Following last week’s habit 1: be proactive, we move on to the second habit of highly effective people: beginning with the end in mind.
The second habit: Begin with end in mind
Steven Covey begins this chapter by inviting us to visualise attending our own funeral and carefully considering what we would like to be said of us by our family, friends, colleagues and community.
Why “the end”?
With this “end” in mind we are able to better understand where we are now, and what steps are taking us in the right direction, and which ones are not. We thus obtain a frame of reference by which we can stay connected to what really matters to us. Covey says that people from all walks of life often find themselves struggling to achieve “a higher income, more recognition or a certain degree of professional competence, only to find that their drive to achieve their goal has blinded them to the things that really mattered most and are now gone”. Even though we may be very busy, and very efficient, we’ll only be truly effective when we consider the end.
How to use “the end” to become highly effective:
Personal Mission Statement. This tool focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based. Your personal mission statement will reflect your own uniqueness, both in content and form (e.g. Benjamin Franklin’s mission statement does not resemble Martin Luther King’s either in content or in form).
Writing and using a Personal Mission Statement:
Covey quotes Viktor Frankl here, the author of “Man’s search for meaning”. Frankl says: “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life…ultimately man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible”. Covey explains this by using a computer metaphor where he says that we are the programmer (Habit 1: be proactive) and that it is we who write the program (Habit 2: begin with the end in mind). He adds that until we accept the idea that we are responsible, that we are the programmer, we won’t really invest in writing the program. By writing a personal mission statement, essentially a personal constitution, we as proactive people begin to give expression to what we want to be and to do in our lives.
If you feel like writing your own Personal Mission Statement, remember: you choose the content and the form. If you need a head start you can build your own Mission Statement with Franklin Covey's Mission Statement Builder at: http://www.franklincovey.com/msb/
You can find further application suggestions in Stephen Covey’s original book: The 7 habits of highly effective people: powerful lessons in personal change.
Next week habit 3: Put first things first
Source : The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People (1989), by Stephen R. Covey
