![]() Now that you’ve focused on your relationship with yourself, it’s time to think about your relationships with other people, like your family and friends. Remember, it’s all about what you decide is important as an individual – don’t let distractions from other people or things distort your schedule. Make sure you plan ahead, so that nothing ends up becoming urgent (and if anything unexpected pops up, you’ll have plenty of time to spend on it), and that only important tasks are being carried out. If your tasks are urgent, not important, or neither urgent nor important, you’re not spending your time wisely. Sean suggests using the “Time Quadrant” model to plan your responsibilities, based on two factors: meeting important deadlines for school assignments), then if there’s time, you may complete your smaller tasks (e.g. In other words, you should carry out all your more important tasks mostly (e.g. On the other hand, if you assign yourself both large and small responsibilities, you can fit everything into your jar by first placing the large pebbles in the jar, then filling up the spaces with the smaller pebbles. Assigning yourself several large responsibilities at once will only make the jar full of huge pebbles, and eventually you won’t be able to fit everything in. Imagine that you have a jar that represents your life, and each responsibility you put in the jar is a pebble. It can be as long as several ages, or even a single line: I will get good grades this year. Write a personal mission statement to yourself to affirm your goals. Then, think about the steps you will need to take to get there: getting the marks you need to get in, collecting all the application materials, researching costs. If your “end product” is getting into university, think first about where you want to go. ![]() If you’re baking a cake, you would start to think about the ingredients and materials you need, like flour and eggs. Once you’ve pictured the end product, start thinking about what you need to make it happen. You know what you want your end result to be: the fully-baked cake. What do you want to achieve at the end of each time frame? For example, you may give yourself a small time frame to achieve a task like baking a cake. Think about your life as a series of time frames. The decision to be active and healthy starts in the mind, but we must take the initiative to put on our exercise gear and head to the gym. We can be proactive in our personal lives too. A proactive person, on the other hand, might ask his boss what other extra tasks he might be able to take on. A reactive person, as opposed to a proactive person, might go home from work three hours early if he has finished all his tasks. This means we’re given the leeway to be proactive, or to possibly be reactive. As adults, we’re trusted to make our own decisions instead of waiting for others to tell us what to do. This means having the initiative to do things. Habit 1: Be Proactiveįour years ago, as a young adult fresh out of my pre-university course, I was constantly given the advice by my internship mentor to “be proactive”. Think of them as the beginning of a journey of self-discovery. The fundamental steps you take are the ones you make for yourself. As Lao Tzu says, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” Once you change your thoughts, your actions will follow. Then, think about realistic ways in which you can achieve the target. Instead, first accept the idea of eating more vegetables instead of simply refusing to. If you’re an avid vegetable-hater, like me, but want to change your eating habits, don’t expect to immediately become a vegetarian. The key is to change your paradigms so that they become positive. Instead of thinking, it’s impossible, you should start thinking, I could achieve this one day. To change the assumptions or perceptions you have about things is to go through a paradigm shift. Covey says that the first step to improving yourself is to realise that there is more than one way of looking at things. Making the choice to begin is a big step in itself. Today’s modern-thinking world gives us more independence to choose what we want to do, how we want to do things, or who we want to be. Now, Covey’s son Sean has adapted his father’s book into The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, showing that you don’t have to wait months or years to start finding your potential and attaining targets and objectives. Covey proposes seven principles to practice (as the title suggests) in order to help one achieve one’s goals. Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a bestselling self-help and business book, with more than 15 million copies sold.
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