Habit 1: Be Proactive
The foundation of effectiveness lies in taking responsibility for your life and actions. Being proactive means being in charge of your own destiny, making conscious choices, and not simply reacting to circumstances. It involves focusing on what you can control and influence rather than being victimized by external forces. Embrace a proactive mindset, and you’ll find yourself empowered to tackle challenges head-on and create the life you desire.

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind

Effective people have a clear vision of their goals and aspirations. They start with a well-defined end in mind and use this vision as a compass to guide their decisions and actions. By clarifying your purpose and setting meaningful, achievable goals, you can align your efforts with what truly matters to you, leading to increased motivation and fulfillment.

Habit 3: Put First Things First
Time is our most valuable resource, and how we use it determines our success. Highly effective individuals prioritize their tasks based on importance and urgency, emphasizing activities that align with their values and long-term objectives. Implementing effective time management techniques, such as creating a to-do list and setting boundaries, will help you focus on what truly matters and avoid getting caught up in distractions.

Habit 4: Think Win-Win
Cultivate an abundance mindset and seek mutual benefits in your interactions with others. Highly effective people understand that collaboration and cooperation lead to greater success for everyone involved. Rather than engaging in zero-sum thinking, strive to find solutions where everyone can win. This approach fosters healthy relationships and builds a positive and supportive environment.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Effective communication is not just about speaking but also about listening with genuine empathy. Practice active listening and seek to understand the perspectives and feelings of others before expressing your own. This habit enhances your problem-solving abilities, minimizes misunderstandings, and builds trust and respect in your relationships.

Habit 6: Synergize
Synergy is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Embrace diversity, appreciate different viewpoints, and work collaboratively to find innovative solutions to challenges. By tapping into the strengths and talents of those around you, you can create a harmonious and productive team or community.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
To be highly effective, you must take care of your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Regularly invest time in activities that rejuvenate and nourish you, such as exercise, reading, meditation, or spending quality time with loved ones. By maintaining a balanced lifestyle, you’ll have the energy and clarity of mind to excel in all areas of your life.

Conclusion:

Incorporating these seven habits into your daily life requires commitment and consistent effort, but the rewards are immeasurable. Remember, effectiveness is not a destination but a journey of continuous growth and self-improvement. By practicing these habits, you’ll become a better version of yourself and inspire positive change in those around you. Here’s to your journey towards becoming a highly effective person!

Video Guide— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKMwyPFX_74&t=368s

1. They do not believe every feeling they have means something.
They don’t assign value to everything they feel. They know that conviction doesn’t make something true.

2. They aren’t threatened by not being right.
They understand that having a misinformed belief or incorrect idea does not invalidate them as a person.

3. They do not use logic to deny their emotions.
They validate their feelings by acknowledging them; they do not say someone “shouldn’t” feel a particular way if they do.

4. They do not project meaning onto everything they see.
Particularly, they do not assume that everything they see or hear has something to do with them. They do not compare themselves to other people, simply because the idea that other people exist in comparison to oneself is mindless at best and selfish at worst.

5. They do not need to prove their power.
Rather than embody an inflated image of their invincibility, their disposition is predominantly peaceful and at ease, which is the mark of a truly secure person.

6. They do not avoid pain, even if they are afraid of it.
They cope with discomfort in favor of breaking an old habit. They trace the root of a relationship issue rather than deflect from the symptoms. They recognize that the discomfort is in avoiding the pain, not the pain itself.

7. They do not seek out other people’s flaws in an effort to diminish their strengths.
They do not respond to someone’s successes with observations about their failures.

8. They don’t complain (too much).
When people complain, it’s because they want others to recognize and validate their pain; even if it’s not the real problem, it’s still a form of affirmation.

9. They do not filter out certain aspects of an experience to catastrophize it.
People who jump A-Z and only think up worst-case scenarios usually do not have the confidence that they can take care of themselves if something unexpected were to arise— so they prepare for the worst and rob themselves of the best in the process.

10. They do not keep a list of things people “should” or “shouldn’t” do.
They recognize that “right” and “wrong” are two highly subjective things and that believing there is a universal code of conduct to which all people need to adhere only makes the person who believes that consistently disappointed.

11. They do not consider themselves a judge of what’s right or wrong.
Especially when it comes to offering friends advice, they don’t assume their ideal response to a situation is the solution everyone needs.

12. They do not draw general conclusions from their personal experiences.
They do not draw their own generalized conclusions about the human race based on the small percentage of the world that they experience each day.

