keeping Commitments. Keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal. In fact, there’s probably not a more massive withdrawal than to make a promise that’s important to someone and then not to come through. The next time a promise is made, they won’t believe it. People tend to build their hopes around promises, particularly promises about their basic livelihood.
Clarifying Expectations. Many expectations are implicit. They haven’t been explicitly stated or announced, but people nevertheless bring them to a particular situation. For example, if your boss has an implicit expectations of you and you do not fulfill it, you might get a conflict with your boss. On your boss side, he thought you should’ve already known the expectations already. On your side, you have no idea that the mentioned expectations are required. The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals..
Showing Personal Integrity. Integrity includes but goes beyond honesty. Integrity is conforming reality to our words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. This requires an integrated character, a oneness, primarily with self but also with life.
The Laws of Love and The Laws of Life. Conforming to the laws of love to other people means encouraging them to live the laws of life. In other word, when we truly love others without condition, we help them feel secure, safe, validated, and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity. We give them the freedom to act on their own inner imperatives rather than react to our conditions and limitations.

With the paradigm of Emotional Bank Account in mind, we’re ready to move into the habits of Public Victory, of success in working with other people.

Habit 4: Think Win-Win

There are six paradigms of human interaction:

Win-Win. It’s when you strive to seek mutual benefit for all parties.
Win-Lose. It’s when we see the interaction as competition, if one party wins the others will lose. A zero-sum game.
Lose-Win. It’s the situation of giving in or giving up. It’s a mindset of being a “nice guy” even though they bury a lot of feelings.
Lose-Lose. When two stubborn & ego-invested Win-Lose people get together, the result will be Lose-Lose in order for them to “get even.”
Win. This mentality is simply to think of winning. People with the Win mentality thinks in terms of securing his own ends and leaving it to others to secure theirs.
Win-Win or No Deal. A higher expression of Win-Win mindset. People of this mentality would go for No Deal if they can’t come up with a synergistic solution.

Most people’s worldviews are shaped by Win-Lose paradigm. This means they see any interactions as basically a competition, where they need to fight the other person for the bigger slice of pie.

Having a Win-Lose paradigm is not good for long-term positive relationship to form between two parties. For example, if your company sells services to a customer and you argue for a higher price with a strong Win-Lose mindset that your customer don’t really agree about, you may succeed in increasing the value of the deal a little bit. But your customer will prefer to make a deal elsewhere next time. You will lose in the long term.

However, in a Win-Win paradigm. You strive for both you and your customer to have mutual benefit and satisfied with the deal. Your customer will see that you really care about them and want both parties to benefit, no hidden Win-Lose agenda. It will increase their Emotional Bank Account in you. They will trust you more, and in the future they would come back again to you. Increasing your long term profits.

Five Dimensions of Win-Win

Think Win-Win is the habit of interpersonal leadership. It involves mutual learning, mutual learning, mutual influence, and mutual benefits. We cannot achieve Win-Win ends with Win-Lose or Lose-Win means. The principle of Win-Win is fundamental to success in all our interactions, and it embraces five interdependent dimensions of life.

Character. In order to achieve Win-Win, we need to have integrity and maturity. Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration. To go for Win-Win, you not only have to be considerate and sensitive, you also have to be brave. To achieve that balance between courage and consideration is the essence of real maturity and is fundamental for Win-Win.

Relationships. From the foundation of character, we build and maintain the Emotional Bank Accounts of each parties, the trusts. Without trust, the best we can do is compromise, we lack the credibility for open, mutual learning and communication and real creativity.
Agreements. From relationships flow the agreements that give definition and direction to Win-Win. Win-Win agreements shift the paradigm of each parties. From vertical interaction to horizontal interaction, from supervision to self-supervision, from positioning in the deals to partners in success. The agreements follow the 5 areas of Stewardship Delegation that we’ve covered earlier in Habit 3.
Supportive Systems. Win-Win mindset can only survive in an organization where the system supports it. If you talk Win-Win, but your incentives and benefits system rewards Win-Lose, you will not achieve an environment where Win-Win mindset survives.
Processes. You will never be able to achieve Win-Win with Win-Lose or Lose-Win means. You cannot say that you want to achieve Win-Win whilst deep in your heart there’s still a slight intent of Win-Lose or Lose-Win. In the book “Getting To Yes” by Roger Fisher, they suggest to separate the person from the problem, to focus on interests and not on positioning, to invent options for mutual gain, and to insist on objective criteria, some external standard or principle that both parties can buy into.

Habit 5: Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood

Imagine going to opticians wanting to consult about your eyes problem, and then he gives you his own glasses without bothering to check and diagnose your eyesight first. And, obviously, when you put his glasses on, your eyesight doesn’t get any better, or even it looks worse. But he insists that it works on him, so it should also work on you too. Would you want to go to him again to consult?

Although that example won’t happen in the medical world, we do that most of the time to our relationships. We often do that when talking with others. We don’t really listen to what they’re saying and instead project our own situation onto them, coming up with “solutions” for them. We often do not listen to understand, we instead listen to reply.

Emphatic Listening

Emphatic listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. You’re putting yourself on their shoes, you see the world as they see it, you understand their paradigms, you understand how they feel. Instead of projecting your own self to his problem and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives, and interpretations, you’re dealing with the reality inside another person’s head and heart.

