Before going into the actual 7 habits, the author Steve Covey goes into few important concepts.
Character Ethic (good)
There are basic principles of effective living and people can only experience true success and enduring happines as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.
Personality Ethic (not so good)
It is manipulative, deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them. Personality ethic is illusory and deceptive and trying to get high quality results with its techniques and quick fixes – not effective at all.
Paradigm
The book talks a lot about paradigm shifts and I remember having to look it up in the dictionary to find the true meaning of it; paradigm meaning: model, theory, perception, assumption, the way we see world.
Conditioning affects our perceptions/paradigms (old/young lady drawing example in the book worth checking out). We see the world not as it is but as ‘we are’ through our paradigms. Different people can have different views and still both be correct. The more aware we are of our basic paradigms the more we can examine/test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions getting a larger picture and far more objective view.
Paradigm shifts move us from one way of seeing the world to another. They influence our relationship with others. Not all are good. If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives we can appropriately focus our attitudes and behaviours, but to make significant quantum change we need to work on our basic paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviours flow.
Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens though which we see the world. The power of paradigm shift is the essential power of quantum change whether that shift is instantaneous or a slow and deliberate process.
Importance of Principles
Character ethic is based on the fundamental idea that there are