I have heard a lot about The
7 Habits of Highly Effective People over the years, but I have never read
the book, and I never really knew what the habits were. I have always wanted to read this book and
after reading the summary of it I want to read it even more. I had several take
away lessons thought just from the summary.
The first habit of being proactive was one of the most important for
me. It is something that I have been
working on over the last 20 years, but the way that Covey describes it helped
me access more understanding on what I still lacked. I will never forget as a high school student having
a boy that I was interested come up to me and ask why I had to make such a big
deal out of everything. This question
struck me hard at the time. I didn’t
realize that I did make a big deal out of things. Looking back, I can realize that a lot of it
was immaturity and regular teenage girl behavior, however he was right. I overreacted to a lot of different situations. As I evaluated my life after this question I
decided that I didn’t want to be a person the reacted to things and have tried
to carefully weigh in my options before jumping to a reaction. I am not a master of this yet, but I am
practicing all the time and have come a long way on that path, as I learned in
the book Mastery. I believe now that my
friends would consider me to be a careful planner that makes decisions based
more on my beliefs than the situations that are around me, more level headed
maybe. I loved the different sections of
being proactive that was listed: self-awareness (an area that I still need more
work on), imagination (an area I had never considered before when thinking of being
proactive), conscience (an area I feel like I have become fairly adept at doing
well), and independent will (another area where I do fairly well already). These sections have helped me see where I can
further improve this habit.
The other habit that held a lot of meaning for me personally
was habit 3, put first things first. The
chart listing the 4 quadrants was very eye opening to me. I had to evaluate where I chose to spend my
time. I want to learn more about these quadrants
because time management is so important to me right now as I struggle to fit in
all of my household responsibilities as well as my new school work.
I feel like I am growing by leaps and bounds through this
class. Over the last 20 years of being a
mother I have spent so much time devoted to my children that I have lost sight
of who I really am without them, on my own.
I am loving this process of finding myself again. I look forward to the second half of this
class and the things I will continue to learn about myself and my future as a
mother and a business woman.
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