Stephen Covey Reflection

The book was published in 1989 written by Stephen R. Covey. The book explains an approach to being effective in managing people and yourself. After reviewing two hundred years of literature on success, the writer got to a conclusion that there is no book that explains long term advises, but rather all of them were to solve immediate issues. The book started to talk about Stephen’s life where he wanted to control his child, he was successful with his wife in maintaining a healthy relationship with their child and unlock different opportunities for him. Every human has his own unique character, and every character has its own collection of habits. Moreover, habits have a major role on everyone’s life. To break down habits we can say that habits

After reading the book the first lesson that came to my mind is that our characters are critical, since I mentioned above that our character consists of different habits. Therefore, we must understand that character building is important and monitoring our habits because they determine our character and our character determine our lives. Second lesson I learned is that personal and family mission statements are required to plan the path we follow. To keep a healthy relationship with your family and your spouse, a person needs to plan ahead and write down personal goals and mission statement, then keep reading it to see if he or she is on track or not. Another valuable lesson is that the book introduces a simple tool to priorities our everyday activities. The tool is to divide daily activities to quadrant 1 that is urgent, quadrant 2 that is not urgent but important, quadrant 3 that is urgent but not important, and lastly quadrant 4 that is not urgent and not important. Using that tool a person could make a simple matrix of his/hers everyday activities. “Effective people stay out of Quadrants II and IV because, urgent or not, they aren’t important. They also shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II. Quadrant II is the heart of personal management. It deals with things that are not urgent, but are important.” (Stephen R. Covey, 1989). The last lesson I learned from the book is

First habit is being proactive, in order to apply this habit in our lives or in the office we need to know the opposite first. Reactive people always focus on the things they cannot control. For example, their boss, the amount of work, distance to the office. A proactive person will look for solutions instead of problems, and that what sets us apart from animals, is our ability to differentiate and learn to adapt. To apply this habit in a work environment a person needs to tell him that complaining is not going to help me even if all of my problems were right a valid, then he needs to tell him that he will focus on what he can control. Questions asked, how can I improve myself? How can I make a good impression with people? To overcome my problems and build a network? Habit number two is begin with the end in mind. This habit and the previous one are focused on changing a person to go from being dependence to independence. Habit two gives us a tool to use to evaluate our purpose of hard working to achieve higher income, more money, and prestige. But have we stopped to think it over what is the purpose of all that? Do they matter? “It 's incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover that it 's leaning against the wrong wall.” (Stephen R. Covey,