Summary of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Essay Example

Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” will help me in a number of different ways in the year to come. Not only with being effective in my career, but also my personal life and graduate school. Covey talks about character and personality traits, and uses a great example of being in Chicago and having excellent map and reference skills, but if you have a map of Detroit you will not be able to find your way around no matter how good your secondary skills are. This is a great example of how it is necessary to possess the primary elements, before your secondary skills can be used effectively. Covey goes on to talk about the 7 habits of highly effective people in his book, and continues to talk about the difference in relying on personality vs. character ethics. Covey feels that if you rely on personality ethics and the underlying paradigms are the same, simply changing outward behavior is not effective. He also talks about how people view things not the way they are, but how they are conditioned to see thing. He uses an example of two groups of people being shown two different pictures of a young and old woman. Then the groups are shown an abstract containing characteristics of both the old and young woman. Each group saw the image of the picture they were shown within the abstract. The book presents the 7 habits in an inside-out approach centering around principles and character. The key points that I got out of reading this book was to approach the way that I look at the world differently. Once I can realize my past conditioning, I can then change the way that I see things in order to be more effective. All 7 habits will be helpful to me in my future growth, success, and effectiveness. The first is to be proactive. By being proactive, this means to assess a situation and developing a positive response for it, as opposed to reporting it to someone and sitting back and waiting for them to come up with a response. The other key points I took