The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

First published in 1989 Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has become one of the best-selling and most influential self help books of all time.

Covey, an international organizational and leadership consultant, clearly knows his stuff and bases his 7 habits well-researched, tried and tested principles. 7 Habits is easy to read with numerous practical examples of the application of the habits interspersed among their descriptions and theoretical justification.

At times the reader can feel just a little relieved that Covey isn't their father as he describes holding family council meetings with the family mission statement pinned to the wall!

In brief the 7 habits are:

1 Be Proactive. We each have a circle of concern (things that matter to us) and a circle of influence (things we can change). Since we can only have an impact within our circle of influence, this is where we ought to direct our efforts and energies. As we take control where we can so our circle of influence expands.

2 Begin with the End in Mind. Leadership is identifying where you want to go, management is the process of getting there. Without leadership, management is useless. This habit guides you through identifying your center towards the creation of a personal mission statement that will provide the guiding principles of all you do.

3 Put First Things First is concerned with time management. It defines the 4 quadrants of urgency and importance and advocates a shift of effort from quadrant 1 (important and urgent) quadrant 3 (urgent but not important) activities to quadrant 2 (important but not urgent) in order to increase effectiveness. Doing so will reduce the pressures that arise when important things become urgent.

4 Think Win/Win. There are various paradigms of human interaction, but one should always seek a mutually beneficial outcome.

5 Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood. Effective communication begins with empathic listening, this is not just listening to the other's words, but seeking to place yourself in their position, feeling how they feel.

6 Synergize. The hardest, but potentially most productive of the habits, and the culmination of all the others. Synergy is where 2 or more individuals come together to produce results exceeding the sum of the individual parts.

7 Sharpen the Saw. To keep being effective you need to stay refreshed in the four dimensions of the physical, mental, social/emotional and physical.

Habits 1-3 are internal and are grouped under the heading "Private Victory" and reflect the fact that you must first change yourself before you can hope to change the world. Habits 4-6, "Public Victory," turn the improved you towards the world.

As with all books of this kind, 7 Habits should be read with an opened mind. Not every facet of every habit will apply to every reader, but all are food for thought, and should you choose to ignore any at least it will be a conscious and reasoned decision and not due to ignorance of the principle's existence.

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The Secret (law of attraction)

The Secret is a recent movie and book by Rhonda Bryan that claims to reveal the secret to a happy, healthy, wealthy and fulfilled life. Bryan draws on the words of some of the finest Spiritual and inspirational teachers in support of the Secret, which is basically the law of attraction.

The universe is likened to some great catalog ordering service. All you have to do is place your order, for whatever you want, by thinking about it with feeling and acting in the belief it's already in your possession. Amazingly the universe hears your request and pulls out all the stops to satisfy it.

Your thoughts and feelings are a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you feel good, you will be sent more to feel good about. If you think life sucks, it will. So all you need to do is change your way of thinking.

The Secret is fine so far as it goes. Positive thinking and feeling is pretty well necessary for any kind of success. You can be the world's greatest player, but if your mind isn't right you will under-perform and likely lose.

To my mind the danger of the Secret is that it continually implies that right thought and feeling are sufficient for success.

Let me explain why (I believe) that view is flawed.

There are only limited resources in the world. If everyone asks for a billion dollars and 20-room house on a huge lot. Some people will be disappointed, even though they follow all the "rules".

Additionally, life isn't about material acquisitions, it's about having experience - both positive and negative. If success comes just by thinking about it, who's gonna do any work, who's gonna learn anything?

And as most of life's lessons come from difficulties, if we wish our difficulties away altogether, won't life become pointless?

I'd recommend anyone to watch/read the Secret. I'd recommend anyone to put its lessons into practice. But I'd recommend they are put into practice alongside a practical action plan designed to get you from where you are now to where you wanna be.

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Reunions - Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones

Dr Raymond Moody is the scientist who not only brought knowledge of the near-death experience to the masses, he also made a respectable discipline of research into the topic. In Reunions - Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones, Moody brings the scientific method to the ancient, but much derided, practice of mirror gazing.

Reunions begins with the long history of mirror gazing, describing how many cultures have used looking into reflective surfaces to invoke altered states of consciousness. In its time it has gone from widespread acceptance, through condemnation as evil sorcery, to the rationalist ridicule.

Moody goes on to describe how he built a modern-day psychomanteum (apparition chamber) in his old gristmill in Alabama and how he prepared participants for their sittings. It seems that proximity to nature, stimulation through decor and art, and being somehow disconnected from the contemporary world (eg hiding all timepieces) are all positive factors in promoting apparitions. Relaxation and an attitude of not really trying also help facilitate visions.

Moody found that a surprisingly high proportion (more than 50%) of participants have some kind of experience at their first sitting and gives some remarkable accounts of what they reported. Rather than just seeing visions within the speculum (mirror), some participants reported apparitions leaving the mirror to be physically with them, others reported actually entering the mirror themselves. Particularly amazing is that some participants, including Moody himself, reported being visited by life-like apparitions some time after leaving the chamber.

Are the "apparitions" genuinely the spirits of departed loved ones, or are they merely creations of the subconscious minds of the percipients. The book does not pass judgment on this, but the observers' strength of certainty they were real suggests the former. The author has confirmed that participants have reported being given information by the apparitions that they did not previously know and that was later verified to be correct. The couple of accounts of shared visions are particularly interesting as these indicate that the observers were seeing something independent of their own individual minds.

The Spiritual view is that we are all essentially Spirit, temporarily encased in flesh. By altering our level of consciousness, disengaging with physical reality and going deeper within ourselves we draw closer to our Spiritual essence and hence to its connection to the Spiritual realm.

