7 Effectiveness Habits (Class)

Nothing of value happens without having been envisioned and then mentally considered.  The quality of our mental conversation is crucial to the quality of our decisions and our resultant circumstances.

Habit Two suggests we begin with principles which are consistent with our highest values, based on increased self-awareness, rigorous reliance on conscience, and an active visual imagination.

The ultimate end point is one’s personal and inevitable demise.  Death casts new light on most mundane life decisions by either lending power to them or rendering them useless in the overall scheme of things.  

• Reflects constantly on one’s personal life and circumstances, building self-awareness and mastery through reflective insight which is grounded in fundamental values and principles. 
  Not tied to old dysfunctional scripts but uses imagination to envision and act in a better way.
• Well-intentioned, but inconsistent in attempts to master oneself through reflection and rescripting.  Becomes immersed in duty-bound behavior based on comparatively insignificant roles to the detriment of lost opportunities in potentially more important areas of life.  
• Often confused about motivational correctness.  Doesn’t reflect on life nor seriously attempt to disrupt long-embedded scripts or a particular central focus that has become dysfunctional.  Accepts oneself and one’s circumstances as static and unchangeable.
• Attempts to make the present conform to an idealized past which is increasingly incompatible with a rapidly changing present.  Wants others to conform to preordained scripts and roles, regardless of their needs and desires.  Creates disharmony and discord in relationships.
• Decisions are made unconsciously, based on dog-eat-dog, me-first motivations and values which are self-centered and focused on pleasure through entertainment.  Never attempts to improve circumstances through goal setting or by developing more meaningful and significant roles.

Time management decisions have two dimensions: urgency and importance.  Decisions should balance results, solutions, and deadlines with those that contribute to one’s deepest values.

Effective people prioritize other people over things, and relationships over schedules.  The new time management paradigm looks primarily through the lens of importance, not urgency.

Trust is a prerequisite.  Managers trust that subordinates with strong values and guiding conscience can be delegated responsibility.  In turn, workers trust they will be supported.

• Organizes according to daily and weekly priorities.  The discipline to act comes from having a mission and deep-seated values.  Focuses on important relationships and valued results.  Prevents problems from arising, rather than exacerbating them.
• Sets goals and priorities on a weekly and daily basis but deals mainly with urgent problems and crises.  Urgency is based on external priorities.  Doesn’t manage or think about various roles in prioritizing time, commitments, and goals.  Subject to burnout.  
• Has difficulty saying no to the demands of others.  Unable to organize around priorities because a mission, personal vision, and deep-seated values are lacking.  Appears to lack discipline unless given constant supervision.  
• Has little sense of role-related duty or responsibility.  Reluctant to commit or take ownership of work or projects.  Doesn’t organize, plan, or set daily/weekly goals.  Life is hectic, stressful, and disorganized.  There is never time to deal with important matters.
• Irresponsible.  Has a low-level, routine job needing little or no creative thinking.   Spends an inordinate amount of free time on unimportant activities such as TV and other entertainment pass-times.  No sense of personal mission or role-based identity.

Listening is an activity that is commonly misunderstood.  Rather than an easily described behavior, it’s more accurate to say that listening fits into a range of behaviors and attitudes (described below) making up a communication process.

The process begins with one’s ability (or inability) to simply attend to what another person is saying.  Thus, “listening” behavior begins from the middle level of the following scale, rising or falling from there in inter-personal skill and effectiveness.  

• Responding.  Demonstrating an attitude of validation towards another person’s thoughts and feelings.  Agreeing and disagreeing are not as important.  Communication is spontaneous, harmonious, and improvisational.  All parties feel a sense of trust, bonding, and balming.  
• Hearing.  Having full (or partial) empathetic understanding of another’s communication.  Active hearing habitually excludes personal thoughts from the conversation because they interfere with the hearing process.  The hearer is always interested in whatever the other is saying.  
• Listening.  Using one’s attention to focus on the meaning being conveyed by another person’s thoughts and feelings.  By listening, hearing, and responding, a “bridge” relationship between interlocutors is created, thereby enhancing effective communication, cooperation, and learning.
• Blocking.  Misusing attention to focus on and convey one’s personal thoughts, feelings, and history, rather than reflecting understanding of the other’s communication.  Blocking behaviors are myriad.  But the essential aspect of interaction is a discordant, unpleasant, leftover feeling.
• Reacting.  Reaction is triggered by a superficial understanding or misinterpretation of the other person’s intended meaning.  One’s personal agenda—rather than the other’s—is the motivating factor.  Reactionary people often view their listening as “effective,” when it is anything but.

