Virtue: The Good Habit

Virtue: The Good Habit

Developing Good Habits for Effectiveness

Habits are powerful factors in our lives. They are consistent, often unconscious patterns. They constantly, daily, express our character and influence our effectiveness or ineffectiveness.

Habit is defined as the interaction of knowledge, skill and desire. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the "what to do" and the "why". Skill is the "how to do", and desire is the motivation, the "want to do". All these three are necessary to make something a habit in our lives.

Effectiveness is defined as the basis of a person's character, creating an empowering center of correct maps from which an individual can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, continually learn and integrate in an upward growth.

1. Being Proactive

Proactivity means taking initiative. As a human being, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. Highly proactive people recognize responsibility.

2. Begin with the End in Mind

It is to begin today with the image, picture or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined.

3. Putting First Things First

Effective management is putting first things first. While leadership decides what "first things" are. It is management that puts them first.

4. Think Win/Win

The habit of effective interpersonal leadership is Think Win/Win. Win is not a technique; it is a philosophy of human interaction.

5. Seek First to Understand Than to be Understood

In involve a very deep shift in paradigm. We typically seek first to understood. Most people do not intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply.

6. Synergize

It means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in or itself. It is the highest activity in all life, the true test and the manifestation.

7. Sharpen your "Saw" of Self-Principle of Balanced Self-Renewal

Habit is taking time to sharpen the saw. It is the habit that makes all the others possible. It is preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have.