7 habits for highly effective teens!

Hey guys, its Adventure van here with a blog about the book “The 7 Habits for Highly Effective Teens.” This book, written by Sean Covey, is attempting to give advice and strategies for teens in a hope to help organize their lives. Of course, whether or not it actually does help is up to the person taking the advice and the situation. I’ll be talking about each “Habit” individually, so we can start here with the first one!

1: Be Proactive

The book starts out with a comparison between Proactive and Reactive. Reactive is simply reacting when something happens immediately, not really putting to much thought or putting in biased thought. Meanwhile, Proactive is letting stuff go over you, thinking and calmly reacting. It doesn’t mean being a doormat, (see Lose-Win), but it does mean that you won’t blow up at the first thing to poke you.

2: Begin with the End in Mind

The most horrid way of killing of plans is to never have one in the first place. Without a set goal, you’ll wander about, getting stuff done without knowing why. You’ll never see any real progress, despite how much you’ve actually done. Just setting a goal and working towards it could be all you really need to help get to work on what you really want to be working on.

3: Put First Things First

Too often, you end up with the end in mind, and then realize you have no clue how to get there. This is the main part of most personal problems, as you end up doing so much make work and procrastination that you move, but not any closer to the goal you want. The only way to make the first step for going thru projects is making sure each step is in order and you have a clear path towards your goal.

4: Think Win-Win

This area is dedicated to the 4 ways of looking at interactions with other human beings. The ways are Win-Lose, Lose-Win, Lose-Lose, and Win-Win. Of course, Win-Win is the way that should be done, according to the book.

Win-Lose is the average way of ‘Everything’s a competition, and if someone else wins, I lose.’ As much as that philosophy is true sometimes, they take it to extremes to try to cut the other person/people down, even if it isn’t actually a competition.

The philosophy of Lose-Win is the opposite, causing people to act like doormats and using subtler ways such as guilt to get things to get to them eventually, giving small wins to the other person in exchange for having the ‘high ground’ in further encounters. Lose-Lose is what happens when a Win-Lose either knows they’re going to lose or when they meet another Win-Lose, resulting in them both dragging each other down.

Win-Win, however, is the best way. Even though it can’t be used in all circumstances, at most times, helping two people reach both of their goals without fighting each other is a good thing. Win-Win is also a fairly non-tangled path, without any guilt or direct competition being used against you. Even though these are fairly all catching and don’t cover all the aspects of the problems, these are still easy to use in your life and see if you can solve any relationships.

5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.

The premise of this section is that there’s several ways to be a bad listener, and there’s one way to be a good listener with three steps. The bad ways are ‘Spacing out’ which is completly ignoring them, focusing on other things, and just not participating in the conversation at all. There’s also ‘Pretend listening’ which is using a select umbrella response as “That’s cool” and “That sucks” for anything people tell them, hoping they get the hint and stop the conversation.

‘Selective listening’ is when they take a singular word from someone else’s sentence, find a thing about that one word, and slap that back into the conversation. Most of the time, they make that sentence center around them. ‘Word Listening’ is when you hear all the ‘words’ of a sentence, but don’t here any tones or hidden messages.  And ‘Self-centered listening’ is not making any pretenses about listening after a while and just changing it to you.

The way that they say to solve this is a three step solution. You’ll want to listen to the tones, voice, and body language of the speaker as well as their words, for they each tell equal quarters of what they mean. You’ll also want to see it from their point of view, because as much as you might hear one thing, they could mean another. Simply looking at their experiences orbiting the conversation could change the meaning entirely. And lastly is ‘Mirroring’. Mirroring is different from Mimicking as it changes the words but repeats the basic meaning, unlike repeating word for word. You can use it to get to a meaning that makes you look interested and caring unlike any other way that you would using any of the other ways.

6: Synergize

This part is talking about how great friends and teamwork is, and how you can use it to help yourself and they can use it to help themselves. It talks about how to keep relationships healthy, as well as ways to solve most problems with a Win-Win mindset. Because friends can give you motivation and help when you most need it, it talks about making sure you’re for them as well.

There’s a simple plan of “Define the Problem, Listen to Their Way, Speak my Way, Combine and Brainstorm, Take the High Way.” Despite the little pun at the end, this system works for most events, and is a good way of looking at things overall to make everyone happy, or at least ok, with what’s happening.

What is it?

7: Sharpen the Saw

And the last habit, while being the most simple explain, is the most complex to actually do. It’s simply making sure you follow the rest of the habits without having too many problems bring you back to your old ones. As much as this sounds simple, breaking old habits and forming new ones are very hard things to do, despite being possible. “An old dog can’t learn new tricks” is the worst possible way of looking at it, and will make any solutions impossible. Any dog can learn tricks. Just try.

All in all, the book was full of advice and tips to help create good habits. It also knows that one thing won’t help everyone, but there’s so much inside it’s very likely you’ll find something that helps your own life in the long run, and maybe even the short. Good luck.

That’s Adventure Van, habiting out.