Stephen R. Covey

Your Personal Constitution: what holds true to you

Stephen R. Covey says that we should always begin with the end in mind.

For most things in our lives we do begin with the end. We are just not fully aware of it.

For example, artists, before painting a portrait, have a picture of what they want it to look like before grabbing the brush. Professional athletes visualize what they want to do in a game before the game has even started. An entrepreneur, before launching his/her business, will write down a business plan of what he/she would like the business to be.

So, with everything in life there will always be 2 creations. Our visualization and the concrete product.

We always create things twice: once in our minds and then in the physical world

The Funeral

As an exercise, Covey asks his readers to close their eyes and picture themselves driving to a loved one’s funeral.

As you get there you see family, coworkers, community friends, and others getting ready to speak in honor of the fallen. There will be four speakers: one from his/her immediate family, a coworker, a friend, and someone from a community organization (a church or volunteer program) whom which has been involved with him/her.

However, as you get close and look inside the casket you see yourself! This is your funeral in 3 years from now.

Now, what would you like these speakers to say about you?

Write down 10 to 15 things you would like to be remembered for.

Leadership comes before Management

The 10 to 15 points you wrote down are your principles. These are the things you value the most in life and would define your terms of success.

Living through a well thought out set of values is going to direct you towards the path you want the most. These principles will guide you towards your personal definition of success, and ultimately will be what you will be remembered for.

For example, when I am long gone I would like to be remembered as a person who always loved to help others before myself, had a progressive vision with what I wanted to do, carried myself with great leadership, integrity and confidence, was easy to talk to, and worked extremely hard towards goals bigger than myself in an ethical and value-driven way.

With these set of values I have done my first creation of what I would like my life to be like.

So, now comes the question: what is the difference between leadership and management?

A manager focuses on how he/she can accomplish certain things
A leader focuses on what he/she wants to accomplish

With this distinction it is easy to understand why leadership has always to come before management. For example, group of explorers are traveling in a jungle with producers cutting through trees looking for a treasure. The managers are the ones behind the producers sharpening the machetes, writing procedure manuals, and organizing the schedule.

The leader, however, is the one who climbs up the tallest tree and says: “We are in the wrong jungle!”.

The leader has a set of well thought out principles which serves as his/her compass. This compass will guide his group in the right direction. With that being said, no management success can compensate for failure in leadership.

Your principles become an internal compass that guide you in your journey

Your Personal Constitution

Think about the Constitution of a country. That is the tool used to evaluate any law that is passed or not passed. The Constitution will last and endure over years because it is based on a set of correct principles which are the truths obtained upon the declaration of the independence of this country.

By beginning with the end in mind you will be able to develop your own Personal Constitution by utilizing your imagination and conscience (discussed in the previous post).

As an example, I will share my own Personal Constitution:

I am at my best when I inspire others.
I will try to prevent times when I let my negative feelings dictate my responses.
I will enjoy my work by finding employment where I can lead a group of people towards a common goal.
I will find enjoyment in my personal life through making the ones around me laugh.
I will find opportunities to use my natural talents and gifts such as learning quickly, including people into activities, solving problems, motivating myself and others towards achievements, and communicating with others.
I can do anything I set my mind to. I will start a company in the sports industry and utilize the profits to help the poor in Third World countries.
My life’s journey is to continually develop myself as a leader in my community in order to attain the resources and trust of others to help the poor and my own family. I am doing this because I was raised in Brazil being exposed to poverty and also lived in Canada, getting to see the benefits of living in a developed country. I intend to end my journey by inspiring many others to take on the challenge of being a proactive member in society with the desire to help the ones in need.
I will be a person who will always carry myself with integrity, self-belief, and respect (for myself and for others). I will always be a leader with a progressive vision and trail blaze a path to many others behind me. I will always be easy to talk to.
My most important future contribution to others will be to provide my family with options to choose from. I want to return everything my parents have done for me and become a good supporting parent like they were for me. I also want to help the poor communities in my country to develop and thrive as individuals.
I will stop procrastinating and start working on:

Going to bed earlier and waking up earlier

Getting off my cellphone/laptop and doing more activities outside

Taking more chances on the things I believe are right for me

I will strive to incorporate the following attributes into my life:

Being humble and generous

Carrying myself with great integrity and respect

Leading others with a pioneer’s mindset

I will constantly renew myself by focusing on the four dimensions of my life:

Exercising regularly

Meditating regularly

Reading regularly

Interacting with others regularly

You can also develop your own mission statement by clicking here (read the entire post first).

The 4 Balancing Factors

Before writing our personal mission statement we must first understand what fuels the center of our lives.

Stephen R. Covey describes the four interdependent vital factors that dictate our balance in life:

Security: your sense of self-worth, identity and self-esteem
Guidance: your source of direction in life, your internal frame that interprets what is happening outside
Wisdom: your perspective on life, how your principles apply and relate to each other, a sense of oneness
Power: your capacity to act, your vital energy to make decisions, your capacity to overcome bad habits

Depending on what is in our center, each of these factors will be found somewhere in between strong (security, guidance, wisdom, and power) and weak (security, guidance, wisdom, and power). For example, your sense of security will be found either on one end of the spectrum as extreme insecurity, or on the opposite end as a deep sense of self-worth.

