Covey's 7 Habits: "Every Minute of Every Day"

Our lives are divided up into minutes; they are divided up into hours. In the end, a life is nothing but a succession of minutes, or of hours.

Therefore, to ask what our life should be about, is to ask what each of the minutes we experience should be about.

Covey and the 7 Habits try to lay out a groundwork for answering this question.

Of course, naturally, our lives cannot realistically be about only one thing. There are various domains of life that all of us participate in.

For example, we are all inhabitants of a body, and that is structured around principles.

Principles like "Vegetables and fruits, and non-animal proteins are healthy" govern the rules of life for your body; this example is important, because it illustrates that we cannot necessarily always pick our values as if from a smorgasbord of choices as offered in a democracy: certain values have certain consequences -- in the end there are often "right values" and "wrong values."

A way of looking at Covey's approach is to examine his ideas from two frameworks:

- the question of what you will do with the "minutes" you have, or with the "hours" you have, and...

- what are the "right values" ?

Combining these two issues is where success lies:
1) recognize you have choice within each chunk of time, in each day, in each week, and
2) ascertain which values should govern those chunks of time.

Stephen Covey and his Seven Habits -- Is Comfort the Goal

It seems to me that often our society pushes the notion that comfort is the ultimate Good in life. This is a sentiment that many hold, whether they realize it or not, that is pushed by advertising and marketing strategies, but that goes largely unexamined.

Covey suggests however that comfort, or pleasure, or self in general, is not a worthy goal, but that instead that it is principles that should be the focus of our lives.

This is surely not to say that no pleasurable emotions, or feelings of comfort, should be allowed to guide our decisions; on the contrary, it could be argued that, when we arrive at a decision that seems "right", there is often a requirement that we feel "comfortable" or "at peace" with that decision.

The key point, however, is that comfort should not be the GOAL of life; it perhaps should be A goal, but there is so much misery in the world that kind-hearted people with good conscience can do a lot to alleviate, simply making our own personal comfort our objective is unworthy of who we are as human beings.

Stephen Covey and his Seven Habits "self-help" -- Musings on Stephen Covey and the Seven Habits

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Stephen Covey would normally be placed by most commentators under the rubric of self-help. When I think of it, however, I think this does an injustice both to the Seven Habits and to Stephen Covey.

Covey actually advocates NOT focusing on the self. In short, the self is not a worthy focus of our own attention, unless it is in the service of something greater than that self.

This flies in the face of much that we find in psychotherapy. There seems to be an assumption in the orientation of many modes of therapy that it is somehow worthwile to focus on the development of self.

My view is that probably you need to attain a certain threshold of self-satisfaction, ie., of contentment. BUT THIS IS NOT THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF LIFE.

Covey emphasizes this point very well: for Covey, the goal of living is not independence (although the first three habits of the seven habits focuses on this), but effective INTERDEPENDENCE (dealt with in the second three habits of the seven habits).

In other words: YOU are not the goal of life; the goal of life is to SERVE SOMETHING GREATER THAN YOURSELF.

The Stephen Covey Seven Habits FAN BLOG IS BACK!

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