13. They do not change their personality based on who they’re around.
Everyone fears rejection, but not everyone gets to truly experience the kind of acceptance that comes from being yourself unconditionally.

14. They can stand up for themselves without being aggressive or defensive.
Though it sounds like a contradiction, aggressiveness or defensiveness is indicative of insecurity. Calmly standing up for oneself is indicative of inner resolve and self-esteem.

15. They do not assume that this is always the way their life will be.

They are always conscious of the fact that their feelings are temporary, be they good or bad. This makes them focus on the positive and let the negative go with more ease.

Most people don’t want to be happy, which is why they aren’t. They just don’t realize this is the case.
People are programmed to chase their foremost desire at almost any cost. (Imagine the adrenaline-fueled superhuman powers people develop in life-or-death emergencies.) It’s just a matter of what that foremost desire is. Often enough, it’s comfort. Or familiarity.
There are many reasons people thwart the feeling of happiness, but a lot of them have to do with assuming it means giving up on achieving more. Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them.
Happiness is not a rush of positive emotion elicited by random events that affirm the way you think something should go. Not sustainable happiness, anyway. The real stuff is the product of an intentional, mindful, daily practice, and it begins with choosing to commit to it.
Everybody has a happiness tolerance—an upper limit—as Gay Hendricks coins it4. It is the capacity for which we allow ourselves to feel good. Other psychologists call it the “baseline,” the amount of happiness we “naturally” feel, and eventually revert back to, even if certain events or circumstances shift us temporarily.
The reason we don’t allow those shifts to become baselines is because of the upper limit—as soon as our circumstances extend beyond the amount of happiness we’re accustomed to and comfortable feeling, we unconsciously begin to self-sabotage.
We are programmed to seek what we’ve known. So even though we think we’re after happiness, we’re actually trying to find whatever we’re most accustomed to, and we project that on whatever actually exists, over and over again. These are just a few of many psychological impediments that hold us back from the emotional lives we claim to want. Here are a few others:

1. Everybody has a limited tolerance for feeling good.
When things go beyond that limit, we sabotage ourselves so we can return to our comfort zones. The tired cliché of stepping outside them serves a crucial purpose: It makes people comfortable with discomfort, which is the gateway to expanding their tolerance for happiness.

2. There is a “likability limit” that people like to remain under: Everybody has a level of “success” that they perceive to be admirable—and unthreatening to others.
Most things people do are in an effort to “earn” love. Many desires, dreams, and ambitions are built out of a space of severe lack. It’s for this reason that some of the most emotionally dense people are also the most successful: They use their desire for acceptance, love, wholeness, as fuel—for better and for worse.
The point is: Once people surpass the point at which they think people will judge and ridicule them for their success (as opposed to praise them for it), they promptly cut themselves off, or at minimum severely downplay/minimize it so as to keep themselves in good standing with those from whom they desire approval. (It’s ultimately not that people value ego and material over love, but that they think those things will earn them love.)

3. Most prefer the comfort of what they’ve known to the vulnerability of what they don’t.
Even when “what they don’t” is, objectively, much better. If we redefine “happiness” in terms of what human beings innately desire (comfort, inclusiveness, a sense of purpose, etc.), we can then make the choice to seek comfort from things that are ultimately aligned with what we want to achieve.

4. Many people are afraid that “being happy” = giving up on achieving more.
Happiness is, in an essential form, acceptance. It’s arriving at the end goal, passing the finish line, letting the wave of accomplishment wash over you. Deciding to be that way every day can make it seem as though the race is already over, so we subconsciously associate “happiness” and “acceptance” with “giving up.” But the opposite is true: The path to a greater life is not “suffering until you achieve something,” but letting bits and pieces of joy and gratitude and meaning and purpose gradually build, bit by bit.

5. People delay action once they know truth—and the interim between knowing and doing is the space where suffering thrives.
Most of the time, it’s not about not knowing what to do (or not knowing who you are). It’s about the resistance between what’s right and what’s easy, what’s best in the long v. short term. We hear our instincts; we just don’t listen. This is the single most common root of discomfort: the space between knowing and doing. We’re culturally addicted to procrastination, but we’re also just as enamored by deflection. By not acting immediately, we think we’re creating space for the truth to shift, when we’re really only creating discomfort so that we can sense it more completely (though we’re suffering needlessly in the process).

