As a part of the Faber series, we are here again with excerpts from another leadership book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey.

Being effective and efficient is a real excellence in the world that can’t be separated from right and disciplined living. In today’s highly competitive and busy world, people have to strive to achieve some degree of success and recognition. This can only be achieved if you have a right and precise composure of your living habits to make you effective enough in the competitive market.

In this blog, we will cover the seven surreal habits that can make instigate effectiveness in an individual.

• Proactive approach

Do not sit and wait in a reactive manner waiting for problems to happen before taking an action. Instead, work from the centre of your influence and constantly try to expand it. You should understand that you are in charge of writing the scripts of your life. Use this self-awareness to be proactive and implement them in making the choices for you.

Proactive approach develops a sense of responsibility in an individual which ultimately leads to the enhancement of the ability to choose how one will respond to a given situation.

• Envision the results and the destination you want to reach

Work on your project in future and envision the climax you want to give it. Understand that you are the programmer and have the power to remotely decide the direction of your assignments to steer to. Stay focused towards the clear destination and develop your conscience to decide the factors that are going to guide you to achieve your goals. Setting your goals in the beginning also helps in creating robust strategic that is going to compliment your journey. This will also subsequently evolve one on an individual level, making him rescript and assert his own personal values.

• Prioritize your things according to the needs

For effective management, one should prioritize his work and put the important thing on the top of the list. Organize your list by placing your to-do’s in categories: Urgent and Not Urgent. Implementing discipline in our day-to-day actions by prioritizing them is one of the key factors that can improve your influence and grip on the structure if the hierarchy as well as in your life. Moreover, remember, things you don’t want to, are the things you have to. Willpower plays an important role in keeping the focus on track towards the goal.

• Envisage a mutually beneficial paradigm

Start understanding people and respect their opinions for mutually beneficial solutions. You should focus on creating an individual relationship that provides a win-win situation for both the parties; you and your client. Put yourself in other people’s shoes and critically examine the key issues and work on their solutions. Many people misunderstand win-win as being nice and polite. However, it does not actually mean that. It is a basic character code human interaction and collaboration to achieve a profitable conclusion.

• Understand others to be Understood

Before jumping to conclusions or assumptions, interact homogenously with the other members and listen to them. Empathetic listening is very effective in compelling other to reciprocate and listen to you with an open mind, thus increasing you influence area. Before getting to the solution, it is important to evaluate and analyze the problem and that can only be done by understanding the people’s concerns and working on it together.

In order to be understood, one must learn to listen to other people. Unfortunately, we are not able to apply this to our daily lifestyle. This is more the reason for one to build the skills of empathetic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust.

• Promote unanimity

Try and create synergy by understanding and valuing the difference in other person’s point of view to explore a whole new paradigm of openness and creativity. Synergy allows one to create a holistic environment that recourse our thought processes to consider alternative and new possibilities. To be short and precise, it motivates one to dump the old scripts and write new ones.

• Prepare yourself for the push

Rejuvenating yourself physically, mentally and socially is also one of the key factors in making one effective. Continuous refilling also helps people in fulfilling their wishes and enables them to practice all these habits in a nurturing and effectuate manner. The more we see people in terms of their unseen potential, the more we can use our imagination rather than our memory. Furthermore, it maintains a balance between your resources and means and your desired results.

Written & Compiled By Faber Kishlay & Faber Mayuri Pandya