Habits of a Highly Effective Person – Part 2

Welcome back to the second of a seven-part series on Habits of Highly Effect People by Stephen R Covey.

In this series we will look at seven habits, identified by Covey, designed to help you to change your lifestyle, and in return, become a highly effective person. This resource intends to give a useful overview of these ideas, and will hopefully inspire you to read the book in full

Habit Two: Begin with the end in mind

For this habit, we will have some fun. Imagine you are on the show “This is your life”, and it is your night. Going through all your achievements, and moments in your life. You go through all of them, and now comes the part where friends and family come and speak about you. What do you expect them to say? Will there only be one or two people speaking, or perhaps loads of people wanting to speak about you? This is what is meant by ‘Begin with the end in mind’.

When you imagine this, you probably can picture the speakers talking about your character and different relationships. According to Covey, before you live a good and meaningful life, you should first figure out what such a life looks like. When we know how we want people to talk about us at the end, we can the start to take action, to make that scenario a reality later.

Three steps to achieve these are:

1) Block off uninterrupted time

Spend time where you can “go deep within yourself”, so that you can work through your own 

2) Prioritise your roles in life

Organise your different life roles into a list, e.g. spouse/partner, parent, child, sibling, friend, employee, leader, student, writer, coach, etc..,. You may write a huge list, but it does not matter, because we can now prioritise these. Maybe some of them are causing you unneeded stress, or perhaps you have taken on a few that either do not benefit you or take away time from other roles that are more important to you. It might be tough, but eliminating these unnecessary roles is a “good” thing to do.

3) Define the purpose of each role

With each of your written roles, ask yourself, what values do you want to embody in that role, or better still, what do you want the people you affect in those roles to say about you?

This is perhaps the easiest step; with what you have defined about each, you can go about  implementing any necessary change in your life, so that it matches with the definitions you have set for yourself.

So, there we have it, our summary of the second  habit of highly effective people, as identified by Stephen R Covey. In Part Three, we will look at:

• Put first things first

If you have enjoyed reading this, and are looking forward to the future parts of this series; then why not check out one of our personal development courses. We have an incredibly informative one: Personal Planning and Organisational Skills. Why not check it out here.