All human beings live in two spiritual dimensions: the inner and the outer.  We access our inner world through meditation and the outer world through our five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching).  Our inner world is essentially mental, while our outer world depends on our sensing body.

Whether we recognize, acknowledge, or appreciate our spiritual nature is a perennial issue.  Most in our culture believe our outer world is the primary reality.  But through meditation, our inner world acquires spiritual meaning and eventually becomes the primary reality determining our outer-world experience.

Our outer world is circumscribed by everyday activities.  Our inner world is marked by the potentially limitless space between our thoughts.  In the process of widening those spaces, meditation enables divine grace and human intentionality to cooperate in the synergistic work of spiritual regeneration.   

Change is a constant reality in human life: we are born, we mature, and eventually grow old and die.  Thus, of necessity, we are thrown into needing constant spiritual renewal, which is why meditation is so important.  It gives us access to a vast spiritual landscape that ultimately determines our outer reality.  

We are neither our mind nor our body.  Nonetheless, making the best of life requires us to use the mind and body to deal effectively with life’s vicissitudes.  In the process, our inner and outer aspects synergize to produce something greater than both, exemplified, say, as inspirational thoughts that guide outer life.

The depth of meditative practice is determined by the practitioner’s willingness to discipline the mind and body.  The following scale delimits five meditative levels.  They are part of an inner reality in which the ego-centric mind falls away, enabling a synergistic union with our inner source of spiritual power.

• Distraction (outward focus).  A common error is believing one must “stop” one’s thinking, when it’s more accurate to say the objective is to repeatedly cycle through distraction and rumination until one settles in a peaceful place beyond the compulsive urge to get up and act immediately.
• Rumination (inward focus).  During this cyclic process, restlessness becomes groundedness, self-doubt is conquered by commitment, and the temptation to become entangled in our outer life is thwarted by non-attachment and a relaxed inward focus on, say, a mantra or one’s breathing.
• Being There (no-ego).  Being there is the experience of being so settled within our inner space that even the most distracting thoughts and feelings cannot disturb our mental calmness.  The egoless mind is open to inspiring new ideas coming seemingly as miracles from further within.
• Stillness (one-pointedness).  Here, the waverless mind becomes an ideal mechanism for still deeper meditation, contemplation, and prayer.  Prayer assumes belief in esoteric power other-than and greater-than oneself.  Access to that power enables us to rise above life’s challenges.
• Silence (no thoughts).  True silence hangs on a knife-edge between our still-unformed thoughts and a resultant vast, clear, inner space.  The adept practitioner can sustain silence for hours, encountering, during trances, manifestations of astonishing personal and supernatural power.

The 7th habit focuses on four self-renewal dimensions: The physical (exercise, nutrition, stress management), mental (reading, visualization, planning, writing), spiritual (value clarification, commitment, study, meditation), and social-emotional (service, empathy, synergy).

The 7th scale measures the range of human personality according to the Bhagavad Gita—the Hindu “bible.”  Rather than a religious document per se, the Gita is a manual for fruitful living.  Steven Covey studied the Bhagavad Gita to develop his ideas on management effectiveness.

One of the Gita’s most important ideas is the theory of the three Gunas.  In East Indian lore, the Gunas are fundamental to understanding how human personality can evolve through five levels during a person’s lifetime.  Thus, the “saw” becomes the Self as manifested through personality.

Human personality can be explained in terms of the interplay of three Gunas (forces):  1. Sattva (harmony/balance/discipline)—the door to the inner self; 2. Rajas (energy) needed to accomp-lish any task.  3. Tamas (inertia), the ignorance, fear, and delusion blocking the way forward.

