Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

The Kwatee team are all big believers and followers of Covey’s Seven Habits, with each of the habits influencing our day to day working decisions. So we thought we’d do a series of articles to describe which are our favourite habits and why.

The first is from Adam Fergie who describes why he practices “being proactive”:

I’ve always been a positive thinking person and refuse to let hurdles and challenges, or indeed my personal history and upbringing, be barriers to potential success.

We are all brought up in certain ways, and therefore can all find excuses to do nothing – I prefer to use my very varied personal and career paths (including all the positive and negative episodes) as a deep font of experience to call upon. Even those experiences that have had left a negative feeling, e.g. bad bosses, redundancy, mistakes in the workplace, have provided me with a ‘Not going there again’ perspective on certain situations.

I once received some great personal coaching advice from someone who explained that we all go through good and bad times, but our view on the bad times are all about our perspective, and where we see our ‘locus of control’. If our locus is mainly external, we seem to feel as though it’s ‘always being done to us’, whereas an internal locus allows you to take control of every situation. For example, if you look out of the window and see that it is pouring with rain, those with an external locus will immediately become ‘down’ and say “I can’t do anything today – I so wanted to go out”. Whilst those with an internal locus may say, “Well I can’t mow the lawn, but at least I won’t feel guilty getting my long-overdue paperwork done”. It’s all about perspective.

So, my view on Being Proactive is that every situation affords an opportunity. For anyone working in Change, the future holds huge potential, despite Covid or the imminent Brexit impact. The world is looking for different ways of working and adapting to ever-changing circumstances. For those of us who constantly seek innovation and a ‘different way’, organisations are keen to engage and explore new solutions. Being reactive, is in the past – leap forward and embrace opportunity.

Adam Fergie