Types of Centers

You could center your life in a variety of different aspects of your life, and with that your four balancing factors will consequently be affected by that.

For example:

If you are money-centered your sense of personal worth is based on your net worth, becoming vulnerable to anything that threatens your economic situation; profit is your only decision making criterion; making money is the lens through which you see life; and your power is restricted to what you can accomplish with your money.
If you are friend-centered your security is a function of the social mirror; you base your decisions on others’ judgements; you see the world through a social lens; and you are limited to your social comfort zone.
If you are enemy-centered you are always wondering what your enemy is up to; you guide your actions based on what your enemy does; you are defensive and overreactive; and the little power you have comes from anger, resentment, and vengeance.
If you are family-centered your security if founded on family acceptance; your family dictates your source of correct attitudes and behaviors; you interpret all your life in terms of your family; and your actions are limited by family models and traditions.

According to Stephen R. Covey you can also be spouse-centered, work-centered, possession-centered, pleasure-centered, church-centered, and self-centered. All of the above provide a volatile way to center your life around, putting your sense of security, guidance, wisdom, and power at the mercy of external factors.

Principle-Centeredness

By centering your life around a well-thought out set of values and a personal constitution your four factors will be dependent on internal factors. This will provide you with a more consistent balance throughout life:

Security: based on principles that do not change regardless of external factors and you understand your own development
Guidance: you are guided by a compass and you stand apart from life’s situations, emotions, and circumstances enabling you to look at a more balanced whole.
Wisdom: you adopt a proactive lifestyle basing your actions on long-term consequences.
Power: you are only limited by your basic understanding of your correct principles and your decisions are not based on your current financial or circumstantial limitations.

Applying your Principles

Our brains are divided into a left and a right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is more logical and verbal, whereas the right hemisphere is more intuitive and creative. Although people use both sides of the brain, one tends to be more dominant than the other depending on the person.

Since we live in a primarily left brain dominant world, where words and logic are enthroned, our creative and intuitive side tends to be overlooked. Even in the public educational institutions we are teaching all of our kids to become mathematicians, engineers, or analysts. We hardly see schools encouraging music and art – it is more of an option for the students.

Once we understand our values we have a better idea of where we want to go

However, we do need to exercise our right side of the brain in order to be able to visualize our first creations. It is extremely important that we begin to value more our intuition and integrate that with our left side of the brain to put it into practice.

Once we figure out what is important to us, what are our values, we make a promise to ourselves not to react to the external environment. We become more aware of ourselves and once we find a fork on the road we are sure of which road to take.

Responsibility: the ability to choose your reponse

Have you ever thought about what the word Responsibility means?

When you were a kid and your parents told you to be responsible, most of us just took it in as “don’t be stupid”.

But when we dissect the word we can see that being responsible is having the ability to choose your response when receiving stimuli.

For example, we all have dealt with people that really got in our nerves. Someone who is trying to make us mad, get in our heads, or simply just angry at us. Their attitude and words are stimuli that our brain receives. Someone highly responsible is able to respond to that stimuli based on his/her values, and not based on the other person’s weaknesses.

Stephen R. Covey tells us a story about Victor Frankl, who was a Jew that survived the death camps in Nazi Germany. There, Frankl experienced the most unimaginable atrocities a human being could potentially go through. He saw his parents, wife, and brothers die. Him and his sister were the only ones from his family who survived.

One day, when Victor was left naked and alone in a small room he began to become aware of what he calls “the last of the human freedoms”. The Nazi captors could take away his physical freedom, but they could not take away his freedom of identity. Frankl was the only one capable to decide how all of those atrocities were going to affect him. He walked into the land found in between the stimuli and the response.

The “Last of Human Freedoms” is attained through the ability to choose your responses.

And so, through mental, emotional and moral discipline Victor was able to grow his interior freedom larger and larger, until it was larger than his Nazi captors. In other words, his captors had more options to chose from their physical environment, but Victor had more freedom to exercise his options.

Therefore, within our freedom to pick our options we have:

self-awareness: seeing ourselves from an outside perspective
imagination: ability to create things in our minds
conscience: know what is right or wrong
independent will: ability to act based on our self-awareness

Being Proactive

When Stephen R. Covey talks about the first habit of being Proactive he is talking about staying away from being a Reactive person. In other words, choosing our response based on our self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and independent will; and not on external factors.

Covey talks about the essence of proactive people: the ability to subordinate an impulse to a value. While reactive people are highly affected by their social environment (when someone treats them bad or good, on their circumstances, and feelings), proactive people act based on their well-thought out set of values.

When most married couples go into couple’s therapy and talk about how they are not feeling “love” anymore, they end up learning that love isn’t a feeling, but an action. You can choose to love someone – making sacrifices, doing things without expecting anything in return, truly caring about someone else. Reactive people approach love as something that just happens based on the stimuli they receive.

