By Design or Default

It's a principle that all things are created twice, but not all first creations are by conscious design. In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first

creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle or Influence to shape much

of our lives by default. We reactively live the scripts handed to us by family, associates, other people's agendas, the pressures of circumstance -- scripts from our earlier years, from our training, our

conditioning

These scripts come from people, not principles. And they rise out of our deep vulnerabilities, our

deep dependency on others and our need for acceptance and love, for belonging, for a sense of

importance and worth, for a feeling that we matter.

Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to

every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the

second creation of other people's agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits

The unique human capacities of self-awareness, imagination, and conscience enable us to examine

first creations and make it possible for us to take charge of our own first creation, to write our own

script. Put another way, Habit 1 says, "You are the creator." Habit 2 is the first creation.

Leadership and Management -- The Two Creations

Habit 2 is based on principles of personal leadership, which means that leadership is the first

creation. Leadership is not management. Management is the second creation, which we'll discuss in

the chapter on Habit 3. But leadership has to come first.

Management is a bottom-line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals

with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and

Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning

against the right wall.

You can quickly grasp the important difference between the two if you envision a group of

producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. They're the producers, the problem

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart solvers. They're cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out.

The managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure manuals,

holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies, and setting up working

schedules and compensation programs for machete wielders.

The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, "Wrong

jungle!"

But how do the busy, efficient producers and managers often respond? "Shut up! We're making

progress."

As individuals, groups, and businesses, we're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we

don't even realize we're in the wrong jungle. And the rapidly changing environment in which we live

makes effective leadership more critical than it has ever been -- in every aspect of independent and

interdependent life.

We are more in need of a vision or designation and a compass (a set of principles or directions) and

less in need of a road map. We often don't know what the terrain ahead will be like or what we will

need to go through it; much will depend on our judgment at the time. But an inner compass will

always give us direction.

Effectiveness -- often even survival -- does not depend solely on how much effort we expend, but on

whether or not the effort we expend is in the right jungle. And the metamorphosis taking place in

most every industry and profession demands leadership first and management second.

In business, the market is changing so rapidly that many products and services that successfully met

consumer tastes and needs a few years ago are obsolete today. Proactive powerful leadership must

constantly monitor environmental change, particularly customer buying habits and motives, and

provide the force necessary to organize resources in the right direction.

Such changes as deregulation of the airline industry, skyrocketing costs of health care, and the great

quality and quantity of imported cars impact the environment in significant ways. If industries do not monitor the environment, including their own work teams, and exercise the creative leadership to keep

headed in the right direction, no amount of management expertise can keep them from failing.

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual phrased it, "like

straightening deck chairs on the Titanic." No management success can compensate for failure in

leadership. But leadership is hard because we're often caught in a management paradigm.

At the final session of a year-long executive development program in Seattle, the president of an oil

company came up to me and said, "Stephen, when you pointed out the difference between leadership

and management in the second month, I looked at my role as the president of this company and

realized that I had never been into leadership. I was deep into management, buried by pressing

challenges and the details of day-to-day logistics. So I decided to withdraw from management. I

could get other people to do that. I wanted to really lead my organization.

"It was hard. I went through withdrawal pains because I stopped dealing with a lot of the pressing, urgent matters that were right in front of me and which gave me a sense of immediate accomplishment.

I didn't receive much satisfaction as I started wrestling with the direction issues, the culture-building issues, the deep analysis of problems, the seizing of new opportunities. Others also went through

withdrawal pains from their working style comfort zones. They missed the easy accessibility I had

given them before. They still wanted me to be available to them, to respond, to help solve their

problems on a day-to-day basis.

"But I persisted. I was absolutely convinced that I needed to provide leadership. And I did.

Today our whole business is different. We're more in line with our environment. We have doubled

our revenues and quadrupled our profits. I'm into leadership."

I'm convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of

control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart And leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We're into managing with efficiency,

setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

Rescripting: Becoming Your Own First Creator

As we previously observed, proactivity is based on the unique human endowment of self-awareness.

The two additional unique human endowments that enable us to expand our proactivity and to exercise

personal leadership in our lives are imagination and conscience.

Through imagination, we can visualize the uncreated worlds of potential that lie within us.

Through conscience, we can come in contact with universal laws or principles with our own singular

talents and avenues of contribution, and with the personal guidelines within which we can most

effectively develop them. Combined with self-awareness, these two endowments empower us to write

our own script.

Because we already live with many scripts that have been handed to us, the process of writing our

own script is actually more a process of "rescripting," or Paradigm Shifting -- of changing some of the basic paradigms that we already have. As we recognize the ineffective scripts, the incorrect or

incomplete paradigms within us, we can proactively begin to rescript ourselves.