6. People believe that apathy is safety.
We’re all afraid of losing the pieces and people that make up our lives. Some people try to cut ahead of the pain-curve and don’t let themselves feel as though they wanted or liked those things in the first place. The undercurrent here is the sense that everything ends and all is impermanent and while those things are more or less true, there is something just slightly truer, and it is that death gives life meaning. It’s the fact that we can lose what we have that makes it sacred and precious and wonderful. It’s not about what pain you suffer; it’s about what you suffer for. You can choose to cut yourself off from feeling good so as to buffer the sense of loss and suffer from numbness, or you can have an incredible life and mourn wildly when it’s over, but at least there was a means to that end.

7. Few know how to practice feeling good (or why it’s necessary).
It is almost essential to raising your upper limit, augmenting your baseline, and ultimately assimilating to the new chapter(s) of your life without destroying them out of unfamiliarity. Practicing feeling good is simply taking a moment to literally let yourself feel. Extend that rush just a few seconds longer, meditate on some things you’re grateful for, and let it wash over you as much as possible. Seek what’s positive, and you’ll find that your threshold for feeling it expands as you decide it can.

8. People think happiness is an emotional response facilitated by a set of circumstances, as opposed to a choice and shift of perception/awareness.
It seems that the people who are steadfast in their belief that circumstances create happiness are not to be swayed—and that makes sense. It’s for the same reason that we buy into it so much: It’s easier. It’s the way to cut corners on your emotional life. It’s seemingly logical and fairly easy to attain, so why not stand by it fiercely? Because it’s ultimately false. It maintains that you must wait to feel happy, and as we know, unless you are cultivating your baseline to be all-around higher, you’ll spend the rest of your life bopping from one perceived high to another. Some of the statistically happiest countries in the world are nearly impoverished. Some of the most notable and peaceful individuals to grace the Earth died with only a few cents to their name. The commonality is a sense of purpose, belonging, and love: things you can choose to feel and cultivate, regardless of physical/material circumstance.

9. Most people don’t know that it’s possible to shift their baseline, since it’s always framed in a way of being “how one naturally is.”
If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times: the woman with anxiety who says, “It’s just the way I am.” The man with a dozen irrational fears who attributes them to “his personality.” The thing is that nothing has to be an essential part of you unless you decide it is—least of all anxiety and fear. In fact, those things are never essentially part of who someone is; they are learned behaviors. They are ego-reactions that go unchecked. They are flashing lights and waving flags from our innermost selves that something is not right, but we’re avoiding making the shift (mostly by deflecting on the circumstance being out of our control).

10. People believe that suffering makes them worthy.
To have wonderful things in our lives without having suffered for them somehow translates to us feeling as though we haven’t truly “earned” them and therefore, they are not completely ours. On the flip side: The idea that beautiful, joyous things could simply be ours without any conscious creation of them on our part is terrifying, because the opposite could just as well be true.

11. Many people believe they can beat fear to the finish line.
Worry is the Western cultural pastime, and it’s ultimately a deflection from the fact that we buoy between extremes: not caring about anything or caring so much about one thing it could break us altogether.

Worrying conditions us to the worst possible outcomes so they don’t cause as much pain if they come to pass. We’re thinking through every irrational possibility so we can account for it, prepare for it, before it surprises us. We try to imagine every “bad” thing a person could say about us so they’re not the first to do it.
But this does not change anything. You still won’t expect difficult things to arise. You will never know what people are really thinking, or how often. You will not be able to prepare to cope with your irrational fears, because there’s no basis in a reality you could possibly get ready to deal with. You cannot beat fear to the finish line. You are not cheating your way around pain. You’re actively pursuing more and more of it.

12. Happy people are often perceived as being naive and vulnerable.

If nothing else, happy people are stigmatized as being clueless and ill-informed and delusionally positive and disconnected from reality, but the only people who perceive them that way are people who do everything in their power to justify the negativity in their lives they feel they cannot control. It is people who don’t choose a better life that are naive and truly vulnerable, as “happy people” may lose everything they have, but people who never choose to fully step into their lives never have anything at all.

We believe in rooting our everyday functions in logic and reason, yet we come to the same conclusions after long periods of contemplation as we do in the blink of an eye3. Our leaders sorely overlook the human element of our sociopolitical issues and I need not cite the divorce rate for you to believe that we’re not choosing the right partners (nor do we have the capacity to sustain intimate relationships for long periods of time).