For proactive people, love is a choice not a feeling.

Owning up to your circumstances and accepting that you are the only one responsible for where you are today is a tough pill to swallow. Most of us will blame our bosses for not being promoted, our teachers for getting a bad grade, or our weather for not going out and getting stuff done. But in reality, we are the only ones able to control our Circle of Influence.

Stephen R. Covey describes the Circle of Influence as the things we can do something about. The rest of the things we have no control over are found in the bigger Circle of Concern.

In a Proactive Approach, people focus their energy in their Circle of Influence. They exhale positive energy, work on being instead of having, and act upon. This makes their Circle of Influence bigger with time.

In a Reactive Approach, people focus their energy in their Circle of Concern. They victimize themselves, focus on other people’s weakness, and use reactive language (such as I can’t, I must, If only). They get acted upon, what makes their Circle of Influence smaller.

Consequences and Mistakes

However, we also have the other side of the stick when we pick one up. We call that side the consequences. We cannot control the consequences of our actions, only our actions themselves.

For example, as a college student one will present many projects in front of a class. The student can put in all his effort into his assignment and still get a B. The grade is a mere consequence of his presentation. It is something that is out of his/her control. It is in the Circle of Concern.

With that, if the student spends most of his/her time worrying about the potential grade of the project, he/she will most likely do a poor job on the project. However, if the student focuses most of his/her energy on the project itself, the consequence will most likely be a successful one.

There are times that we make wrong decisions, we pick up the wrong stick. If we could go back in time and pick another stick that would be our choice. We call these “wrong sticks” our mistakes. Those are also in our Circle of Concern and there is nothing we can do about them but learn from them.

Reactive people spend too much time wishing they could go back on their mistakes. Proactive people learn from them and move on.

Finally, one can work on being a proactive individual by making promises or commitments. These hold us accountable and will remind us of what we stand for. When we feel like reacting we will remember of our promises of not to react based on feelings, for example, and be more proactive as a consequence.

Production/Production Capability

Stephen R. Covey utilizes an amazing fable to describe the definition of effectiveness.

In short, this is how it goes:

A farmer had a pet goose, and day after day he would pick up the eggs laid out by the goose. One day, however, the pet goose laid out a golden egg. The farmer got really excited, and from that day on the goose would lay out one golden egg per day. The farmer got rich, which lead him to greed and impatience. So one day he decided to kill the goose and get all the golden eggs at once. However, when he opened the goose there were no eggs in there. Now, he had no other way to get more golden eggs and he had just killed the only goose who was able to lay those out.

The value of Production (golden egg) and Production Capability (goose/chicken).

The moral of the story is how having the capability to produce (pet goose) is more important than what is produced (golden egg).

And there comes the P/PC relationship – P being Production and PC being Production Capability.

Covey describes how there are three kinds of assets – physical, financial, and human.

Physical Asset

Let’s assume you purchase a vehicle. For the next years your car runs perfectly well and takes you from point A to point B with no problem. You decide that you won’t take it to the shop to maintain it on a regular basis because you don’t think that it is that important if the vehicle is doing the job. However, 2 years later the vehicle breaks down and now you have to purchase a new one. Had you only maintained it on a regular basis you would not have had this problem, and now you will have to spend much more money to buy a new one in comparison with the maintenance costs you would otherwise have had.

Keeping a balance between your P – the vehicle – and your PC – maintaining and preserving the vehicle – is essential for extracting the most value out of your physical assets.

Financial Asset

Let’s say you have some money in the bank – your P – and day after day you make money on top of it with the interest you receive – your PC. The more you spend your money, the less interest you will receive. And you will eventually reach a point where there will be no P nor PC if you don’t continually add more money into your account.

Human Asset

This is the most important asset, because it controls the physical and financial assets.

A basketball coach, for example, teaches his players that the only thing that matters is getting the points, and not how correct your fundamentals were in the process of making the basket. In the short term this might bring positive results and even lead the team to win some games against the weaker teams. But once they get deeper into the playoffs they will begin facing better teams which will challenge their ability to score baskets.

If the players do not have their fundamentals properly trained they will not be able to score baskets against a great team, and therefore, leading them to a loss.

The same goes to someone who just joined a gym. You might experience muscle gains in the beginning even if your trainer teaches you poor form, but once you begin lifting heavier weight, if your form isn’t correct, you will hurt yourself. Getting injured leads to time off, and time off leads to muscle loss.

There is the other side of the coin, as well. If your trainer spends all your time focusing on form (lifting lighter weights), and little time on increasing the weight, you will also not experience muscle gain.

Focusing on form is just as important as focusing on adding weight.

With that, it is very important to keep a balance between P – weight – and PC – taking the time to learn proper form.

This is the first principle Stephen R. Covey teaches in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The habits taught throughout the book revolve around this basic principle. From being dependent, to independent, and finally to being interdependent, people need to keep a balance between their P and their PC if they are seeking long term results.

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