I think one of the most inspiring accounts of the rescripting process comes from the autobiography

of Anwar Sadat, past president of Egypt. Sadat had been reared, nurtured, and deeply scripted in a

hatred for Israel. He would make the statement on national television, "I will never shake the hand of an Israeli as long as they occupy one inch of Arab soil. Never, never, never!" And huge crowds all around the country would chant, "Never, never, never!" He marshaled the energy and unified the will of the whole country in that script.

The script was very independent and nationalistic, and it aroused deep emotions in the people. But

it was also very foolish, and Sadat knew it. It ignored the perilous, highly interdependent reality of the situation.

So he rescripted himself. It was a process he had learned when he was a young man imprisoned in

Cell 54, a solitary cell in Cairo Central Prison, as a result of his involvement in a conspiracy plot against King Farouk. He learned to withdraw from his own mind and look at it to see if the scripts were

appropriate and wise. He learned how to vacate his own mind and, through a deep personal process

of meditation, to work with his own scriptures, his own form of prayer, and rescript himself.

He records that he was almost loath to leave his prison cell because it was there that he realized that

real success is success with self. It's not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.

For a period of time during Nasser's administration Sadat was relegated to a position of relative

insignificance. Everyone felt that his spirit was broken, but it wasn't. They were projecting their own home movies onto him. They didn't understand him. He was biding his time.

And when that time came, when he became president of Egypt and confronted the political realities,

he rescripted himself toward Israel. He visited the Knesset in Jerusalem and opened up one of the

most precedent-breaking peace movements in the history of the world, a bold initiative that eventually

brought about the Camp David Accord.

Sadat was able to use his self-awareness, his imagination, and his conscience to exercise personal

leadership, to change an essential paradigm, to change the way he saw the situation. He worked in the

center of his Circle of Influence. And from that rescripting, that change in paradigm, flowed changes

in behavior and attitude that affected millions of lives in the wider Circle of Concern.

In developing our own self-awareness many of us discover ineffective scripts, deeply embedded

habits that are totally unworthy of us, totally incongruent with the things we really value in life. Habit 2 says we don't have to live with those scripts. We are response-able to use our imagination and

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart creativity to write new ones that are more effective, more congruent with our deepest values and with

the correct principles that give our values meaning.

Suppose, for example, that I am highly overreactive to my children. Suppose that whenever they

begin to do something I feel is inappropriate, I sense an immediate tensing in the pit of my stomach. I feel defensive walls go up; I prepare for battle. My focus is not on the long-term growth and

understanding but on the short-term behavior. I'm trying to win the battle, not the war.

I pull out my ammunition -- my superior size, my position of authority -- and I yell or intimidate or I

threaten or punish. And I win. I stand there, victorious, in the middle of the debris of a shattered relationship while my children are outwardly submissive and inwardly rebellious, suppressing feelings

that will come out later in uglier ways.

Now if I were sitting at that funeral we visualized earlier, and one of my children was about to

speak, I would want his life to represent the victory of teaching, training, and disciplining with love

over a period of years rather than the battle scars of quick-fix skirmishes. I would want his heart and mind to be filled with the pleasant memories of deep, meaningful times together. I would want him to

remember me as a loving father who shared the fun and the pain of growing up. I would want him to

remember the times he came to me with his problems and concerns. I would want to have listened

and loved and helped. I would want him to know I wasn't perfect, but that I had tried with everything

I had. And that, perhaps more than anybody in the world, I loved him.

The reason I would want those things is because, deep down, I value my children. I love them, I

want to help them. I value my role as their father.

But I don't always see those values. I get caught up in the "thick of thin things." What matters most gets buried under layers of pressing problems, immediate concerns, and outward behaviors. I become

reactive. And the way I interact with my children every day often bears little resemblance to the way I deeply feel about them.

Because I am self-aware, because I have imagination and conscience, I can examine my deepest

values. I can realize that the script I'm living is not in harmony with those values, that my life is not the product of my own proactive design, but the result of the first creation I have deferred to

circumstances and other people. And I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my

memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past. I can become my own first creator.

To Begin with the End in Mind means to approach my role as a parent, as well as my other roles in

life, with my values and directions clear. It means to be responsible for my own first creation, to

rescript myself so that the paradigms from which my behavior and attitude flow are congruent with my

deepest values and in harmony with correct principles.

It also means to begin each day with those values firmly in mind. Then as the vicissitudes, as the

challenges come, I can make my decisions based on those values. I can act with integrity. I don't

have to react to the emotion, the circumstance. I can be truly proactive, value driven, because my

values are clear.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 893