The essence of emphatic listening is not that you agree with them. It’s that you fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually. You use your right brain as well as your left. You sense, you intuit, you feel.

When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air, their vital psychological needs. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving.

One of the key takeaways in Covey’s example of emphatic listening is when the conversation turns logical, you can effectively ask questions and give counsel. But the moment it turns emotional, you need to go back to emphatic listening. In that moment, avoid responding autobiographically, projecting ourselves to their problems.

Once you fully, deeply understand the other parties, seek to be understood. This is equally critical in order to reach Win-Win solutions (Habit 4).

Habit 6: Synergize

We now come to habit that all the previous habits have prepared us for. Synergize.

Simply defined, synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s 1+1=3 or 10 or 100 or even 1 million. It means that the relationship between the parts is also the most important part of itself, the most empowering, and catalytic.

Each of us sees the world differently and all of us has our own unique strengths and weaknesses. You can leverage the power of synergy by being open with others and valuing these differences.

It is important to remember that in order to be able to achieve interpersonal synergy, we need to achieve intrapersonal synergy first. That is synergy within ourselves. The heart of intrapersonal synergy lies within Habit 1 to 3, in which it gives internal security sufficient to handle the risks of being open and vulnerable.

When people synergize, they emphatically listen to each other, use the contributions of each other to create something that is greater than what they can achieve individually. When people synergize, they’re applying all the previous habits 1 to 5 to each other in the group.

As an example, when David Lilienthal was tasked to head the Atomic Energy Commission after World War II, he put together a team of highly capable people. Knowing that each had his own strong agenda and opinions, he started by scheduling several weeks for the group to know each other better, to learn each other’s fears, hopes, and dreams. Many criticized this as a waste of time, but the basic human interaction helped the team get into an open, trusting, and synergistic mindset. When disagreements arose, instead of opposition, there was a genuine effort to understand the other person, resulting in a very respectful, creative, and productive culture.

Force Field Analysis

In and interdependent situation, synergy is particularly powerful in dealing with negative forces that works against growth and change.

Sociologist Kurt Lewis described that on any kind of driving forces that encourage growth and upward movement, there will always be restraining forces that discourage it.

For each positive movement, there will always be the opposite negative movement.

For example, in a family, you have a certain “climate” in the home, a certain level of positive or negative interaction, of feeling safe or unsafe in expressing feelings or talking about concerns, of respect or disrespect in communications among family members.

You may want to change that level to be more positive, to make the climate more respectful, open, and trusting. You are the driving force here. But increasing the driving force is not enough. There will be the opposite restraining forces, by the competitive spirit between children in the family, by habits that have developed in the family, by the scripting of home life, by work or other demands.

Increasing the driving forces may bring results for a while. But as long as the restraining forces are there, it becomes increasingly harder and harder just like pushing against a spring, until it suddenly thrusts the level back down to the previous state.

The resulting up-and-down, yo-yo effect causes you to feel, after several attempts, that people are “just the way they are” and that “it’s too difficult to change.”

But when you introduce synergy, you use the motive of Habit 4, the skill of Habit 5, and the interaction of Habit 6 to work directly on the restraining forces. You create an atmosphere where it’s safe to talk openly about these restraining forces. You collaboratively loosen them up and create new insights that actually transform those restraining forces into driving forces. You involve people in the problem, immerse them so that they feel it is their problem and they tend to become an important part of the solution.

As a result, a new shared goals are created, and the whole group moves upward, creating a new normal level that is higher than before because you all drive the group upward together in synergy. It will result in new culture, fresh-thinking, and opportunities often that no one has anticipated.

Renewal

Habit 7: Sharpen The Saw

Suppose you were to come upon someone sawing down a tree. He claimed that he has worked for hours sawing it down. You can see that he’s really exhausted and his saw has become so blunt. You can tell that his tool has become so dull that it’s almost impossible to cut down any tree, yet he won’t listen to your advice to take a break and sharpen his saw.

Similarly, if you never pause to take care of yourself, any gains of effectiveness you achieve will be short-lived. You’ll soon exhaust yourself and won’t be able to maintain any of the good habits you have developed.

That’s why this last habit is really essential for a lasting effectiveness in each of the four key dimensions of your life:

Physical. To stay physically fit, you need to exercise regularly, eat healthily, and avoid undue stress.
Spiritual. It means praying, meditating, or simply regularly reflecting on your own norms and values.
Mental. To stay mentally healthy, you can read plenty of good books, keeping a journal, organizing and planning things to keep your mind sharp and fresh, avoiding too much time in TV and social media.
Social and Emotional. By keeping contacts with your relatives, deliberately seeking to understand others, building positive relationships with them, helping them.

Always remember to schedule time to Sharpen Your Saw, to heal and recharge yourself, to improve yourself. In the long term, it’s really essential for lasting effectiveness and it will be a well worth investment.

Finally, we’ve come to an end. Writing summary about this book gives me many new insights that I somehow didn’t get a grasp for before when first reading the book. I would really recommend you to read the book in full to really get the grasp of the knowledge and teachings there. There are so many examples in the book that would help you understand.

Incorporating these habits in our lives might not be as simple as it sounds, but we should all strive to practice them if we want to be more effective in our life. I hope that we can all successfully implement them and make ourselves better and better from day to day.