Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits: Sharpening the Saw on Holidays
Posted on Thu, Dec 20, 2012
What are your plans for the holidays? Are you going to trek to a Mountain Park to go camping for a couple of days? Spend your time with the family or friends on white-sand crystal clear water beaches?
Well, whatever plans you have, you will want to enjoy the holidays. But you can hit two birds with one stone by taking a break to unwind and refresh yourself from the hectic schedules and work overloads and at the same time enriching your knowledge and skills as marketers.
Why not integrate the 7th habit – Sharpening the Saw, of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People into your holiday activities. You can spend the holidays as a way to gain renewed effectiveness and productivity. A means of preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have -- you.
The essence behind the 7th habit -- Sharpening the saw, is that you need to spend time to renew and revitalize yourself in order to operate at your peak effectiveness. By doing so, you will return from vacation to your office fully recharged, fresh and productive.
To explain what “Sharpening the Saw” means, Mr. Covey uses as an example a woodcutter who is sawing log for several days and is becoming less and less productive. In the process, the blade becomes dull. With a dull saw, it would take a lot of time and effort to saw a log but the result is very minimal. So the solution is to periodically sharpen the saw so it would take a lot less effort to get through the log.
Many people, however, fail to understand what sharpening the saw really means. If you’re burnt out and your productivity begins to fall off, common thing to do is to take a break, maybe even go on holiday. Yes, it may help to revitalize you. However, that isn’t really sharpening the saw — that’s simply putting the saw down and the blade will still be dull when you use it up again.
As what Mr. Covey means, sharpening the saw is actually an activity or activities. Maintenance activities needed to enhance the overall performance. These are not necessarily directly related to your business goals. But doing these things will help you reach your goals easier. Doing these activities can refresh you, increase your energy, or help you learn a needed skill and ultimately you become more effective and efficient.
So think about an activity that would mean to sharpen the saw of your life.
Physical exercise
Doing physical exercise is a great example. It may not directly help you to earn more money but a regular exercise can increase your energy and vitality. A sound body can have positive impacts to your career and relationships.
Ignoring your physical health will have negative impacts and it will be harder to achieve your goals.
Taking a break
Sometimes just taking a break from to relax and do something else can help you in dealing with a certain problem. Solutions to issues sometimes will just pop into your head upon waking up in the morning. But it only happens when you have enough sleep.
Enriching Knowledge and skills
Yes, taking you holiday helps revitalize you. But what is more beneficial when you do it with sharpen your saw activities. How about grabbing covey’s book or eBook and enjoy your time reading it as your “sharpening the saw” activity during holidays. Practicing the 7 habits can bring a lot of success in your life. The insights and wisdom found in the bestselling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is priceless. It’s the brilliant guide on taking of control of your life, self-renewal, teamwork, mutual benefit, being proactive, and other paths to private and public victory.
I strongly recommend for you to read and integrate these habits in your personal and business activities. In my previous blog posts, I articulated how the 7 habits can be used to become a highly effective marketer. Every inbound marketer wants to become not just effective but highly effective, don’t you?
So, when you start packing up your things to go on with your plan for the holidays, don’t forget to integrate an activity to sharpen your saw. Go to Amazon.com to pick up your copy of Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Reading this very inspiring and skill enhancing book is a good example of hitting two birds in one stone for the holidays. You can enjoy the sea breeze or perhaps the cool mountain air while reading covey’s book.