For my own part I must admit to being slightly, inexplicably, afraid to try the techniques described. Though I do admit that shortly after my father's passing I was just gazing aimlessly at my reflection in a glass-fronted piece of furniture when my appearance seemed to take on that of my father's. Of course the family resemblance may offer an explanation...

Also by Raymond Moody:
Life After Life
The Light Beyond

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God under attack

The recently published God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens is the latest in a long series of attacks on the concept of God.

One of its more prominent predecessors is The God Delusion by acclaimed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, backed up by a national television series in the UK.

In the days before mass education it was easy to use the pulpit image of a judgemental God to keep the ignorant masses under control. Be god, work hard and there's a place in heaven waiting, but step over the line and it's eternal damnation.

These days such ideas are rightly condemned as superstitious nonsense. What loving father could possibly watch his children suffer as so many do on earth, especially when much of that suffering is inflicted by the hands of his other children, and even more especially when much of this is done in the name of "God" (witness the "war on terror" aka Christendom vs Islam!). That's not a God many would want to be associated with.

Science has given us cars and planes, microwaves and refrigerators, TVs and stereos, cell phones and the Internet... It's cured many of the ailments that once killed us. Who needs the white-bearded old man on a cloud any more, especially when he doesn't seem to lift a finger to solve our problems.

Science is indeed king. But... only within its own domain the 4-dimensional world of space-time composed of matter and energy. Here it reigns supreme. Trouble is there's more to reality than this. It can't explain our Spiritual dimension, the myriad accounts of anomalous phenomena experienced throughout history and now being confirmed in the scientist's laboratories. It can't explain why we've long felt the need to follow religions/superstitions (depending on your point of view) or to express our most abstract thoughts through art, literature and music.

Even science recognizes its own limitations. In studying the origind of the universe the equations break down at a certain point in what's known as singularities. The single most successful theory of quantum mechanics is based on an inherent randomness (or indeterminacy).

No, God isn't always good (whatever good may mean), because in incarnating we are possessed of free will. If God were to intervene every time we had trouble we'd sure have an easy ride, but we would learn nothing, and would be no more than automata acting out a script. In short our earthly existence would be pointless.

One answer to Dawkins and Hitchens is offered by Dawkins' fellow Oxford professor and scientific theologian, Alister McGrath in The Dawkins Delusion.

If you read Dawkins, Hitchens or both, in the interest of balance you owe it to yourself to read McGrath.

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Freakonomics

You might wonder what a book based on economics and statistics is doing in a Spiritual blog. The answer is that although Freakonomics uses these tools, it's really a book about people and what makes them tick.

Resulting from a collaboration between brilliant but off the wall economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics addresses questions such as what real estate agents and the Ku Klux Klan have in common, why most drug dealers live with their mothers, and how your name affects your likelihood of success. Often revealing surprising answers.

Full of fascinating and insightful analysis, for me the most thought-provoking and controversial piece was the explanation given for America's faling crime rate. The reason given was the legalization of abortion some years earlier and the fact that mny o those most likely to be the criminals of today never got the chance to be born.

Surely there has to be a better way of crime prevention than the pre-birth execution of potential criminals? Surely this knowledge means we can identify those most likely to turn to crime and offer them the chance of a more purposeful existence?

For all students of humanity, and that ought to be all of us, Freakonomics is a must-read.

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You Have Been Here Before: Reincarnation - A Review

You Have Been Here Before: Reincarnation by Seiyu Kiriyama is a fascinating book examining reincarnation from a Buddhist perspective.

Kiriyama is founder of the Agon Shu Buddhist Association, a prolific author, and a clairvoyant able to review the past lives of those who consult him.

Reincarnation is the idea that one soul lives many lives in different bodies and different circumstances. It has long been accepted in the East and is becoming increasingly widespread in the West. Where this book differs from most account of reincarnation is that it uses it as a possible explanation for many of the seemingly inexplicable difficulties faced in the here and now.

The book consists of four distinct parts.

The first part presents some fascinating accounts of those who have come to Kiriyama for assistance and been helped by his assessment of their past lives. Often they are troubled by the spirits of ancestors who passed in difficult circumstances and who are helped by Kiriyama releasing them from their discontent.

The second part discusses the reasons for reincarnation, using further fascinating case studies. The bottom line, in keeping with the Buddhist tradition, is that we continue to reincarnate until we are able to shed our earthly baggage.

The third part is somewhat tangential in presenting a lengthy discussion of the mind-body problem under the heading of “what” it is that reincarnates.

The final part begins with the remarkable description of a boy who reincarnated in the early 19th century with the ability to recall details of his previous existing inaccurate and verifiable detail. It goes on to a somewhat depressing view of the afterworld drawn from the Tibetan Book of The Dead which describes numerous departed souls in despair or falling into an abyss as a result of their failings. Some of their number attempt to return to their former existence but find only torment in their disembodied state forcing them to seek other bodies to enter. On a brighter note it does mention that some more advanced souls may reincarnate several more times to complete their journey to Buddha-hood.

In contrast to the more conventional Western view of life as experience the Buddhist approach places greater emphasis upon judgment and punishment for things done wrong. I believe that both approaches meet with those souls that feel they have unfinished business and choose to reincarnate in order to complete it. But this is not necessarily the only, or even the main driver, for reincarnation.

For those interested in reincarnation this book offers an unconventional approach that provides valuable food for thought. For those trying to understand their current circumstances it might provide insight. As with all such material it should be subjected to one’s own inner judgment, but it definitely offers some useful pointers along one’s unique development.

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