Stephen Covey's Seven (7) Habits of Highly Effective People: Understanding Thinking

Click on This Line of Text for More on Stephen Covey and The Seven (7) Habits of Highly Effective People

Covey's Habits emphasize understanding one's own thinking. This means learning a little about psychology. After all, if one of the goals of Covey's system is to help people achieve "mastery over self," then it can surely be very helpful to understand the mechanisms of cognition, of thought and feeling as they go on in the self...

For example, it is important to understand that a lot of our thinking is not, in fact, worked out through logic or rationality. Sometimes, indeed, our emotional reaction to something is not, in fact, at all a "causally-connected" response to an incoming event. Let us say, to take a common example, that you are arguing with your friend about plans for a project. Often what happens is that you, and/or your friend, seem to "see" or feel the "logic" and rightness of the position that you yourself (or they themselves) are arguing for in proportion to the amount of resistance the other person gives! This is a sign that you are not convinced of the rightness of your position just because it genuinely seems to you to be the best course of action, but because there tends to be an instinct in people to become more convinced of an idea if someone emotionally close is arguing in a different direction.

Understanding that it is not logic that reigns in the mind helps us to understand that we may not see the world exactly as it is, but rather we are dictated to by our own emotions of "rightness" about our own views on the world. And this can help us de-couple our feelings from the process of analysis that it is so often crucial to get right in daily life.
Stephen Covey's Seven (7) Habits of Highly Effective People system requires organizing and planning in detail, and in an ongoing way. Maybe something found by clicking on this line of text might help you with this...
Bookmark Me or Put Me in your Favorites, to see what else I may think of to say about Stephen Covey.