BUS 110 Week 7

This week we studied the a summary of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: An Approach To Solving Personal and Professional Problems" by Stephen R. Covey, as well as a descriptive video on the 7 Habits through the Launching Leaders program. I find myself somewhat at a loss this week in being able to live up to my own expectations. Completing my assignments was more difficult this week than ever before and I realized I should have had ample opportunity to get ahead in my studies, rather than trying to complete my assignments on the last day. Life circumstances got in the way in a manner I never expected, or at least didn't expect yet. As I'm writing this, my fourteen year old is in the other room completing a research paper on the subject of integrity. This isn't a school assignment as she is now on summer break, but an assignment I gave her as a form of punishment and a learning opportunity. 

I choose to write about this because in studying the 7 Habits, I found myself particularly drawn to the first habit of being proactive. While I understand the benefits of the other six, I find being proactive really resonates with me. Maybe because I see so many people at work than frustrate me to no end because they aren't proactive and instead are reactive. I see their mistakes and think things could have been so much easier if you had only gotten ahead of the problem and cut it off by being proactive. I have left good jobs because the people in charge were making my life more difficult by being reactive instead of proactive. 

Yet here I am, with a teenager that got into major trouble with me because I wasn't proactive. Instead I was forced to react to the situation. In hindsight there are many things I could have done to insure this didn't happen, or at least to forestall it as it seems inevitable, but I chose not to. Now I have a much more profound understanding of the need to be proactive in other areas of my life, from raising my kids, doing preventative maintenance on the car or house, making sure I have all I need when I need it so I'm not forced to go to the store on a Sunday. I try my best to live my life this way and yet I still have areas I need to implement this habit into.

Perhaps I can apply the lessons I learned from reading "Mastery" by George Leonard to making the 7 Habits more than habits but a pursuit of mastery.

I feel the more successful I am in this endeavor the more victories I'll achieve, whether they are private or public. Most of my victories now are private, but implementing the 7 Habits into my life will help me move to a more public victory arena. This will be more true as my success in business becomes more apparent.

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