It seems people believe the most intelligent thing to do is not have emotions at all. To be effective is to be a machine, a product of the age. A well-oiled, consumerist-serving, digitally attuned, highly unaware but overtly operational robot. And so we suffer.

Here are the habits of the people who have the capacity to be aware of what they feel. Who know how to express, process, dismantle, and adjust their experience as they are their own locus of control. They are the true leaders, they are living the most whole and genuine lives, and it is from them we should be taking a cue. These are the things that emotionally intelligent people do not do.

1. They don’t assume that the way they think and feel about a situation is the way it is in reality, nor how it will turn out in the end.

They recognize their emotions as responses, not accurate gauges, of what’s going on. They accept that those responses may have to do with their own issues, rather than the objective situation at hand.

2. Their emotional base points are not external.

Their emotions aren’t “somebody else’s doing,” and therefore “somebody else’s problem to resolve.” Understanding that they are the ultimate cause of what they experience keeps them out of falling into the trap of indignant passivity: Where one believes that as the universe has done wrong, the universe will ultimately have to correct it.

3. They don’t assume to know what it is that will make them truly happy.

Being that our only frame of reference at any given time is what’s happened in the past, we actually have no means to determine what would make us truly happy, as opposed to just feeling “saved” from whatever we disliked about our past experiences. In understanding this, they open themselves up to any experience that their life evolves toward, knowing there are equal parts good and bad in anything.

4. They don’t think that being fearful is a sign they are on the wrong path.

The presence of indifference is a sign you’re on the wrong path. Fear means you’re trying to move toward something you love, but your old beliefs, or unhealed experiences, are getting in the way. (Or, rather, are being called up to be healed.)

5. They know that happiness is a choice, but they don’t feel the need to make it all the time.

They are not stuck in the illusion that “happiness” is a sustained state of joy. They allow themselves time to process everything they are experiencing. They allow themselves to exist in their natural state. In that non-resistance, they find contentment.

6. They don’t allow their thoughts to be chosen for them.

They recognize that through social conditioning and the eternal human monkey-mind, they can often be swayed by thoughts, beliefs, and mindsets that were never theirs in the first place. To combat this, they take inventory of their beliefs, reflect on their origins, and decide whether or not that frame of reference truly serves them.

7. They recognize that infallible composure is not emotional intelligence.

They don’t withhold their feelings or try to temper them so much as to render them almost gone. They do, however, have the capacity to withhold their emotional response until they are in an environment wherein it would be appropriate to express how they are feeling. They don’t suppress it; they manage it effectively.

8. They know that a feeling will not kill them.

They’ve developed enough stamina and awareness to know that all things, even the worst, are transitory.

9. They don’t just become close friends with anyone.

They recognize true trust and intimacy as something you build, and something you want to be discerning with whom you share. But they’re not guarded or closed as they are simply mindful and aware of who they allow into their lives and hearts. They are kind to all but truly open to few.

10. They don’t confuse a bad feeling for a bad life.

They are aware of, and avoid, extrapolation, which is essentially projecting the present moment into the foreseeable future—believing that the moment at hand constitutes what your entire life amounted to, rather than just being another passing, transitory experience in the whole. Emotionally intelligent people allow themselves their “bad” days. They let themselves be fully human. It’s in this non-resistance that they find the most peace of all

Pre-empt importance. Give some sort of sign to the other person that what you want from him, will make him feel important. Let’s take charity for example. A recipient wants or needs contributions from the giver. It can either be material or service contribution, or both. Even before the act itself, the giver somehow expects appreciation from the recipient and this will give him a boost of importance. Appreciation may not necessarily be in words. A smile and/or a pat would suffice and they can come from both giver and recipient. The giver shows his feeling of being appreciated. The recipient shows his feeling of appreciation for the gift. Somehow magic or chemistry takes place. It’s a feeling both parties would enjoy happening many times over.

Are you aware that the feeling of importance, brought about by compliments and appreciation, is good for your health, mentally and physically? Whether you are the giver or recipient, it is good for both. There are medical findings that substantiate health effects brought about by positive emotions like compliments and appreciation. Frequent doses of the feeling of importance activate the brain cells and various harmonies in the body that promote good health. To put it plainly, the feeling of importance is the antioxidant of life.

Can you think of a better way to nourish other people’s feelings than to show your concern and appreciation? Well, you can show something better than appreciation, and that is – a truckload of appreciation.

You know what you and I and everybody else should be doing right now? We should go out there and show our feeling of appreciation to everything and everybody. Let’s go!