Personality forces are proportioned differently in different people: Rajas is full of energy, while Tamas is lazy and torpid.  Similarly, the same person can reflect different forces through life, with the dominating Guna representing gradual changes in the stages of personal growth.  

At the highest level, an ordinary person in rare moments can be calm, secure, and even-tempered.  Thus, Sattva is unperturbed by the effects of scattered Rajas energy, nor affected by Tamas laziness.  Tamas and Rajas forces must be brought under control to reveal Sattva.

All three forces are present and operative in all human beings.  The Gita describes the forces so we can reshape ourselves according to our highest ideals.  But we must have a strong desire to swim against the powerful current of our habitual, conditioned ways of thinking and feeling.  

• Sattva (the Lover, Effective in Life, Focused).  Meditates frequently to gain control of the mind and will.  Sattva knows how to direct willpower toward completing the job at hand—including a supreme goal—without giving up or wandering off track.  Sattva works hard, does the best possible job, gets a lot done, but is not attached to results.  Fame and obscurity, success and failure are experienced with equanimity.  When work is done, Sattva relaxes without succumbing to compulsive activity.  Sattva doesn’t confuse the inner self with the roles people play in life.  Gives freely to help others: selfless, never selfish; slow to anger, quick to forgive.  Sattva is involved with people but not spiritually nor psychologically entangled in their lives.  Lives simply, peacefully, free of inner turmoil but within the flow of the universal power of loving, selfless action.  
• Sattva/Rajas (S/R).  Trains the will by learning to control the senses.  Yet, ironically, S/R can’t keep up with a plethora of scattered sensual desires.  The S/R mind races at night, propelled by an overriding need to be right about decisions taken without adequate reflection.  Bound to activity for its own sake, S/R is always on the go, but shows few significant results.  Angers easily, forgives little.  Becomes emotionally entangled with others—assuming their problems at the expense of personal wants and needs.  Frequently “burned out,” S/R meditates haphazardly and irregularly, leaving willpower less than fully developed.  
• Rajas (The Maker, Active).  An expert manipulator, Rajas believes the end justifies the means.  This attitude ultimately carries with it the karmic baggage of action born of selfish ends.  Rajas needs others around to rescue him/her from an inability to stay on top of mundane tasks, asking, for instance, that friends help find constantly misplaced items.  Rajas lives according to previously determined scripts, expecting others to accommodate themselves to his/her agenda.  A poor listener, Rajas has only glimmers of understanding and empathy, finding it difficult to respond appropriately to another’s point of view.  Lacking the personal power necessary to direct restless energy, Rajas fails to focus attention on the one thing necessary to rise to the next level of personal growth—meditation.   An inner focus is alien to the outward-focused Rajas mind, which is easily tempted by the pleasures of the sensory world.  
• Rajas/Tamas (R/T).  A consumer of entertainment and material possessions, R/T’s attention is drained by a clutter of playthings to which R/T is attached often to the point of obsession.  Attachments extend to past resentments and future worries, with little time focused on improving the present.  Liberating moments of insight and decision slip by unnoticed in the frantic urge to enjoy life, or the equally strong desire to chill out.  All attachment is ultimately selfish, yet R/T is capable of simple work tasks done well.  A meaningless work life is balanced with a life spent passively attending to electronic devices.  Ignorance and delusion contribute to a make-believe world scripted for them by the entertainment industry.  R/Ts fail to appreciate their true nature and how much better an awakened life could be.
• Tamas (The Sleeper, Inactive).  A closed-minded procrastinator who’s full of fear in its countless disguises, Tamas worries constantly about a precarious future, but seldom acts to prevent imminent disaster.  With little awareness and without sufficient energy, Tamas is often incapable of being tempted by life or its sensual pleasures, preferring to sleep whenever possible.  Lazy to a fault, disloyal and selfish, Tamas can’t see through the dark ignorance that is part of living at this level.  Commonly overweight and out of shape, they deplore their health and physical condition, while doing nothing to improve it.  Change is part of life, but Tamas resists needed changes like the plague.  The Tamas motto: I don’t care because nothing matters.  Yet there is always dissonance and suffering at the unconscious level when life is so unchanging and dull.